Wayfarers in Arcady 
 
 Charles Vince 
 
1 r" 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 6043.I36W3 1922 
 
 Wayfarers in Arcady. 
 
 3 1924 013 234 038 
 
Pi Cornell University 
 
 §/ Library 
 
 The original of tiiis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 3234038 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES VINCE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE STREET OF FACES" 
 
 Happy is England ! I could be content 
 To see no other verdure than its own. 
 
 — Kads. 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 Zbc ftnfc^erbocfter press 
 
 1922 i>-^ 
 
Copyright, 1922 
 
 by 
 Charles Vince 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 
 /b^ 
 
MY FELLOW WAYFARER 
 
 OF THREE THOUSAND 
 
 MILES 
 
 ■^' 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Road 3 
 
 The Two Valleys . 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 On Coming to the Downs 
 
 
 
 
 >5 
 
 The Seafarer of the Downs . 
 
 
 
 
 23 
 
 The Old Man and Death 
 
 
 
 
 33 
 
 Shepherds' Romance 
 
 
 
 
 39 
 
 Great Roads 
 
 
 
 
 45 
 
 The Scholar Roadmaker 
 
 
 
 
 53 
 
 Warrior Trees 
 
 
 
 
 59 
 
 The Road to Didling 
 
 
 
 
 • 63 
 
 Winter Woods 
 
 
 
 
 • 71 
 
 The Map 
 
 
 
 
 • 75 
 
 The Country Breakfast 
 
 
 
 
 . 81 
 
 The Thunderstorm 
 
 
 
 
 • 87 
 
 The Little Stream 
 
 
 
 
 • 95 
 
 The Exile 
 
 
 
 
 . 101 
 
 Sheep on the Downs 
 
 [vii] 
 
 
 
 
 . 107 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Roads of War 115 
 
 The Spring River . 
 
 
 
 121 
 
 The Country 'Bus . 
 
 
 
 127 
 
 The Enchanted Forest . 
 
 
 
 «33 
 
 The Fishermen of Amberlev . 
 
 
 
 141 
 
 The Magician of the Hills 
 
 
 
 145 
 
 The Adventurers . 
 
 
 
 151 
 
 The Village at the World's End 
 
 
 
 157 
 
 Windows .... 
 
 
 
 163 
 
 [viii] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 [I] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 THE ROAD 
 
 WE have not travelled very far. 
 Nor ever have we gone 
 To where the great adventures are, 
 Nor Port Desire nor Calabar 
 Have we ever looked upon. 
 
 We go by the ploughed and tranquil field. 
 By the woods where no fears hide. 
 The forges are silent now in the weald 
 Where a man no more has need of a shield 
 Or a sword upon his side. 
 
 But we can feel the galloping wind 
 The quick cold strokes of the rain. 
 And it matters not that we must find, 
 Before the day is far behind, 
 A road to the London train. 
 
 For the sky that is high above Helicon 
 Is as high above Gomshall Down, 
 And a road is a road to travel on 
 Or whether it start from Babylon 
 Or out of Dorking town. 
 
 [3] 
 
THE TWO VALLEYS 
 
 OF the two valleys one was long and narrow, 
 the other like half of a great bowl ; and the 
 second valley, since it looked towards the north- 
 east while the long valley looked towards the 
 north-west, was the first to be filled by the sun- 
 light in the morning and by the shadows in the 
 evening. They opened into the same field, and 
 other fields stretched down from them to a farm- 
 house built of grey stone and flints, smooth and 
 black as ice, with a ten-foot hedge of box round 
 its garden, and a deep square porch of yew at its 
 door. 
 
 Since they were valleys in the chalk hills they 
 were of a beautiful shape, looking as though they 
 had been very carefully made by eyes and hands 
 that loved true and pure lines. From year's end 
 to year's end their turf was always short and 
 green, and they were unadorned, although in 
 summer their green was faintly dusted over with 
 the red gold and the pale gold of trefoil and rock 
 roses. 
 
 To this cottage with the box hedge and the yew 
 [5] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 porch came a young man, tired and troubled, and 
 misanthropic. He may have been unhappy in 
 love, or he may have been in debt, or he may 
 have eaten and drunk too much, or, more prob- 
 ably, since he had come to such a place, he had 
 worked too hard and slept too little. When he 
 came away he had told his friends that he was 
 going to spread his mind out in the open for the 
 wind and the sun to freshen it again. 
 
 At the door he was received by the farmer's 
 wife, a figure as square and deep as the porch 
 itself, and led upstairs to a little room whose 
 casement window, opening under the thatch, 
 looked out across the fields to the two valleys. 
 The passage outside was hung with wedding 
 groups of the farmer's family and of the royal 
 family in democratic neighbourliness, and in the 
 room itself was one picture, so dark and dim that 
 it looked as if it had been smoked. Peering close 
 the young man could see a very large silver fish 
 lying in the foreground of what might have been 
 a landscape in the style of Poussin. The land- 
 lady considered it to have been sufficiently de- 
 scribed when she had said with pride that it was 
 " a painting in oils." The young man was about 
 to make a joke about smoked fish and fish in oil, 
 but reflecting that the landlady would probably 
 
 [6] 
 
THE TWO VALLEYS 
 
 not understand it, he opened the window instead, 
 and looked out across the fields to the two valleys. 
 At this window, with its broad wooden seat 
 cut in the thickness of the wall, he was content to 
 spend his days. At night his mind still worked, 
 troubled and overstrained, and he woke out of 
 puzzled uneasy dreams of which he remembered 
 only that he had been trying to get something to 
 come right and always it went wrong; but his 
 days were like long sweet sleep. Kneeling on 
 that wooden seat and leaning from the window, 
 where his outstretched hand could touch the 
 thatch above and the living roof of the old yew 
 porch below, he let his mind sink into idleness, 
 luxuriously, as the tired body will sink into cool 
 water. He sank to that depth where the mind is 
 back again in its first childhood, content for 
 hours with no more than a moving thing. So he 
 was happy, watching the smoke of his pipe as it 
 curled up into the thatch, or the top of an apple 
 tree as it moved in the wind, or the rain as it fell 
 through the still summer air, or the shadow of the 
 tall box hedge at evening as it crept across the 
 garden like a tide. And if there were neither 
 rain nor shadow nor wind to watch, then he 
 looked across the fields at the two valleys, and 
 was content with their emptiness. 
 
 [7] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 He had watched them for a long time before he 
 even thought — so idle was he — of going any 
 nearer to them. Then one day he walked across 
 the fields and climbed the hill in which they lay, 
 listening to the pleasant sound of the grass heads 
 as they tapped on his boots, and looking at the 
 simple and pure shape of the two valleys. After 
 that he left his window under the thatch and 
 spent his days lying on the odorous ages-old 
 turf of the chalk which is more restful than down 
 and all the "verdurous glooms." There, through 
 half-closed eyes, he looked out, as he thought, at 
 nothing, and thanked God for the emptiness of 
 the two valleys, where none came and nothing 
 had ever happened. 
 
 To him, drowsing there, sleep and waking were 
 almost the same, for each was a great peace, born 
 of the strength and gentleness of that ancient turf 
 on which he lay. Time was not. Nothing in 
 those valleys can ever have been other than it 
 was. There was nothing — ^nothing as he looked 
 round them, which could tell him whether he was 
 in the present or the past, and he would wake 
 (this was after he had listened to stories in the 
 farm kitchen) wondering in what century he 
 was, and look, still half asleep, for the deer steal- 
 ers coming across the hill from the chase beyond, 
 
 [8] 
 
THE TWO VALLEYS 
 
 or listen for the sound of the mallets of the Nor- 
 man stonemasons building the church in the 
 little village across the hill. And once he won- 
 dered if he heard, very faintly, the cries of men 
 and women on the curving Down behind him as 
 they watched the handfuls of the ashes of their 
 dead laid on the dry chalk, and the black earthen 
 pans placed over them and the great barrows, 
 less ancient only than the hills, heaped above. 
 So he dreamed in that empty place until one day 
 he noticed in the turf a track, no broader than a 
 cart wheel, and faintly white with chalk. He 
 had lain close by it for a long time, not moving, 
 and wondering what it could be, when suddenly 
 a rabbit dashed down it from behind him and he 
 saw its scut go over the valley's rim like a shoot- 
 ing star. 
 
 For the first time, he wakened to the living 
 things in those two valleys. He would lie very 
 still to watch the rabbits travelling up and down 
 by those little roads that their feet had whitened, 
 or playing tick down below, or coming out to sit 
 in the sunlight as the shadow began to creep over 
 the valley's rim. As his eyes opened, the empti- 
 ness of the two valleys, for which he had blessed 
 them, began to fill with living things. He 
 watched each day for a flock of sheep that came 
 
 [9] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 always by the same road — ^he had seen them 
 before, unthinking as he had seen the flowers or 
 the clouds — and drifted up through the valleys, 
 silent as the blowing rain. He would listen now 
 for the shepherd's voice coming across to him 
 high and strange as the call of a bird, and watch 
 for his dog that moved among the sheep like a 
 bird's shadow on the turf. 
 
 Each day he would see them stop in their 
 wandering on the side of the long valley, and pour 
 suddenly down into it, gathering eagerly round a 
 small hut. Then they would drift away again, 
 and when he went across to see why it was that 
 they gathered there, he found drinking troughs 
 round the hut and inside it a well. 
 
 It was then that he saw the horseman. He too 
 had his hour each day. He would come, riding 
 slowly across the fields from the distant farm, 
 and sit on a trough while the horse, tramping 
 round and round, would pump the water up 
 from the depths below the chalk. 
 
 Last of all came the cows, and their hour was 
 when the day began to turn, and the valleys 
 seemed to ripen, growing golden and mellow in 
 the sun ; and the rim of the rounded valley was 
 marked with a foot of dark shadow, like the 
 painting round the rim of a bowl. 
 
 [lO] 
 
THE TWO VALLEYS 
 
 The cows would come in single file from the 
 fields — each falling into place as the file went by 
 in slow procession to the well. It was like a 
 solemn ceremony at the close of day — the pro- 
 cession of the evensong of the two valleys. So 
 the noiseless coming and going of the day was 
 ended, and the rounded valley began to fill with 
 shadows. 
 
 All this the young man watched and was 
 fascinated, as a child watches the turn and return 
 of the wheel of a watch. Each day it happened 
 just the same. The creatures came and went, 
 unheeding of time but at their appointed hours. 
 They came also by their own paths that they had 
 made themselves. Those empty valleys were 
 more full of roads than the busiest of towns — 
 roads made and kept by the continual passing of 
 many feet. Their floors were all criss-crossed by 
 the little white ways of the rabbits. Their sides 
 were closely ribbed with hundreds of earth tracks 
 studded with flints, which the feet of the sheep 
 had beaten out of the turf. These tracks ran all 
 round the valleys like the seats in an immense 
 amphitheatre, so clearly and evenly were they 
 made; and twisting leisurely across the fields was 
 the broader highway of earth, worn out of the 
 turf, by which the cows came to drink. 
 
 [11] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 Watching these roads, and wondering how 
 much older they must be than the streets of the 
 towns that he knew, watching them and the 
 creatures that came by them, regular as the sun, 
 in their uncrowded, unhurrying life, the young 
 man forgot that desire for escape and for loneli- 
 ness with which he had come, and was happy 
 again with the present and the companionship 
 of living things. 
 
 On his last day he sat above the rounded valley 
 until he saw the horseman appear across the 
 fields. Then he walked down to the well and 
 when the horseman came asked that he might be 
 allowed to pump up the water that day. At this 
 the horseman neither smiled nor looked surprised 
 but nodded and sat his horse, while the young 
 man laid his strength against the long pole. He 
 pushed it round, slowly and laboriously, and did 
 not stop until he heard the first of the water be- 
 gin to flow into the troughs. Then, as the horse 
 was fastened to the pole to finish the work, he 
 climbed the valley's side, and taking one of the 
 hundreds of little sheep paths, and treading care- 
 fully in its narrow way, he went by it right round 
 the two valleys and the curve of hillside which 
 separated them, until he came to a rabbit track, 
 and following this went up over the valley's rim 
 
 [12] 
 
THE TWO VALLEYS 
 
 to the place where he used to sit. All this he did 
 as a man performing a ceremony, and then, 
 feeling that by this act he had made himself a 
 part of the valley's life, since he had shared for a 
 moment in its toil, he went back by his accus- 
 tomed way to the farmhouse, where his bag 
 stood, ready packed, under the great porch of 
 yew. 
 
 [13] 
 
ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 
 
 T^ VERY time that a man who loves the hills 
 ^-^ returns to them, he feels as if, for him, a 
 miracle had been performed. Far away he has 
 seen a strange look in the high clouds, and then, 
 suddenly, he has known that the hills were there ; 
 but just when that change came and how he first 
 knew the hills from the clouds he can never be 
 sure. In this way, for every traveller who returns 
 to them, the hills are made afresh out of the sky. 
 In whatever way he may come, there will always 
 be that mysterious moment of their change, or, 
 as it more truly seems to him, of their birth. 
 
 But you do not come to the South Downs as 
 you come to other hills. They do not grow out of 
 the clouds, but rise up before you above the 
 curve of the world. And yet, although they are 
 always part of this earth, they are more distant, 
 mysterious, and aloof than any of the other hills. 
 They have no high peaks, nor fantastic shapes. 
 They have nothing but their long unwavering 
 line standing against the sky, like the unattain- 
 
 [15] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 able horizon of the sea. It is this that makes 
 them more remote than all the hills, and you 
 draw near to them wondering always what it 
 can be that lies beyond. They stand, as some- 
 times the sea stands, like a great green wall of 
 the Gods built to keep men from things too good 
 for them to find, and the little chalk roads that 
 go up them are like tall and slender ladders, from 
 which a man, if he ever climbed them, would step 
 straight into the sky. 
 
 In another thing also the Downs are different 
 from the hills. They do not change. For the 
 unchanging hills do, indeed, change continually. 
 You have seen them in the sunshine looking small 
 and dusty and far away; and after rain, tall and 
 black and very near. You have seen them tower- 
 ing, awesome and beautiful, against a clear even- 
 ing sky, and the next day dim with wrack and 
 dwarfed by the great moving mountains of the 
 clouds that roll above them. For the faces and 
 the very stature of the hills change and change 
 again with the changes of the sky. But the 
 Downs do not change. There is something in 
 their pure and beautiful shape which is stronger 
 than any storms and than all the moods of the 
 sky. Night and the clouds alike rest very gently 
 on them. They have a sweetness and gravity of 
 
 [16] 
 
ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 
 
 their own which Nature herself cannot alter. 
 The skies and the seas, the trees and the hills — 
 all these she can make to reflect all her moods. 
 But however her face may change above the 
 Downs they remain always the same. They do 
 indeed respond to those two needs which a man 
 feels more and more strongly the older he grows. 
 They are simple and they are sure. 
 
 In his description of Egdon Moor Mr. Hardy 
 speaks of a change in the human mind towards 
 Nature. He believes that it grows darker in 
 itself, and, seeking always for sympathy in Na- 
 ture to its own moods, that it turns more and 
 more towards what is most sombre and most 
 bleak in her. He believes that in the end we shall 
 have grown as indifferent to the groves and the 
 
 valleys, to 
 
 Daffodils 
 With the green world they live in; and clear rills 
 That for themselves a cooling covert make, 
 'Gainst the hot season, the mid-forest brake 
 Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms, 
 
 — as Indifferent to these as were the earlier 
 generations to the beauty of the hills. But that 
 time will never come so long as there are men who 
 try, in whatever way is given them, to praise the 
 Sussex Downs. No man could love them and not 
 keep in himself some sweetness and sanity and a 
 
 [17] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 belief in gracious things. In them these antagon- 
 isms, that elsewhere divide the world, have no 
 existence. One cannot understand, when among 
 them, why some men should love the valleys 
 and some the hills, for on their heights the valleys 
 and the hills meet. There are no sheltered and 
 tended gardens in all England where the flowers 
 bloom as they bloom on this open turf, fed by 
 the south-west wind and the salt sea-mists. They 
 are sown as close with the pale rock-roses as is 
 the sky with stars, and their poppy fields are like 
 flame and their great gorse slopes like golden light 
 across the miles. And where these flowers bloom, 
 and where the plough turns the earth and the 
 corn is sown, and the road runs and the sheep 
 feed, among all these things that belong to the 
 quiet and sheltered places of the earth, there is 
 also such a sense of spacious emptiness, inhab- 
 ited only by the light and the wind, as one will 
 not find on the highest hills, but only in the 
 sky. 
 
 Here too in that mysterious time between day 
 and night other things meet also which elsewhere 
 must always be divided. In that waning light 
 one may wonder whether they are indeed of the 
 earth, and do not belong also to the sea and the 
 sky; for all that is beautiful and serene in all three 
 
 [18] 
 
ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 
 
 seems to meet and be made permanent in the 
 Downs, the expanse of the sea, and the gra- 
 cious shapes of the earth, and the purity of the 
 sky. 
 
 I could believe that the Downs were made after 
 the sky, in the early morning of the third day of 
 the world, and are a little older than all the rest of 
 the earth. When the waters were divided and 
 the sky made between, a strange sea hung be- 
 neath, and when the waters were gathered into 
 one place that the dry land might appear, this 
 sea was changed suddenly into land and its 
 waves were caught and changed to earth before 
 they could break. But even now it half belongs 
 to the sky and the sea, and some day its great 
 serene spaces will be lifted to the sky again, and 
 its crested slopes of turf will break into water, 
 and its white stones turn to foam. 
 
 This sense of strange things meeting there, 
 which everjrwhere else are kept apart, haunts all 
 the verse that men have written about the 
 Downs; but no one yet has found the words to 
 say what it is. One poet tried when he said very 
 bluntly of them that they were 
 
 Half wild and wholly tame, 
 
 and another when he wrote, — 
 
 [19] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 Together stand 
 
 Tillage and pasture and dim fairyland, 
 
 and yet another when he wrote, — 
 
 They are a wonderland, where shapes well-known, 
 Hayrick or homestead, bush or tree-top, seen 
 Far off, take forms of faerie not their own. 
 
 But no one has ever said what it really is, or 
 indeed come nearer to saying it than a broad 
 rough gesture, which is all that those words are. 
 Indeed the wisest poet was he who did not 
 attempt to say more than could be said in very 
 plain and simple words, and who wrote, — 
 
 And along the sky the line of the Downs 
 So noble and so bare. 
 
 For it is so that you remember them, as some- 
 thing single, and complete, and very clear. It is 
 because they have this simplicity, and their 
 changeless look, and that far, remote line of their 
 summit like the horizon against the sky, that 
 they stand apart from all other hills and seem 
 more steadfast than them all. Whatever else of 
 beauty and mystery you have found in them, you 
 see them always in your mind as you saw them 
 when you first came to them, rising in their long 
 green rampart from the weald, and shutting 
 away behind them many things. For the mys- 
 
 [20] 
 
ON COMING TO THE DOWNS 
 
 tery of the hills as you come to them, watching 
 them take birth from the clouds, is the mystery 
 of what they are ; but the mystery of the Downs 
 is the mystery of what they hide. 
 
 [21] 
 
THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 
 
 f MET the Sea Captain for the first time one 
 •'• evening after a day of storm when the wind 
 was blowing down the gap and out to sea. The 
 water in the last grey reaches of the river was 
 ruffled and broken between the wind and the 
 incoming tide, and on the cliffs, on either side of 
 the gap, you could hear, if you lay close in the 
 turf, the cheerful song that the wind made, 
 blowing through the fine grasses, and watch the 
 seagulls as they rose from the crumbling cliff 
 edge and were carried away like spindrift from 
 a wave. 
 
 The path to the top of the headland went 
 upwards through a valley behind the crest of the 
 cliffs, and was so smooth and so green that it was 
 like a great hollow of water between two waves. 
 It was empty except for a clump of bugloss turn- 
 ing wine dark in the late summer, and the chalk 
 stones, like patches of foam, all up the valley 
 marking the path. 
 
 A little way up I could see what looked like a 
 
 [83] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 much larger stone than any of the rest, but when 
 I came to it I found a sheep lying on its back. It 
 was lying very still, and its four legs were stick- 
 ing straight up into the air so that it looked like a 
 great wooden toy of a sheep, and no one would 
 have been surprised to see a little wheel at the 
 end of each of its feet. 
 
 As I stood by it I saw a man coming down from 
 the headland. He wore a big cloak, and I 
 thought it must be the shepherd, although he 
 carried no crook and he did not walk as the shep- 
 herds do. I waited, and together we helped the 
 sheep to its feet again. Then I looked at him. 
 It was a shepherd's cloak that he had, and above 
 it a sailor's sou'-wester. The two together, at 
 first sight, gave him a comical air, but this one 
 forgot when one knew him, and now I feel that 
 this mixed dress, which he wore in all seasons, 
 was exactly right for that strange, pathetic 
 man. 
 
 He told me the best way to help up sheep who 
 have rolled on their backs, and talked of the 
 staggers, and then he looked through the end of 
 the valley out to sea. A steamer was on her way 
 across to France, with her smoke rolling far ahead 
 over the waters before that dancing north wind. 
 Far beyond the smoke we could see a great sailing 
 
 [24] 
 
THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 
 
 ship going down Channel along the distant road 
 of the horizon, and nearer at hand was a smaller 
 ship making up the coast. The man looked at her 
 for some time and said, in a changed, sharp voice, 
 that she was carrying too much sail. 
 
 I turned then to leave him, looking up at the 
 great curve of turf above us which, in that amber- 
 coloured evening light after the rain, had become 
 a deeper and almost lucent green. 
 
 "It's like a wave," I said. 
 
 "It's like a wave," he repeated. "It hasn't 
 started to break yet — but perhaps one day it 
 will." 
 
 These were our last words. He went down the 
 valley, and I went up and over the headland, 
 thinking of this odd man, and the sudden change 
 in his voice when he spoke of the ship, and then 
 the note that was almost fear, when he said of 
 that great wave of turf that some day it might 
 break. 
 
 Everyone in the village called him the Sea 
 Captain, and told me of his cleverness with 
 animals and especially with sheep, which was well 
 known, so that the shepherds themselves would 
 seek his advice. But when I asked of his adven- 
 tures at sea they said no more than that he was 
 the Sea Captain. 
 
 IflS] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 I wondered what tales he would tell of the sea, 
 but he told none. And yet the sea was always 
 coming into his talk, and seemed never out of his 
 mind. He told me no tales — and then, one night, 
 as we went down towards the sea by a road, all 
 roofed and dark with trees, that once upon a 
 time the smugglers used, he told me of a storm 
 when one of the hands fell from aloft, crashing 
 with his face on the deck, and was picked up with 
 his jaw broken, and hanging horribly loose on his 
 throat. Perhaps it was the night and that dark 
 road, and the sound of the sea on the shingle as 
 we came near it, like mournful fingers raking 
 among the stones for something that they had 
 lost — perhaps it was these which gave to the 
 tale a moving and terrible reality, as he described 
 the look of horror in the man's eyes, and the 
 awful noises that he made out of his hanging 
 mouth, like a sheep in pain. That was his only 
 tale, but it was like all his talk of the sea, through 
 which there seemed to run, in spite of him, 
 an odd current of fear. 
 
 What the fear was I could not tell, but I came 
 very soon to the conclusion that he must have 
 left the sea for some fault of his own, and that 
 this had made bitter all his memories. 
 
 It was only when his talk of the sea mixed 
 
 [26] 
 
THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 
 
 with his talk of the land that it lost all fear. He 
 talked as a lover of the Downs, with a love of the 
 sea running through it all. He talked of them 
 when the grey showers blew across them, and 
 they themselves were like a rolling swell after a 
 storm and of their great, grey untroubled empti- 
 ness in the evening like a sea where no ship 
 came, when one walked by the little white stones 
 that marked the path, and looked out to the 
 Channel for the friendly lights of the fishing fleet, 
 gathered together like the lights of a town. 
 
 He talked of the trees that filled the gap, 
 shutting off his village from the sea, and of the 
 trees round his home when he was a boy — he had 
 come from inland ; and he would tell how he had 
 listened to them at night, pretending that the 
 wind in them was the sound of the sea, and won- 
 dering when the call would come for him to go 
 on deck. "And now when I hear it," he said, 
 "I listen differently. I seem to hear it come 
 howling over the awful empty sea, and then the 
 wind falls a little and the emptiness all fills with 
 the sound of the leaves." 
 
 In this way he talked, this man whom some- 
 thing at sea troubled, so that at times he seemed 
 to fear it like a child ; but whether or not he woul d 
 have been happy if he had left it altogether 
 
 [27] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 going back to his own inland country, I could not 
 be sure. 
 
 One day the news came that he was dead, and 
 that if I would go down to his cottage there were 
 messages which he had left for me. I went, and 
 found that he had been ill only two days. Before 
 he died he had said that he left his sea books to 
 me, begging that I would have "Sea Captain" 
 put on his tomb. 
 
 There were only three or four books in his 
 cottage, and they stood on a shelf in the kitchen 
 with the candlesticks. I lifted them down, 
 expecting to find his Nautical Almanack and 
 Sailing Directions and his List of Lights and 
 Tide Tables. Instead, to my surprise, I found 
 that they were all volumes of Marryat, much 
 mended and soiled, and their woodcuts col- 
 oured roughly with chalk — ^the tales of the sea 
 that boys read fifty years ago. And that was 
 all. 
 
 With the books in my hands, and a first under- 
 standing of the mystery of the Sea Captain in 
 my mind, I went up to the Vicarage. There I 
 found a woman with the Vicar, "the Captain's 
 sister," he said, and added "not that he was a 
 Captain at all." 
 
 "Nor had ever been to sea" — ^the woman spoke 
 
 [28] 
 
THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 
 
 as if she were ashamed, " though he was always 
 romancing about it." 
 
 I put the books down on the table before her. 
 She looked at them and went on. 
 
 "And he was mad to go to sea until — " she 
 broke off, "and then he gave it up. But even 
 then he said that he must be near the sea. I've 
 hardly seen him for forty years. He might have 
 had the farm — a good farm, and we're well to 
 do" — she looked at us a little defiantly — "but he 
 would come to the sea." 
 
 I said nothing, for I was looking at the books 
 and wondering. It might be in one of them, but 
 I doubted it. 
 
 " Did he ever tell you," I looked at the Vicar, 
 "the tale of a storm when a man fell on deck and 
 broke his jaw?" 
 
 The Vicar shook his head, but the woman gave 
 a start. 
 
 " Broke his jaw?" she said. 
 
 "Yes," said I ; " so that it was hanging horribly 
 down, and he was moaning like a sheep." 
 
 "And he said that that happened on a 
 ship?" She spoke almost with awe. "To think 
 that he remembered it at all! He can't have 
 been more than ten at the time. It was one of 
 our farm hands. He fell off the roof of the 
 
 [29] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 barn. To think that he said it happened on a 
 ship!" 
 
 "I am afraid it must have been deliberate 
 deceit." The Vicar was evidently pained — ^but 
 then he had not heard the tale. 
 
 I said nothing, remembering how the Sea 
 Captain had told it on that dark road under the 
 trees, to the sound of the mournful sea, as it 
 crept and whispered among the stones. 
 
 When the sister went away she took with her 
 such things as the Sea Captain had left, but the 
 books she said that I might keep. There were 
 many things that she had not said, and that we 
 had not liked to ask. Others had asked them, for 
 the day after she had gone the village was full of 
 vague tales. Yet she can have answered little or 
 nothing. The tales were too vague. All we knew 
 was that something had changed the Sea Captain 
 when he was still a boy, turning his delight at the 
 sea to fear, so that the sea had haunted him all his 
 life, chaining him to her yet always repulsing 
 him. 
 
 After his burial the village was bitterly di- 
 vided. Some would have had "Sea Captain" 
 put on his tombstone, as he had desired. The 
 others held that to set up such a lie on holy 
 ground would be blasphemy. It was useless to 
 
 [30] 
 
THE SEAFARER OF THE DOWNS 
 
 argue that the very last man laid in that church- 
 yard, though he had been a lazy drunkard, 
 neglecting his wife and indifferent to his children, 
 yet was described on his grave as a tender hus- 
 band and devoted father. It was useless to 
 argue, for the Vicar was on the side of those who 
 were for the exact truth. 
 
 But if the Sea Captain's spirit shall ever visit 
 that place again, may he be satisfied to find, 
 beneath his name and the date of his death, 
 
 This soul hath been 
 Alone, on a wide, wide sea. 
 
 [31I 
 
THE OLD MAN AND DEATH 
 
 ONE summer day, during the War, I walked 
 through a Sussex village under the Downs, 
 a village so undisturbed and serene that it 
 seemed as if the hot breath of War can never 
 have blown that way. I walked through it, 
 counting the coloured cards in the cottage win- 
 dows with the names of those who had gone to 
 the War; and I wondered if there were any people 
 left in it, for the place was so still and empty, and 
 so many had gone. 
 
 The wind was in the east, and, very faintly, it 
 brought the sound of guns from the Flemish 
 coast. There in the weald, the sound did not 
 seem to come out of the air at all, but from 
 beneath the Downs. It was like a murmur deep 
 within the earth, as if the dead, lying under their 
 barrows and the trenches of their ancient camps, 
 had turned and muttered in their sleep. 
 
 I followed the road through the village, and up 
 the hill behind it, and sitting there at the top 
 looked back across the quiet roofs to the Downs. 
 3 [33] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 Then I saw that an old man had been cHmbing 
 the hill behind me. He stopped two yards away 
 and bent down. A rabbit lay on the road close 
 under the edge of the grass ; it had been killed 
 and ripped open by a stoat. The old man picked 
 it up and parting the grasses at the hedge roots 
 slipped it in among them. He looked up and saw 
 me watching him. 
 
 "It'll be very well there," he said. "If I 
 was a rabbit I'd rather lie there and feed that 
 rose than at the bottom of one of their profitless 
 sand-holes. But they will go to their holes if 
 they can." 
 
 He sat down near me and filled a pipe so that 
 I had time to look at his face, a cheerful, strong 
 face, well browned and wrinkled with the 
 weather, a face, you could see, that took pleasure 
 in feeling the wind and the rain. 
 
 "There's a woman down there," he went on 
 " (you could see her chimney if it wasn't for the 
 church spire) who has just lost her son. I went in 
 last night to say a word or two. *Ah,' she said 
 to me, ' if only I had him here and could put him 
 in the churchyard, where his father is, and know 
 he was safe there, I'd be comforted. It's not 
 knowing where he lies that's hard.' 'What 
 matter?' said I; *so long as there's good earth 
 
 [34] 
 
THE OLD MAN AND DEATH 
 
 round him he'll be easy. I've seen life and death 
 in these fields and woods enough years now to 
 know as it don't matter very much where you lie 
 so long as you're in good earth.' But there was 
 no comfort in it to her. She would ha' been 
 happier if she had seen him brought home to the 
 churchyard. It's that that hurts them all." 
 
 The old man puffed at his pipe for a while. 
 "That's not my way of thinking," he said, and 
 pointed down the hill. "There's my cottage, 
 with the bent chimney and the honeysuckle 
 round it. It's just flowering again. From the 
 door you can see up this hill. The station is over 
 the other side behind us. 
 
 "It's three years and more now since my son 
 went up this hill. He didn't say much, but we 
 knew why he was going. When he came back he 
 was a soldier. He came and went more than 
 once. We never knew when he was coming. 
 The last time- he came from France. One night 
 very late — it must ha' been long after ten — ^he 
 knocked us up. There he was, loaded like a ped- 
 lar, and as muddy as if he had just come from 
 the plough. When he went away it made the 
 sixth time that I had watched him up this hill. 
 It's just where we are now that he would turn 
 and wave at us." 
 
 [35l 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 The old man looked at me, and neither in his 
 eyes or voice was any sadness. He spoke 
 gravely; that was all. 
 
 "His mother is like the rest," he said; "she 
 misses it that she didn't see him at the end lying 
 on the bed where he was born. She misses the 
 comfort of his grave to grieve over. But I like it 
 better as it is. I feel the sudden end of it less. 
 He just went away. 
 
 " When he comes into the talk I don't hush my 
 voice and stop. I talk of him just the same as 
 before, and tell the tales that he used to tell when 
 he came home, and laugh over them. 
 
 " It shocks some of them. They think I've no 
 heart because they don't see me grieve. But 
 there's no comfort to me in grieving, as there is 
 to some. He just went away as he had gone 
 before, and I like to think that he can still come 
 back. 
 
 "The Vicar says I should be comforted, re- 
 membering that he did his duty and that now 
 he's in heaven. But / say that I'd rather think 
 that he's still somewhere on earth, and that one 
 day yet he'll come walking over this hill again." 
 
 The old man looked at me and smiled. Then 
 he got to his feet, and I with him ; and we walked 
 together just across the crest of the hill. Away 
 
 [36] 
 
THE OLD MAN AND DEATH 
 
 below it the white smoke of a train was moving 
 above the hedges, and when it stopped I could 
 see the red station among the trees. We watched 
 long after the train had gone, for we could see the 
 little dark figures of people come out of the sta- 
 tion and move along a few yards of white road 
 before the hedges hid them. We watched until 
 they had all disappeared, until it was certain 
 that there were no more to come. Then, very 
 slowly, the old man knocked out his pipe in the 
 palm of his hand, and turning, went back down 
 the hill. 
 
 [371 
 
SHEPHERDS' ROMANCE 
 
 I heard a mess of merry Shepherds Sing 
 A joyful song full of sweet delight. 
 
 SHEPHERDS changed when they laid aside 
 their pipes. Neither Theocritus nor the 
 writers of the Mediaeval and Elizabethan Carols 
 would have understood Professor Jacks's Mad 
 Shepherds. To them the shepherds were the 
 merriest of men, but to us, now that they have 
 ceased to sing, they are of all men the most 
 mysterious. We wonder how they fill their 
 silences. As they stand along the edges of the 
 hills, bent a little over their crooks, they are like 
 great solitary birds. Nor do they even walk 
 like other men. They walk as if they were meant 
 always to be still, like statues just come to life 
 and moving for the first time their joints of stone, 
 or like trees feeling their way with their great 
 roots. Do they wait like animals in vacant con- 
 tent? Or do they dream.? Of this world, at 
 least, they know things that we cannot. Per- 
 haps they are the richer men for having now no 
 
 [39] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 pipes to play, and for standing in silence all day 
 on the hills. 
 
 But this shepherd, had he lived in the piping 
 times, had piped as merrily as any of them. 
 
 He had on him his tabard and his hat, 
 His tar box, his pipe and his flagat; 
 His name was called jolly, jolly Wat. 
 
 He too, had he lived in other times, had been a 
 jolly, jolly Wat. 
 
 He was a small man and, although it was a 
 warm summer day, he wore a massive overcoat 
 that almost touched the ground. He stooped a 
 little, and it seemed as if his shoulders bent 
 beneath its weight. He had a plain, gentle, and 
 wooden face that did not change. But his eyes, 
 which were a very pale clear blue, were alive as 
 he talked, and by them one knew when he was 
 laughing. He had also two small tobacco pipes, 
 — very small for a man to smoke in the open 
 air. They were both old and black, one of clay 
 and one of briar, and he filled and smoked them 
 alternately. 
 
 He talked like other men, boasting in a gentle 
 and charming way of his possessions and the 
 things that he did. He talked of his great coat 
 which he had bought marvellously cheap and 
 
 [40] 
 
SHEPHERDS' ROMANCE 
 
 which no rain could penetrate. He told us how 
 he had painted it with rubber and, pegging it out 
 one night, had filled it with water; yet in the 
 morning it was dry as a rush beneath. He talked 
 of his employers, telling us how they were wrong 
 about the sheep and he was right, and of the dogs 
 he had bred and the marvellous things that they 
 did, and of his sheep, and an illness that they had 
 had, wasting away, as he said, like butter against 
 the sun. So he talked with his gentle wooden 
 face, in the same way that other men talk of 
 themselves when they love their work, except 
 that he spoke without vain glory and without 
 bitterness even towards his employers and their 
 mistakes. In all he said there was the sweetness 
 of the open air. He talked ; but we had not yet 
 touched on the thing that piped in his soul. 
 
 We made ready to leave him, pointing out our 
 way along the Downs to a distant hill where 
 stood a solitary and withered thorn which was 
 called "the Scrag." In reply he asked us (filling 
 this time the briar) if we knew Cunning Dick's 
 hole, which, not long since, had been discovered 
 in the side of the hill with the table and chair still 
 in it that Dick had used. And when we asked 
 him who was Dick his eyes showed his surprise, 
 and he answered that it was Dick Turpin, who 
 
 [41] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 had worked in those parts. Then he turned and 
 pointed across to the next ridge of the Downs 
 where once the main road had run along the 
 summit — a road still broad and level but now 
 green with turf. He pointed to a wood, and, 
 speaking as a man speaks who had made great 
 discoveries, he said that he knew, over there in 
 that wood, of another of Cunning Dick's holes. 
 The hole itself he had never been able to find, 
 but his brother one day had seen, stuck in the 
 trunk of a tree, the staple to which Dick must 
 have tied his horse ; and he himself had drawn 
 that staple out. He had it still. And then . . . 
 "I've read two hundred of Cunning Dick's 
 books," he said. 
 
 We had been growing a little weary of his 
 gentle, ambling garrulity, but at this we stopped. 
 We had come suddenly on a great belief, and we 
 looked at him in surprise and even in reverence. 
 He talked on of Dick's adventures, the eyes, in 
 his kindly wooden face, full of excitement, and as 
 he talked we could see him as he must often be, 
 sitting by some cottage fire in winter evenings, 
 and reading those little paper-bound books, each 
 with its "two-penny coloured" cover of a high- 
 wayman — reading them with the simple, com- 
 plete faith of a child. 
 
 [42] 
 
SHEPHERDS' ROMANCE 
 
 It was not in Dick and his adventures that we 
 were interested, but in this romantic shepherd. 
 He was touched with that splendid madness 
 which compels some men to turn their fellows 
 into gods. Had he lived in a town and among 
 books instead of with his sheep in the sweet, sane 
 air of the Downs, he might have been one of those 
 strange conspirators who find the hidden hand of 
 Bacon in every Elizabethan writer, and turn the 
 joyous, full-hearted literature of all that age into 
 a vast inhuman mystery. Instead he believed, 
 with a faith which could harm none, that every- 
 thing which he had read of Dick Turpin had been 
 written with Dick's own hand. 
 
 He had passed the age at which every reader 
 of fairy tales and adventure asks the question 
 which proclaims him mortal, doomed to doubt 
 and change — ^the question, "Did it really hap- 
 pen?" He had passed it with his faith un- 
 dimmed. He had missed the first turning point 
 of mortal men, and gone on by his own road. 
 
 He knew that Dick was dead. He knew that 
 he would never see him come galloping across 
 the Downs, nor did he peer in at his Cunning 
 Hole expecting to find him at his table. Yet he 
 had, not knowing it, made Dick immortal. 
 Another hundred books of Dick's adventures 
 
 [43] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 may yet be written, and he will receive them all, 
 in pure and simple faith, as from Dick's own 
 hand. He may never find that Cunning Hole 
 for which he seeks, but there are great discover- 
 ies still for him to make. For surely some day 
 the "penny dreadful" will grow weary of modern 
 times and the discovery of crime, and the adora- 
 tion of great detectives. It will return again to 
 the past, to the highroad and horsemen, to 
 genial rogues and picaresque romance. Then 
 will he be happy. 
 
 He plays no pipe on the Downs, and sings no 
 songs, but he is of the company of Merry Shep- 
 herds. For as he goes his slow way behind his 
 sheep, sweeping the grass heads with his coat, 
 or stands and looks across the valley at the wood 
 where the Cunning Hole lies hid, what a great 
 figure of a horseman gallops always down the 
 romantic high-road of his soul. 
 
 [44] 
 
GREAT ROADS 
 
 OF all the things that man has ever made the 
 roads are the greatest of his works of un- 
 conscious art. You cannot imagine the most 
 contemptible of aesthetes having a road made 
 that through his window he might admire the 
 grace with which it turned a corner; and you 
 may be sure of this, that if he did it would be a 
 vain thing, and that the road, since it was not 
 made to travel by, would not be worth looking 
 at. Men have never made a road except for the 
 good reason that they wanted very much to reach 
 some place; and in doing it they have always 
 shown themselves indifferent to beautiful things. 
 They break the hills; they ruin the streams. 
 They go on their way caring for nothing but their 
 intent to arrive, and yet, not knowing what they 
 do, they make the roads also beautiful and 
 mysterious, with a beauty and mystery which 
 endure long after their purpose has been fulfilled, 
 and which become a part of the very magic of 
 the earth. 
 
 [45] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 Wherever the great roads pass they bring 
 three noble things. They bring memory. When 
 the Romans built a road for many miles along 
 that high and level summit which is still called 
 High Street, they did it only because they 
 thought that so they could most easily take their 
 legions from Windermere to Penrith. That road 
 was long since overgrown with the old turf of the 
 hills, and we go northwards now by other ways. 
 But beneath the turf the road remains, a road 
 travelling no longer to Penrith but back into the 
 years. It serves no purpose now, but it remains, 
 ennobling the hills. To them the changing and 
 returning seasons cannot bring forgetfulness. 
 There is this road within their turf keeping the 
 past alive. For this also one can say of the roads 
 that cannot be said of any other of the works of 
 men. They may be forgotten but, so long as they 
 are remembered, they cannot altogether die. 
 Cities that have fallen into ruins are more deso- 
 late than emptiness. The flowers and the grasses 
 have come up like hands out of the earth to draw 
 them back to it. No one will ever live in them 
 again. Imagination itself can hardly rebuild 
 them, or believe that men ever called them home. 
 But where roads have been — even though they 
 are covered with the turf, and the wild things 
 
 [46] 
 
GREAT ROADS 
 
 have returned to live in them — there men can 
 still walk. 
 
 The second good thing that the great roads 
 bring is this, that they give to all the country 
 which they cross an emphasis and firmness to 
 whatever is beautiful in its shape. They make 
 the plains more level ; they mark, so that the eye 
 can see it more clearly, the beautiful dip and 
 wave of the land at the foot of the hills; they 
 make magnificent the great curve of a hillside. 
 As they can ennoble an empty place with mem- 
 ory so also can they give grandeur to its very 
 shape. It is so with those great roads of North- 
 ern France that go rising and falling, rising and 
 falling, across the arches of the Downs. Where 
 those unswerving roads touch that smoothly 
 rolling country with its even and gentle curves, 
 it is suddenly changed. They seem to increase 
 its very stature, to exalt it. 
 
 Last of all the great roads bring romance. Not 
 the eye only but the mind travels by them, 
 imagining many things. Never does it go so far 
 into the distant mists as when it follows the way 
 of the white roads. This is their final paradox 
 and mystery. One knows that it is by following 
 them and not by turning aside that one will reach 
 the undiscovered places. 
 
 [47] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 What it is that gives to certain roads this 
 enchantment no one can tell. Some have it and 
 some have it not, and some may have it in one 
 place and not another, and some may have it 
 only at certain times. One cannot explain it. 
 You can only say that of such a road you know 
 at once that it will take you to some place where 
 you wish very much to be. By this you know 
 these roads, and it is the only thing really worth 
 having in a road, and these are the only roads 
 worth travelling by. 
 
 No one has yet written a book about the influ- 
 ence of the roads on the characters of the na- 
 tions who make them, or, if you prefer it, about 
 the way in which the characters of nations are 
 made clear by their roads. One could write the 
 book from either starting point, and from each it 
 would be true. For we show what we are by 
 what we make, and the things once made, com- 
 pleted and not to be changed, are a perpetual 
 influence upon us. The history of Europe could 
 be told in such a book ; and it would have a very 
 beautiful chapter entitled "The Part Played by 
 Hedges in the Development of the English 
 Character." 
 
 The whole difference between the English and 
 French peoples is in their roads. Each started 
 
 [48] 
 
GREAT ROADS 
 
 with the roads that the Romans left them, and 
 France still travels by those roads; but in Eng- 
 land men now search for them under the turf of 
 the Downs and trace across the fields the way 
 that they must have taken. The faith of the 
 French mind in reason; its courage in following 
 ideas direct to their conclusion; its economy; its 
 love of light, and of good proportion, and of the 
 classic in beauty — all these things are expressed 
 by those great roads laid like a sword across the 
 country, unswerving, unhedged, open to the sun, 
 with their poplars kept spare and lean by the 
 winds. All noble things the French roads have 
 but one — ^they are without enchantment. They 
 are too straight and too confident. They lead 
 only to that place whose name is on the map. 
 
 All that the French roads are the English 
 roads are not. They wander. They go, so many 
 of them, between great flowering, wasteful, 
 beautiful hedges; and the trees rise out of the 
 hedges, stretching magnificent arms from that 
 pleasant shelter in which they live, massive and 
 luxuriant, as if all the richness of the earth were 
 only to give them stature and beauty. Those 
 roadside trees, and the undipped hedges full of 
 birds, and the broad grass banks, and the ditches 
 that are wayside gardens of wild flowers, what 
 * [49] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 else could speak more clearly than they of the 
 easy, wasteful, jolly contentment of the English ? 
 Seeing these roads any foreigner might say that 
 indeed they could belong only to the people who 
 use so much that word which he cannot trans- 
 late — "comfortable." Walking by them also as 
 they wind and wander, seeming not to know 
 what way they will go, yet all the time following 
 the curves and slopes of the earth, until in some 
 mysterious easy way of their own they do at 
 last reach the place — ^walking by them so, he 
 might also come to understand that thing of 
 which he is most impatient, suspicious and re- 
 sentful, that strange sense by which, blundering 
 on without any light of reason, the English, in 
 the end, arrive. 
 
 Above all, if he followed the English roads, by 
 wayside hedge and elm and oak and beech, by all 
 their flowering, comfortable, pleasant windings, 
 until suddenly they lifted him out and up to the 
 open turf of moor or hill or Down, not like those 
 French roads pointing straight as a sign-post to 
 the next town, but still wandering — as if they 
 searched for something — over the hills and into 
 the sky — then at last perhaps he would under- 
 stand the final and greatest puzzle of the English: 
 why it is that out of this people, not caring much 
 
 [50] 
 
GREAT ROADS 
 
 for thought, loving ease and comfort, out of this 
 people, as he thinks them, of over-prosperous 
 tradesmen, so many poets have come and have 
 travelled on to such strange cities and lands and 
 fairy places, as no straight road has ever reached. 
 These things and many more a man might 
 learn from the great roads, but they stand also as 
 a symbol of something greater even than the soul 
 of a people. They are the splendid symbol of all 
 noble art, the symbol of the truth that men only 
 achieve beautiful and enduring works when they 
 are not concerned alone with the beauty of what 
 they do, but are intent also on reaching some- 
 thing, even though it is no more than an under- 
 standing of what is in their own minds. 
 
 [51] 
 
THE SCHOLAR ROADMAKER 
 
 T TE was killed by a wandering bullet when 
 * •'• working on a road behind the lines, and 
 these are passages from some of his letters. He 
 wrote a great deal, for though he had good com- 
 rades in his Labour Battalion, there were none 
 to whom he could talk very much, and so he was 
 always writing for the comfort and pleasure of his 
 own mind. It left him content in the monotony 
 of a labour that had none of the fierce moments 
 of a soldier's life, though it brought him a 
 soldier's death. 
 
 His letters were written in all sorts of odd 
 places, whenever the fancy took him and he had 
 five minutes leisure, by the light of a candle 
 stump as he sprawled on the floor of his billet, 
 or as he lay at the road-side resting; and he spoke 
 of them always as his "raw stuff," that some day 
 he would use. They are full of cheerful talk 
 about all the books that he would write after the 
 war, but most of all about his book on roads. 
 And now that wandering bullet has brought him 
 
 [53] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 and them to the dust, and there remains nothing 
 of it all but a grave in France and a box full of 
 "raw stuff" and eager hope. 
 
 "I seem now to have been busy all my life 
 with roads. There was a bit of road that I used 
 to love when I was a boy. It was across the 
 valley from my home. One end of it rose out of 
 the woods, and the other went over the edge of 
 the hill. I used to play with that bit of road ; I 
 used to play at sending people up and down it. 
 Once you sent them over you never knew just 
 how they would come back, or what they would 
 bring. It was this that made it a fine game, a 
 game of unending fancies. I often think of it as 
 I bend over these roads. 
 
 "And I often remember how the news of the 
 war first came to me. I was in the north of 
 England that August, tramping along the crest 
 of the hills that are still called High Street, after 
 the road which the Romans built there. In the 
 late twilight I came down to an inn at the head 
 of a lake. I had been thinking of the Roman 
 legionaries who once upon a time went that way, 
 and feeling the utter freedom and peace of it all. 
 For I was alone all day with the turf and the wind 
 
 [54] 
 
THE SCHOLAR ROADMAKER 
 
 and the white sign-posts, that up there on the top 
 of the hills seemed to point to no places on earth 
 but to some distant places of the sky. In the inn 
 I picked up a paper two days old and read the 
 declaration of war. 
 
 "There was destiny in it when they made me a 
 roadmaker. 
 
 " When I am cheerful I dream of writing the 
 greatest book on roads that was ever written. 
 For I have done more than tramp the roads and 
 love them. I have worked on them and ached 
 for them. I shall go to Rome where all the great 
 roads start ; and I shall write of it all in a house 
 that I see (though it is still unbuilt) just under 
 the edge of the North Downs where the oldest 
 road in England runs. That is how I dream 
 when I am cheerful ; and when I am sad I think 
 that I shall die on one of these roads and drop 
 into a shell hole. 
 
 " We work too hard in the open air to dream at 
 night. When I lie down I tumble straight into 
 deep sleep. But sometimes I have a half dream 
 in the mornings, before I am fully awake. It is 
 
 [55] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 a dream always of the road that, at the moment, 
 we are making across this shell-broken, pitiful 
 country; but always as I go along it it becomes 
 that white road over the hill that I knew when I 
 was a boy. I know that they are the same roads 
 but I never see where they join. There is always 
 a bit of dead ground between them, and I always 
 wake before I come to it. But beyond I see the 
 old road very clear, going over the hill. 
 
 "I had rather a success with the battalion the 
 other night. We were back in camp. It had 
 been a day of continual rain, awful to work in, 
 and there had been fairly heavy shelling that had 
 cut up our work. We were sodden and discon- 
 tented and cursed roads and roadmaking and 
 prayed to be in the trenches, and sneered at our- 
 selves because we were not real soldiers. It was 
 then that I broke in and told them of the Roman 
 roads, and what awful labour they were to make, 
 built in stone across the hills, and how those 
 roads made the Empire. I talked of that great 
 old road under the trees above Mickleham that 
 crosses Epsom Downs by the racecourse (they 
 all knew that) and I talked of that road which 
 you can still see at Blackstone Edge, with the 
 
 [56] 
 
THE SCHOLAR ROADMAKER 
 
 heavy flags as the Romans laid them. And I had 
 them listening. 
 
 "Then a man who had worked on the Uganda 
 Railway joined in, and a navvy who had laid 
 wood pavements in London, and another man 
 who was working, when the war came, on the new 
 road by the Ouse down to the sea. Before we 
 had done talking we all knew that roadmaking 
 was the finest work in the world. 
 
 " I shall never smell the heavy smell of damp 
 clothes again without thinking of that scene ; and 
 how the man from East Africa spoke, in little 
 unexpected flashes, of the wonder of his work; 
 and how the navvy from London laid down the 
 law of roads, and, whatever you might say of 
 Roman stone, would not allow that any road 
 was a real road unless it were built of wood. 
 
 " I often think of what de Musset wrote, that 
 if a man despaired of being a poet he should 
 shoulder his pack and march in the ranks. It is 
 when we march that I do all my thinking. With 
 this perpetual work in the open, if I sit down to 
 think I fall asleep ; and there is no thinking as we 
 work. Then the body takes possession of the 
 mind. Sometimes a line of a song, or the last 
 
 [57] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 sentence I thought before we took up tools, will 
 occupy it all the day. It can go no further. But 
 when we are marching then it can roam. While 
 my body drones on in the mud below, it travels 
 on the poplar tops. I have never known it so 
 free. I have never before so dreamed and 
 planned, and loved the distant and delightful 
 things as now in the prison-house of this con- 
 centrated, unresting labour of war." 
 
 When the roadmaker was shot the last of his 
 letters was still in his pocket. 
 
 " I had that dream of the two roads again the 
 other night, but it was different. While always 
 before I have looked forward to the old road from 
 the road that we were making, this time I was on 
 that old road and going up to the edge of the hill. 
 I was nearly at the top when I stopped to look 
 back. But the ground where the two joined was 
 still hidden. I must have crossed it before the 
 dream began. I wonder what had happened 
 there." 
 
 (58] 
 
WARRIOR TREES 
 
 OF the past of the Downs what remains? 
 There was the time when men lived in their 
 freedom and sweetness, high above the oak for- 
 ests and the marshes, the wolf packs and the 
 fevers of the weald ; when they cut their axes and 
 their arrowheads from the flints of Cissbury, and 
 fought their wars on that open turf. There was 
 the time when Vespasian led the 2nd Legion 
 from London to conquer southern England; 
 when the legionaries dug their trenches, and 
 buUt their palisades, and lit their camp fires all 
 along the summit of the Downs, and made the 
 perilous journeys for water into the weald in the 
 shelter of the deep, trenched paths. There was 
 the time when Ella sailed in from Germany with 
 his three ships and his sons, and through many 
 years fought for the Downs. But of all those 
 years, and of those little wars, which were the 
 birth struggles of England, what remains ? The 
 morning mists still blow in from the sea, as when 
 they came to fill the earliest dew-ponds and to 
 
 [59] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 make the shivering Roman sentry long for Pro- 
 vence or the warm Italian plains, but time and 
 the turf have rounded the trenches and smoothed 
 the great camps as tides wash out sand castles. 
 The Downs still remain, immense and tranquil 
 and free, as they were before men came. 
 
 Only the trees of the Downs seem to be 
 troubled by that distant past. There is a 
 strangeness in them as if the spirit of the ancient 
 soldiers of the Downs, Briton and Roman and 
 Saxon, were still an influence deep below the turf 
 that feeds their roots. The trees alone of all the 
 things of the Downs seem to speak of remem- 
 bered wars. I could believe that the wandering 
 men who drove their flocks across the Downs, 
 and watched in the morning the marsh fogs of 
 the weald, and listened at night for the bark of 
 the wolves, and the men who climbed in the 
 darkness from the shelter of the forests and 
 prowled round the Roman camps, still nourish 
 with their spirits those stunted thorns that 
 stand, forlorn and twisted, on the Downs. They 
 seem to belong to an earlier, more savage race 
 than the great beeches, whose roots, it may be, 
 have found the graves of the legionaries. 
 
 Wherever the beeches grow on the slopes of 
 the Downs they are changed. They seem to have 
 
 [60] 
 
WARRIOR TREES 
 
 lost the deep-rooted steadfast content of the 
 trees of the weald and to have gathered, waiting 
 for some order to come. They fill the great 
 valleys like armies, in close ranks, expectant, 
 and when the wind moves among them it might 
 be the first step of a sudden advance. In all the 
 combes along the Downs between Adur and 
 Arun are little companies of trees that are gath- 
 ered close together and seem to press in against 
 the Downs — as the British warriors must once 
 have crouched below the Roman camps, and 
 here and there, halfway up the slopes, solitary 
 trees seem to wait until the time shall come to 
 take the next step upwards. 
 
 Everywhere among the trees is this strange 
 expectancy, as if some day an enchantment will 
 be broken, and their roots be freed, and they 
 themselves be turned again into armed men who 
 will sweep upwards and over the great green 
 rampart which lies above, and once more look 
 southwards to the sea. 
 
 Along that rampart also where once the sen- 
 tries watched, it is the trees which seem to have 
 kept the memory of the trenched and palisaded 
 camps. I do not think of vigilance and war when 
 I look at the smoothed out trenches of Ditchling 
 or even the deeper earthworks of Wolstonbury, 
 
 [61] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 but at those strange and solitary circles of 
 beeches, in which the trees grow so close together 
 that only a flicker of light shows through their 
 branches. Far away across the Downs you see 
 these camps of trees, standing high and lonely 
 and self-sufficient in the emptiness of the Downs. 
 It is only when you come near them that you see 
 them to be trees. In the distance they are grey 
 and smooth as stone. They stand like fortress 
 rocks. The winds cannot stir them. 
 
 When the enchantment is lifted, it will be they, 
 and not the old camps of turf, which will turn to 
 palisades, and glitter with the spear heads and 
 the helmets and the strong short swords of the 
 waiting legionaries. So do the trees seem still to 
 keep the memory of wars ten centuries old, and 
 to draw up from the ancient graves the spirit of 
 buried soldiers. I wonder if at night, when the 
 sheep are gathered into their folds and men have 
 gone back to the weald, all these trees — ^the great 
 circles of beeches like grey forts, and the solitary 
 thorns, and the little hangars waiting in shelter 
 to climb the Downs — ^become the toys of the 
 children of the gods, and if this can be their great 
 nursery, where, in the hours when men and the 
 sheep and the flowers are asleep, they come to 
 play at soldiers .? 
 
 [62] 
 
THE ROAD TO DIDLING 
 
 IN a manner of speaking I am now, and always 
 * shall be, on that road. Just as here and 
 there, sometimes on this road sometimes on that, 
 on old turf tracks and between the houses of dark 
 and busy streets, one remembers that here, under 
 one's feet, is a road to a Roman town, so in un- 
 expected places do I wonder if this, on which I 
 walk, may not be part of the road to Didling. 
 All roads do not lead to Didling as they lead to 
 Rome, but for three minutes of one summer 
 evening we were on a road which went to that 
 place and nowhere else. 
 
 No one had ever spoken of it to us; but one 
 morning, stopping in the rain by a chalk quarry, 
 halfway up the Downs, we found that name on 
 the map. The name is still there. It is not an 
 elfin name which we have never been able to find 
 again, which came on that one morning to lead 
 us astray, either for our sorrow or our happiness. 
 The name is there, and the place, as I believe, is 
 there, a solid English place of stone and flint, red 
 
 [63] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 tiles and brown thatch. It lies — ^but what does 
 it matter where it lies? Anyone can find it for 
 himself on the map. 
 
 There and then, standing by the quarry 
 against a hazel bush while the wind shook the 
 rain drops in heavy showers off the full-leaved 
 beech trees, we resolved to set out for Didling. 
 We climbed the steep chalk path, and at the 
 summit turned westwards by the turf road. The 
 clouds lay close above us, in even and dark lines, 
 like enormous black rafters acrbss the sky. With 
 those clouds above and the tall beech woods on 
 either side, through whose branches we could see, 
 as through little windows, far down into the 
 weald, it was as if we were walking all this day 
 in a great dark room. It was a room full of the 
 wind and the rain, and from it we looked out 
 always at a distant, fairy world. For from under 
 the low clouds we could see, many miles distant, 
 hills where the sun shone. 
 
 So we tramped towards Didling. Who had not 
 been enchanted, opening his map, to have come 
 suddenly on such a name ; to have seen it, for the 
 first time, when he was already on the road; to 
 have found that it was not many miles away? 
 Didling filled our day. We talked of it. We 
 wondered what manner of place it was. We 
 
 [64] 
 
THE ROAD TO DIDLING 
 
 joked about it. We made such rhymes to it as 
 there were to make, and all day long we drew 
 nearer to it. There was in that name something 
 at once so comical and so romantic, so friendly 
 and so remote, so homelike and yet so elfin, that 
 we could not tire of it. We had never heard of 
 Didling before. But three hours since we should 
 have laughed if anyone had spoken of it, saying, 
 "There is no such place, but if there were, what 
 a strange place it must be," — and now we should 
 reach it by tea, time. 
 
 The rain came and went. We bent to its fierce- 
 ness, and then raised our heads to watch its 
 silver squadrons go sweeping across half a 
 county. The wind dried us as soon as the rain 
 had passed. Far away, now here now there, we 
 saw the sunlight mingling with the rain, but we 
 walked always under the dark low rafters of the 
 clouds; and at every step we came nearer to 
 Didling that waited to welcome us and to laugh 
 with us. 
 
 At midday we sat down to eat on a fallen tree 
 where a road, soft with last year's leaves and 
 black with rain, went steeply down through the 
 woods. And as we ate we heard from that road 
 a voice singing, loudly and triumphantly. It 
 sang "On the road to Didling," and then linger- 
 ' [65] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 ingly and softly, as if not willing to leave it, the 
 voice repeated the name "Did-el-ling," and then 
 it took up the song again, 
 
 "The old turf road to Didling" 
 
 and again, and in the same fond way, "Did-el- 
 ling," 
 
 " Sometimes you'll spy 
 Elves dancing by 
 To the sound of fiddlers fiddling, fiddling, fiddling . . ." 
 
 But how many times the voice repeated the word 
 we could not say, for it fell very low and there 
 was, to us, a long silence before it took up the 
 song again, loudly, but further away than before, 
 
 " On the road to Didling, 
 
 Didling, 
 The old turf road to Didling, 
 
 Didling 
 If you hold your ear. 
 Perhaps you'll hear 
 Those fairy fiddlers, fiddling, fiddling." 
 
 At that moment the wind suddenly caught the 
 wet tree above us and shook it fiercely, and when 
 it had passed the voice had gone. If there was 
 more to that song we could not hear it, though we 
 listened for a long time. 
 
 Then we went on our way trying to sing the 
 [66] 
 
THE ROAD TO DIDLING 
 
 song for ourselves ; but we could not sing it. It 
 was one of those tunes which run very clearly in 
 the head, but as soon as the voice attempts to 
 catch them they dart away. We pursued it so for 
 nearly two miles of our road ; but we could not 
 sing it. So we tried no more. We stayed con- 
 tent with the tune running in our heads, not like 
 a song that one has sung once and cannot forget, 
 but gently, evenly, delightfully like a rippling 
 stream. 
 
 So, too, with the words, they were clear in my 
 mind until I tried to write them down, and then 
 I knew that I had not got them right. All I can 
 say is that as the man sang them they were, in 
 some way that I cannot discover, both comical 
 and beautiful. 
 
 Three hours later we turned aside from the 
 turf road and went down by a steep chalk track 
 into the weald. At once everything was very 
 still. A great buttress of the Downs, sheltering 
 in its curve a field of corn, held off the wind, and 
 between tall hedges, odorous, rain-laden and 
 covered with Travellers' Joy, we came to a road. 
 To the left it went to villages that do not matter. 
 To the right it went to Didling. Across the 
 fields we could already see hay-ricks and the 
 steep roof of a barn all golden with lichen. 
 
 [67] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 Above us stood the beautiful shape of the Downs, 
 serene and benign as the figure of an angel. We 
 turned to the right, but before we had gone many- 
 yards we stopped again to consider our way. 
 The road was clear, but out in the weald, where 
 evening already began to stoop and settle gently 
 over the fields, was a station, and the last train 
 of the day. By which road should we be sure to 
 catch it.? At any other time this had been a 
 trivial choice, but now with Didling already 
 rising among the fields to welcome us, we stood 
 there very solemnly looking at our watches. 
 Their hands were against us, and we turned 
 about. We turned feeling that there was some- 
 thing more than time which made us take the 
 other road. We were meant not to enter Didling, 
 though we had travelled towards it the whole 
 day, though we had talked of it until already 
 we seemed to know it like our own home. 
 
 We took the other road and, looking back, we 
 could see only the gentle shape of the Downs 
 rising above the fields. We had passed Didling 
 by. We had not trod its street — ^for it could have 
 had but one, — ^nor looked in at its windows, nor 
 knocked on its doors. We had seen only that one 
 golden roof in the distance, and we had turned 
 aside. Yet we went on our way satisfied, and 
 
 [68] 
 
THE ROAD TO DIDLING 
 
 even exalted. It was as if we had indeed entered 
 Didling and found it as lovely and as comical as 
 we had desired. 
 
 We went on by the darkening road, and now in 
 our content we sang aloud nearly all the way; 
 but it was no longer the elfin, unseizable Song of 
 Didling that we tried to sing. We sang of simple 
 and earthly things. About this time, we knew, 
 far away, steak and onions were beginning to 
 prepare for our supper, and so we sang of these. 
 We sang of them to most of the tunes that we 
 knew, and they seemed to us, in that splendid 
 mood, to go equally well with them all — ^with 
 tunes of comic songs and of anthems, of marching 
 songs and of love songs. We had never thought 
 before of singing of such things, nor had we ever 
 before sung so carelessly, so untiringly or en- 
 joyed so much to be singing. Didling was behind 
 us. We had renounced it, but its influence went 
 with us making us happy; and now we doubly 
 possess that comical, romantic place — as a place 
 which we have found to be all that we desired, 
 and as a place which, some day, we shall see for 
 the first time. 
 
 [69] 
 
WINTER WOODS 
 
 TT is the winter woods that are haunted. Why 
 ■■• look for fairies in the spring, when the buds 
 are green, when the primroses first lighten the 
 long winter darkness and the woods are too full 
 of the beauty of this world for the mind to pass 
 beyond it ? If one would find them it must be 
 behind the burnt and shrivelled tatters of the 
 beech leaves that lie on the dark boughs of De- 
 cember. In the woods of spring what more 
 would one hope or wish to find than the buds and 
 flowers of this good life beginning? But the un- 
 changing winter woods, that are dead to this 
 world, are most like an entrance to some world 
 beyond. In their silence the mind travels on- 
 ward, searching for strange places, with eyes that 
 look and ears that listen for the enchantments of 
 another world. It is then, between the dead 
 brown leaves, that one might at any moment see 
 the holly-berry red of fairy caps, or look into 
 fairy faces through the cloudy windows of the 
 white ice at the edge of the dark pools. 
 
 [71] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 The silence of the winter woods is not the 
 silence of death, as is commonly said, but the 
 silence of suspense. They are not woods where 
 everjrthing has happened but where anything 
 might happen; and there is this great difference 
 between them and the woods of summer, that 
 the woods of summer are loveliest when you go 
 into them and the woods of winter when you 
 pass them by — ^the woods of summer as you lie 
 in their heart and watch the wind shake down 
 the sunlight out of their rustling leaves, the 
 woods of winter as you march towards them 
 looking at that dark and turreted wall which 
 they make against the sky. 
 
 These winter woods are not the frosted woods 
 which are as gay and beautiful as the woods of 
 spring, so that the heart sings in them though 
 they are silent, but the black woods of the grey 
 time, the woods that throw no shadows. None 
 could walk towards them without the hope of 
 finding something strange and beautiful within. 
 They are of greater stature than the woods of 
 spring. The smallest copse has the mystery 
 and grandeur of a forest, and a belt of trees 
 against the low winter light is like a majestic 
 entrance to the sky. They are not trees grow- 
 ing from the earth, but pillars holding up the 
 
 [72 1 
 
WINTER WCKDDS 
 
 sky. Their tops touch its light. They stand like 
 stone. 
 
 Somewhere in the heart of these winter woods 
 are all the castles of romance, beyond that dark 
 mist of the close and naked twigs which hides 
 them more securely than all the heavy greenery 
 of summer. It must have been in a winter wood, 
 a wood that never budded nor blossomed, 
 whose black branches grew closer and closer, and 
 whose twigs wove between them a darker and 
 darker mist, that the Princess slept for a hundred 
 years. All round that enchanted wood were 
 single fir trees, raven black, as fir trees are in the 
 grey of winter afternoons, like sentinel towers on 
 the edge of mystery, and from its depths rose 
 the peaks of solitary trees standing like pin- 
 nacles of rock against a low yellow sky which did 
 not change. Within it, at its very heart was a 
 wood of larches, most mysterious of all the trees, 
 for in winter they are not a wood at all until you 
 touch them, but a grey cloud. Beyond them was 
 a great brown wall of beech leaves, and within 
 that wall the sleeping palace lay, a palace built 
 of wood which through those hundred years of 
 sleep had slowly turned to trees again; but since 
 they too sleep in that long winter enchantment, 
 they put forth no green leaves but only dark 
 
 (73) 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 twigs. Little by little the tall windows drew 
 across themselves a lattice of their own branches, 
 and the wood carving of the rooms turned very 
 slowly into twisted tree stems, and the fading 
 gold upon them to withered leaves. So the wood 
 stood round the sleeping Princess for a hundred 
 years, black when all the world about it was 
 green, and still black when all the world was 
 white with frost. 
 
 No time in all the year is more beautiful than 
 the end of a winter's day, when the mild stillness 
 is touched by an evening frost, and all the towns 
 lie hidden in mist and you walk beside those 
 silent woods watching them turn to stone in the 
 dusk. At such a time the trees and bushes of 
 the gardens that you pass, as you go towards the 
 town, have the freshness and the majesty of the 
 woods. It is then, in that frosty and darkening 
 winter air, that the sweet breath and magic of 
 the country, which in the summer would long 
 since have left you, come far with you, and blow 
 a little way into the very streets of the town. 
 
 [74] 
 
THE MAP 
 
 THIS happened on the road one day. You 
 know how sometimes far inland you will 
 suddenly smell the sea in the wind. That day, 
 on the French road, I smelt England in it every 
 time I lifted my head and it blew on my face. 
 And all that had happened was that I saw a man 
 sitting by the road looking at a map. He was 
 holding it wide open like a newspaper. 
 
 It was an odd thing to see a Bartholomew's 
 half-inch map on a roadside in France. As he 
 held it I could read the name. It was my own old 
 map ; and all its hills suddenly rose up before me 
 in their clear and even line against the sky. I 
 went across to him. 
 
 "Can you tell me," said I, "if this is the road 
 to LuUington?" 
 
 He jumped, and I took a corner of the map and 
 looked at it. There was the beautiful, familiar 
 curve of the coast, and the roads that I had 
 travelled and the names that I knew. But for 
 one moment they looked very strange. All 
 
 [75] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 names are comic until you know them, and after 
 Montreuil and Arras and Amiens they were, for 
 the first moment, comic — ^broad and blunt and 
 comic as I read them — Plumpton and Iford and 
 Glynde, all the little villages that you look down 
 on from the hills — but only for a moment and 
 then I was back among them again. And there 
 across the wandering twisted English roads lay 
 that faint unswerving line which marked what 
 once had been the Roman road. It was like a 
 sudden shadow, thrown on that peaceful col- 
 oured map, by these great war roads of France. 
 
 Then I discovered what I had never known 
 before, that an old map is full of odd windows — 
 little odd windows opening into the past. As I 
 followed the many ways I had gone, road by 
 road, name after familiar name all across from 
 the silver birches of Tilgate to the Seven Sisters 
 looking out to sea, those windows kept opening 
 to me. Memories of little things long forgotten 
 came out of the map to me. They came as 
 sudden, as vivid, as unexpected as that smell of 
 the sea in the wind. 
 
 We looked at the map together for some time, 
 remembering things. Then the man spoke. 
 
 "You know that St. Crispian speech?" he said 
 abruptly. "It's about the only thing I learnt at 
 
 (76] 
 
THE MAP 
 
 school that I still remember, not all of it, just the 
 bit from 'Old men forget.' I remember how I 
 cried over it and thought I could never learn it, 
 and had it driven into me word by word, and now 
 I couldn't forget it if I tried — 'Old men forget,' 
 and then the English names, like a drum rolling, 
 
 Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, 
 
 Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester " 
 
 He stopped and looked at me. 
 
 "That map's full of Crispian speeches," he said. 
 "You can make them up as you go along and all 
 as fine as Shakespeare," and he began to chant, 
 
 " Midhurst and Petworth, Amberley, Poynings, 
 Hurstpierpoint, Bramber . . " 
 
 And so he went on in sonorous iambics, rolling 
 ofi the names, until those little villages — ^red 
 cottages and dark beech trees under the bare 
 Downs — sounded like a battle cry of the names of 
 great men. 
 
 "That map's better than all the songs," he 
 said, "and if I didn't carry a map I think I'd 
 carry a railway guide. Then I should have all 
 England in my pocket. What more do you want 
 to know of any place than its name and how far 
 it is to go there ? But England is too big for any 
 one man. This is my bit." 
 
 l77] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 He put his finger on the map and moving it 
 along the grass track on the top of the hills came 
 to the two crossed swords above Houndean 
 Bottom, and the date 1264. 
 
 "We lived across the valley from there," he 
 said. " It seemed very wonderful then to have a 
 battlefield so near home. We'd look at it across 
 the water-meadows. The sun used to set just 
 over it and turn it all red. I used to think there 
 were always men fighting somewhere over there 
 where the sun set. It made life exciting, and, 
 when the sun had gone, rather fearful too. One 
 never knew then what might not come galloping 
 down the big road. 
 
 "It seemed to be years that I waited and 
 wanted to see that battlefield, and then in the 
 end I saw it, and it was nothing but a slope of 
 the hills, like any other, with sheep feeding on it. 
 I could have cried. Half the charm went out of 
 life when I saw those sheep. There seemed 
 nothing left to wonder about, or to be afraid of 
 when it began to get dark. Well, I've seen 
 battlefields now. 
 
 "I went over on the Somme with the names of 
 that part in my head — ^Wilmington, Friston, 
 Beddingham, and Firle — ^the last time I went 
 through Firle it was August and there was an old 
 
 [78] 
 
THE MAP 
 
 lady in her garden dusting her hollyhocks. When 
 I was wounded I crawled into a trench, a chalk 
 trench, and lay there. I must have got light- 
 headed, for I thought I was down on the shore 
 under the cliff by Cliff End, and the sea was 
 coming in with a sou'wester behind it — that must 
 have been the guns — and I could not get away. 
 I think in my fright I tried to crawl up the 
 trench side, and then I tried to say those names 
 over again but they would not come right, until 
 at last I got Wilmington — just that one; and I 
 said it over and over again, slowly, when I felt 
 I needed it. You know how men clutch them- 
 selves sometimes when they have been hit, as if 
 they were afraid that they would break into 
 pieces. My head felt like that, but that name 
 seemed to keep it together — 'Wilmington.' ..." 
 
 All the time as we talked, you understand, we 
 were looking at the map together, following the 
 roads, and the roads leading our thoughts. We 
 talked of the inns that we both knew, and what 
 we had eaten and drunk there. We went by 
 those roads with giant strides. We visited each 
 village like gods. 
 
 "You'll think it absurd," he said, "but I 
 always see those villages as candle-flames. It 
 came to me like that one night, when there were 
 
 [79] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 all sorts of strange glares and coloured lights in 
 the sky and sudden bursts of firing. When I 
 thought of those quiet villages, and the night 
 quite still all round them, they seemed like no- 
 thing so much as steady, mellow candle-flames, 
 burning there all along the roads as you look 
 over them from the Downs. 
 
 "Some of them have burnt there untouched 
 since that last battle. They may burn on for 
 centuries more, and yet — ^half a day of war would 
 snuff them all out. ..." 
 
 He suddenly gathered up the map and thrust it 
 into his pocket ; and we got to our feet. 
 
 "Midhurst and Petworth, Amberley, Bramber, 
 Wilmington, Friston, Beddingham and Glynde ..." 
 
 He was chanting the names as he went on his 
 way. 
 
 [80] 
 
THE COUNTRY BREAKFAST 
 
 WHATEVER may be the fashion in town the 
 breakfast party is no country institution ; 
 and that no doubt was why it caused such excite- 
 ment in the village (though this we did not know 
 until later)when we invited ourselves to breakfast. 
 As we tramped dustily in, half an hour after the 
 appointed time, our hostess met us in the middle 
 of the road before her door. She was in a state 
 of great excitement and distress. If you lived in 
 a village and had never before entertained a 
 breakfast party you would not have been tran^ 
 quil. Imagine her, living alone, with no one to 
 share her anxieties, already past her youth and 
 about to give her first breakfast party. 
 
 She had waited; and we did not come. The 
 tea was in the pot ; the kettle-lid danced upon the 
 steam; and still we did not come. Everything 
 was prepared — ^that is to say everything except 
 the eggs. She must, I think, have looked fear- 
 fully at them many times in that half hour. For 
 you can do nothing with eggs in advance. There 
 they lay, cold and horribly unready. 
 
 [81] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 I have never heard of anyone being haunted by 
 ^^ cggj but I can conceive it as a terrible thing. 
 For there is an awful expressionless tranquillity 
 about an egg. Even to the process of boiling it is 
 utterly indifferent. Boiled or raw it is outwardly 
 the same. To anyone in the nervous state of that 
 good woman this peculiar indifference must have 
 become maddening. I can imagine her in the end 
 wildly wondering whether or not she had boiled 
 them, and obsessed with a terrible longing to 
 break them open and see. 
 
 It must have been about twenty-five minutes 
 after the breakfast hour that the sight of those 
 eggs became more than she could endure. Anx- 
 iety can make us all utterly reckless. She could 
 wait no longer. She put them on to boil. We 
 were not in sight, yet she put them on to boil; 
 and immediately a more terrible anxiety suc- 
 ceeded to the first. Would we come before they 
 were boiled too hard.'' 
 
 You can understand now why she met us in the 
 street. Not until we were seated and the eggs 
 cracked and found, after all, to be still soft, was 
 peace again in that house. 
 
 Breakfast is the meal at which anything might 
 happen. There is no dish of which you can say 
 beforehand that it will be out of place at break- 
 
 [82] 
 
THE COUNTRY BREAKFAST 
 
 fast. It is the meal for experiments. Its very 
 name premises that one may eat what one Hkes. 
 Supper is the eating of a sop ; lunch is but a hunk 
 of bread ; at tea — one drinks tea; but observe that 
 at breakfast one is committed only to break one's 
 fast ; the method is not prescribed by the name, 
 and everyone may do it according to his choice. 
 Mine is for a varied and elaborate breakfast — a 
 breakfast of unexpected dishes, and I read with 
 a special delight of that breakfast beginning with 
 fried eggs and cocks' combs which Brother 
 Eusebe served to M. Chicot at the Priory of the 
 Jacobins. But in the country, where all food has 
 a flavour of freshness, an early morning dew upon 
 it, which has long since gone by the time it 
 reaches our tables in the town, an austere break- 
 fast has its own charm. To sit at a table where it 
 has never been conceived that breakfast could 
 consist of more than eggs and bread and butter 
 is to feel ashamed of the over-decorated tables of 
 town. There inust of course be enough of each ; 
 they must have their early-morning freshness, 
 and then what more could one desire than this 
 virginal feast? When Adrian found Richard 
 Feverel at breakfast by the Solent Richard had 
 just eaten seven eggs (that is if we allow two for 
 Lucy as the feminine maximum) but we are not 
 
 [83] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 all Meredithian young men. It is possible to be 
 content with fewer. 
 
 And then we had discovered the perfect hostess 
 for such an occasion. From the moment when 
 we stumbled out of the morning heat down the 
 stairs into the dining room (it was one of those 
 old houses that have every room on a different 
 level) until the moment when we set out on the 
 road again she did not cease talking. It was not 
 one of those treacherous monologues with sudden 
 pauses, abrupt and unsuspected chasms to en- 
 gulf the inattentive, but a fresh, vivacious, un- 
 staying flood of talk which neither got nor asked 
 for answers. It flowed and rippled over us. We 
 had come in hungry and hot, and we ate in tran- 
 quillity beneath its shelter as one can sit, cool, 
 dry, and luxuriously lulled by the noise, under the 
 arch of a waterfall. 
 
 In town we do not talk to our friends of all the 
 preparations that we might have made to enter- 
 tain them. Though why we should not talk to 
 them of these things I do not know. It is the best 
 of natural good manners, the true warmth of 
 welcome, the most delicate flattery — thus to let 
 one's guests share in the reminiscence of all the 
 anxieties, the preparations, and the thought for 
 their coming. This is at once to make them at 
 
 [84] 
 
THE COUNTRY BREAKFAST 
 
 home. It is most hospitably to open to them not 
 only the rooms but the very cupboards of the 
 house. So we were made welcome. We heard of 
 all that had been done, and all that had been said 
 in the preparation of that breakfast — ^how the 
 table had been laid the night before that all might 
 be ready for the untimely feast, and how the 
 curious neighbours had dropped in. For it was 
 an event without precedent in that village. Tea 
 drinkings there were in plenty, but no one had 
 ever before given a breakfast party. There were 
 no rules to follow, and so the neighbours came, 
 for unless they saw they could not imagine how a 
 breakfast piarty was got ready. 
 
 At that point I was disturbed for the only time 
 in my tranquil eating of eggs and bread and 
 butter under that sheltering talk. I was sent to 
 get the kettle from the hob that my fourth cup 
 might be filled. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that with all this talk 
 we were neglected, or left to search the table for 
 ourselves. A nurse could not have been more 
 watchful of our wants. The cups were almost 
 taken from our lips to be replenished. The eggs 
 were lifted from our plates and others put in their 
 place almost before our spoons had done with 
 them. We wanted for nothing. And as she 
 
 [85] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 talked and watched She broke a piece of toast on 
 her plate, for she herself had breakfasted long 
 before we came that she might give undivided 
 attention to our entertainment. With her ec- 
 centric ways, her naive and anxious prepara- 
 tions, her alert and hospitable eye, her unceasing 
 talk, I salute her again as the perfect hostess. 
 Even her nervousness, so candidly confessed, had 
 but served to put us at our ease. 
 
 She waved us farewell as she had welcomed us, 
 standing in the middle of the road before her 
 door. 
 
 [86] 
 
THE THUNDERSTORM 
 
 TT was the full summertime, a hazy and still 
 ■* day. The heat seemed to come not from the 
 half-hidden sky but from the burning white road ; 
 and though it was near noon the Downs were 
 grey and very distant. For by day, even when 
 the air is clear, their high line seems far away, 
 mysterious, and the world beyond them scarcely 
 to be attained. There were no clouds in the sky, 
 but there was no depth of blue either. That hot 
 grey shadow, the sure warning of a storm, which 
 is flung by nothing and does not move across the 
 earth like the cool shadow of a cloud but lies 
 upon the light itself, had passed between the 
 earth and the sky. The coolness of the turf was 
 gone, and all the colours seemed sucked from 
 out of the world. Only the road was fiery white. 
 On such a day of grey heat the weight of many 
 years seems to press upon the limbs. 
 
 A little after it left the town, and before it 
 opened out on its great curve above the valley 
 and turned towards the Downs, the road sank 
 
 [87] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 very deeply between its banks. On this day 
 they had the hard look of walls. They threw no 
 shadow, but they seemed to hold all the dust 
 of the road and to gather into them all the heat of 
 the sky. Out of this prison the road lifted on to 
 the curving shoulder of the hill with all the water 
 meadows of the broad valley beneath. From 
 here we looked straight across at the Downs and 
 saw the little chalk path rising up them. In the 
 greyness and heavy silence the only clear thing 
 was that high chalk path far ahead. By it we 
 knew that we should come to our first breath of 
 coolness and a sudden sight of the sea. For there 
 was no coolness at all in the unshaded space of 
 the water-meadows nor in the dull and still sur- 
 face of the stream, but only a hope of it beyond 
 that distant road. 
 
 We crossed the empty valley and came to a 
 village where, for the first time, there were 
 shadows in which the eyes might cool themselves, 
 broad shadows under the beech trees and little 
 shadows under the ivy leaves of the church tower, 
 and a shadow, deep and dark as a grave, within 
 the porch. Through a single arch of trees across 
 the road we looked forward at the delicate line 
 of the Downs. From this road the path, that 
 had been our mark all across the valley, went up 
 
 [88] 
 
THE THUNDERSTORM 
 
 through the turf. Its glittering chalk surface was 
 without dust, and in the smooth and calm face of 
 the Downs there was, not coolness, but a relief 
 from the dust pall of the road and the weighing 
 odour of the heat. 
 
 Already the shadow which had lain all morning 
 on the light was growing deeper; and the valley 
 now behind us was very dim. The whole world, 
 that had lain all morning as if dead beneath the 
 heat, seemed to be changing into a grey ghost of 
 itself, a ghost that was growing, each minute, 
 vaguer and mistier, and that presently would 
 dissolve and be blown away with the first breath 
 of the wind. But there was still no wind, though 
 once, in the hot silence, a lonely flutter, with a 
 faint smell of salt, touched our faces. 
 
 On the crest of the Downs the chalk path 
 disappeared in the turf, as a stream goes under- 
 ground, and there we came suddenly on the sea. 
 Below us were long empty valleys, and the last 
 broad reach of the river, dull and hard as lead, 
 and dark houses and the masts of ships at its 
 mouth, and beyond these the sea, grey like the 
 land but with a faint scatter of the gold dust of 
 the sun. 
 
 Away to the eastwards, where the sky was 
 growing darker, rolled the smoke of a gorse fire. 
 
 [89] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 It was the only thing that moved in all the press- 
 ing stillness. Within the smoke glowed broad 
 orange flames, and within these flames other and 
 smaller flames, red like holly berries, sharp and 
 curled like holly leaves. At their vicious touch 
 each great gorse bush fell, with one rending 
 crackle, into grey ashes, and was left a black and 
 twisted skeleton. The smoke moved slowly 
 along the Downs, and as it rose disappeared into 
 the greyness above, so that from those great- 
 bellied clouds of smoke seemed to have come that 
 shadow which filled the whole circle of the sky, 
 and those orange and red flames to be the fires 
 beneath the cauldron of the storm. 
 
 It came stealthy and disguised upon us from 
 beyond the rolling smoke. It came with no crash 
 and parade of its forces. There were no clouds in 
 the sky, but only darkness. No wind blew, and 
 the first sounds of thunder were like the unin- 
 tended muttering and shuffle of a great crowd 
 striving to move in silence. 
 
 These empty spaces of the Downs are without 
 shelter, and we waited on the open turf. Below 
 us at the shallow head of a valley a flock of sheep 
 was gathered, so close and still that in the grey 
 light it was like a slope of the dun-coloured turf. 
 Then at last the storm began to take shape above 
 
 [90] 
 
THE THUNDERSTORM 
 
 the sea. The darkness gathered and sank, com- 
 ing out of the sky into a long Hne of clouds that 
 hung low over the very edge of the shore. These 
 clouds were black above, and below the colour 
 of bronze. The shore was black and desolate in 
 their shadow, but in the narrow space between 
 the two the sea shone with a pale and distant 
 light. So clear was it and so far away under the 
 dark and evil brow of the storm that it seemed as 
 if suddenly we should see through it, small and 
 clear, the shores and houses of France. 
 
 The line of the clouds sank lower and lower, as 
 if they would fall bodily upon the shore and crush 
 it beneath their bronze shields. Then the storm 
 broke across that narrow bar of the pale light of 
 the sea, and the lightning stabbed furiously out of 
 the clouds at the shore. There was the darkness 
 of the clouds above and the darkness of their 
 shadow on the shore below; and across that 
 serene light between them ran the crooked and 
 vicious flames. Then the rain fell, and the rain 
 drops were so great that they shone in the dim- 
 ness like silver. The cornfield that filled the 
 bottom of the valley moved a little to the rain 
 and looked like a mild green lake. The sheep did 
 not stir. They had faded altogether into the 
 colour of the turf. There were no trees to bend 
 
 [91] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 and sway in terror before the anger of the storm, 
 and the Downs lay under its darkness as easy 
 and untroubled as a pool when a shadow passes 
 over it. 
 
 The rain fell, and it seemed as if the world, 
 which had been dissolving under the heat into a 
 grey ghost, would now be washed away. Then 
 the rain ceased ; the heavy brow of the sky lifted, 
 and the storm passed; but that hot ominous 
 shadow still lay on the light of the day, and some- 
 where beyond it, unseen, the storm waited. 
 
 It had left the world utterly spent. The rain 
 had washed from it the last sign of life. The 
 last colour was gone. The bitter red flames 
 of the gorse fire were quenched, its smoke had 
 disappeared, and the dark skeletons of the gorse 
 bushes stood up from the turf, darker and more 
 gaunt than before. The sea no longer sparkled 
 faintly, nor shone with that pale clear light. It 
 lay beneath the even grey sky, as leaden and 
 motionless as the land. 
 
 So the day passed, weary and without joy. 
 The day passed and the night came, hot and still, 
 beneath a sky where no lights shone, an unseen 
 sky, that seemed, so heavy was the night, as if it 
 might have been within hand's reach above one's 
 head. 
 
 [92] 
 
THE THUNDERSTORM 
 
 At last, under the darkness, the storm crept 
 stealthily away. Suddenly a single star shone 
 out, clear, beautiful, and distant, and at the sight 
 of it the sky seemed suddenly to lift. It was as 
 if a window had been opened in a hot room and 
 the wind had blown in. 
 
 [93] 
 
THE LITTLE STREAM 
 
 ^ I 'HERE was a man in one of the fairy tales who 
 ■*■ could hear the grass growing — a wonderful 
 thing to do, but how he must have loved the 
 sudden, awesome silence of midsummer when all 
 the hay was cut ! Yet even without his terrible 
 gift there is one living thing which one can both 
 see and hear as it grows, and that is a little 
 stream. Nothing in the world grows so noisily, 
 or so fast, or with such delight to be growing. 
 
 One long warm afternoon in the Cumberland 
 hills I went all the way with a stream as it grew, 
 down a winding valley from the summit of High 
 Street — a lonely valley with great slopes of deep 
 green bracken, with grey rocks and scars of red 
 earth — and in among its tufts of grass the deli- 
 cate lance-heads of rushes, brown as the fresh 
 turned soil, and flashing green mosses, and the 
 blood-red leaves of the Venus fly-trap, an empty 
 sun-bleached valley, but with all the colours 
 hidden somewhere in it. 
 
 Among the scatter of grey rocks at the valley 
 [951 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 head, in a crumbled black cup of earth, was the 
 beginning of the little stream, and round the 
 cup lay mosses, exquisitely fine, whose tendrils 
 floated away and at a touch seemed to dissolve. 
 Out of this cradle cup of earth the little stream 
 crept and felt its way, like a blind kitten taking 
 its first steps. It spread hesitatingly among the 
 moss and grey pebbles, and then, as if frightened 
 to be abroad, slipped under ground again. But 
 it soon got courage, and up it came, and fell with 
 a splash into a little brown pool. 
 
 There is no word to describe that first call of 
 the little stream. It was something like the 
 tinkle of glass, and something like the chirrup of 
 an insect, but really like nothing but itself — ^that 
 first sound of new-born water. Nor is there any 
 little sound among the hills so beautiful except, 
 perhaps, the clear ring of tiny stones on the 
 screes. So the little stream came to life and 
 started on its way. 
 
 At first it flowed very carefully. Its waters 
 came most delicately over the stones. They 
 seemed to flicker like a candle flame, and to be as 
 easy to snuff^ out. But soon it cut its narrow 
 channel deep, and the long grasses stretched 
 above it, and its courage rose, and its voice grew 
 louder. Then it fell over its first rock with the 
 
 [96] 
 
THE LITTLE STREAM 
 
 deep sound of full water. That was the second 
 call of the little stream. It was not only alive 
 now, but glad to be alive. It felt its own 
 strength; and suddenly it went onward faster 
 than any feet could keep pace with it. 
 
 A river is always inhuman. Beautiful or sad, 
 boisterous or lazy, stately or terrible, or any one 
 of a thousand different things it may be ; but it 
 is always inhuman. For its energy is without 
 effort. It flows on, and neither knows nor cares 
 whither, or why, or how it flows. But that little 
 stream was very human. It seemed to love what 
 it was doing. I could see its delight. I could see 
 it stretching its silver sinews as it hurried. Only 
 to be moving was its desire. It cared for nothing 
 else: "Faster then, faster then, faster then," was 
 its song. It hurried and spluttered. It tripped 
 and it tumbled. It was up and on again. Its 
 waters rushed along the smooth rocks like boys 
 hurrying down a slide. It plunged from pool to 
 pool like a diver throwing up his heels. It cared 
 nothing for the tranquil hills round it, nor for the 
 stones in its course, nor the grass tufts on its 
 banks ; and if it stopped in a quieter pool it was 
 only for a moment before it hurried on from rock 
 to hollow, from grey pool to brown. At first we 
 had gone together, it and I, but now it was with 
 ' [97] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 me, and far ahead of me, and tumbling behind 
 me, all at the same time; and I knew then that 
 we were near the end of our companionship. 
 
 With a last plunge the little stream fell into one 
 of those beautiful pools which are neither grey 
 nor green, but a colour of their own, a colour still 
 without a name, the colour of perfect purity. 
 
 There the little stream ended. It flowed out of 
 that pool, but it was changed. It was a burn or a 
 beck, or what you will, but it was no longer a 
 little stream. It flowed on, with rapids and fialls, 
 by stagnant back-waters where the flies skated, 
 and by greater pools where men fished and 
 bathed. It flowed on without effort, and it 
 neither knew nor cared whither or how it flowed. 
 
 It is said sometimes of the hills that they defy 
 time, but they are merely indifferent to it. It is 
 the rivers which defy time, for they are always 
 changing and always the same; they can be all 
 ages as they will. They can rollick in youth and 
 ripple placidly in middle age, and drag their steps 
 among their stones, old and decrepit; and they 
 can do these things in any order they will, and 
 do them over and over again. They can be old 
 before they leave their first valley, and young 
 again the moment before they plunge into the 
 sea. But a little stream cannot do these things. 
 
 [98] 
 
THE LITTLE STREAM 
 
 It cannot defy time. Once it has ceased to be a 
 little stream it can never become one again. And 
 this little stream, my companion, came to an end 
 in this pool which was as clear and serene as 
 untroubled sleep. 
 
 [99] 
 
THE EXILE 
 
 If E had the peasant's great attachment to his 
 *• *■ soil. To him Belgium was that acre in 
 Brabant which was his garden. He was a tree 
 taken from the earth. His patriotism was not an 
 idea on which even in exile, he could feed the soul. 
 Still less was it an affair of governments or men. 
 It was for him home. 
 
 C'est la douce folic 
 
 De recolter ce qu'on sfeme, 
 
 Et I'absurd passion 
 
 De posseder ce qu'on aime. 
 
 It was literally of the earth. 
 
 He was a man of great ignorance and great 
 curiosity. Both were singularly attractive. Of 
 England he had known nothing at all. He saw it 
 for the first time on a railway map at Ostend 
 during his flight, and wondered if so small a place 
 could offer him any safety. Yet even this naive 
 astonishment did not get the better of his thrifty 
 good sense. He met English soldiers as they 
 landed, and changed his Belgian for their English 
 
 [lOl] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 money, so that in the end he came to England 
 with a pound's worth of EngHsh pennies in his 
 bag. 
 
 The sea he had never seen before. At any 
 other time to have embarked on it would have 
 been an awful adventure. But at that moment 
 with the terror behind he would, he said, have 
 set out for America without a thought. When he 
 was settled in an English sea-side town the first 
 fresh wonder of it returned to him. The tides 
 were a perpetual marvel, and he would hardly 
 credit it that the wind could make the waves — 
 though the rumour of such things had reached his 
 village. He delighted to talk of all these won- 
 ders. Indeed all natural science delighted him. 
 He could not hear enough of the earth and the 
 stars. He was untravelled but he had a continual 
 and eager curiosity. He had that upstanding 
 quality of mind which is neither silent nor over- 
 come, but remains always interested and critical 
 before any new thing. And so when, in middle 
 age, he was rudely thrust into this first great 
 journey of his life, when he found himself with 
 his family, a little money, and a single bag in an 
 unknown country, he was neither abashed nor 
 fumbling. He carried himself as he should. 
 There was something singularly engaging in the 
 
 [102] 
 
THE EXILE 
 
 contrasts of his character, the untravelled igno- 
 rance which he never tried to conceal, his tact and 
 good sense as of a travelled man. 
 
 On men and manners he had his ideas. Some 
 of them, he said, he kept to himself, in his village. 
 They would have been looked at askance. They 
 would have come to the ears of the cure. His 
 delight was great when he found that these ideas 
 which were his own, which he dared not share, 
 were the ideas of many men. 
 
 Romance he did not understand. To him it 
 was the feuilleton of a halfpenny paper. The 
 world, he thought, was already so full of wonders 
 to be discovered, like the waves and the tides, 
 that he could not understand why men should 
 trouble to invent things. When Dumas was 
 brought (from the very small French shelf of the 
 local library) he put him aside with a shrug. 
 They were romances, he supposed. His wife 
 might read them. For himself, he had not the 
 taste. But in the absence of anything more 
 scientific he consented to look at La Bruyere's 
 "Characters," and was greatly entertained. He 
 showed a child's delight when he found among 
 them reflections which he had already made for 
 himself in his observation of men. 
 
 Yet though Romance was hidden from him he 
 [103] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 spoke of his village, of the characters and the 
 fields and the woods, the labours and the plays, 
 of that little place — and of his delight in them — 
 all unconsciously with the poet's speech. He had 
 the poet's speech because he had never lost the 
 eagerness of a child. He loved his tools almost as 
 living things. He possessed his house as a child 
 would possess a toy house. He talked of all that 
 it contained like a child fondling its toys. And 
 so, though he did not know it, that village be- 
 came as he spoke like a place in a book, clear, 
 detached, complete, touched with humour and 
 enchantment. 
 
 There was his friendship with the burgomaster, 
 the great man of the village ; there was the village 
 concert where the famous singer from Brussels, 
 spending her holiday in the country and singing 
 by great condescension, was unapplauded, while 
 the village comedian brought down the house. 
 He acted the little scene of the gaping uncompre- 
 hension of the villagers changing to broad 
 delight. 
 
 There were the days that he spent in the winter 
 woods cutting fuel, and his happiness in the mere 
 presence of the earth and the trees. There was 
 that summer evening when he heard an unseen 
 horn, far away in the stillness, playing a mourn- 
 
 [104] 
 
THE EXILE 
 
 ful old hunting air, and he climbed to the roof of 
 his house with his ochrina and, sitting there, 
 played it back through the dusk. He described 
 it until you almost smelt the smoke of the even- 
 ing going up from the fields. 
 
 But it was only his own soil that wakened the 
 poet in this exile who did not know Romance. 
 He marvelled at the sea, but at the woods and 
 fields and hills of England he looked with an 
 unseeing eye. They were not his home. 
 
 Many men are indolent in misfortune, but he 
 rose briskly to its opportunities. If he did not go 
 travelling by his own choice, he would at least 
 not refuse its benefits. His curiosity and his 
 pleasure in new things were his support. Yet at 
 heart he remained an exile. It was only as he 
 worked in a garden that he felt himself once 
 again in Brabant. Then, as he turned the earth, 
 he was near his home; but the thought of it 
 troubled him always. What would become of 
 that square grey house, with the garden and the 
 clump of osiers, on its little eminence in the 
 Brabant plain.'' They were more than worldly 
 goods. They were his Belgium. 
 
 He was safe, cared for, prosperous, but "la 
 douce folie" drove him home. He knew at least, 
 when he set out, that his house had not been 
 
 [105] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 destroyed. But how much more of the rest, that 
 he went to seek did he find — of the village and 
 all that pleasant company of which he used to 
 speak ? 
 
 He might have been less an exile if he had 
 stayed in England, and nearer to his old home, 
 talking and dreaming of it, and turning the earth 
 in an English garden. 
 
 [106 J 
 
SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 
 
 /^F all the figures of speech which the Bible has 
 ^^ made most familiar in our mouths none is 
 stranger than the Lamb of God. We have for- 
 gotten in it the literal meaning of lamb ; we have 
 forgotten the original Hebrew meaning of the 
 burnt offering of a lamb to God. That phrase has 
 been lifted far away from all that it once was, and 
 now, beautifully but strangely, it expresses for 
 us, through the gentleness of a timid and stupid 
 animal, the most courageous and wonderful 
 gentleness in the world. 
 
 Language is full of these words that lead 
 double lives. It is indeed one of the great proofs 
 that words do indeed live. Those who work with 
 them work with living things. Let us remember 
 this and use them with reverence. Neither wood 
 nor stone, gold, nor the richest colour, nor any 
 other of the things that men use in their arts is 
 living but only words. 
 
 If one wanted any other proof that words are 
 living things it is that the language is full of dead 
 
 [107] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 words, words that men have killed by using them 
 too much, or by misusing them. But many of 
 them get no rest even in death, for men who do 
 not know that they are dead — since they never 
 realised that they could live — drag their corpses 
 about and hang them up on their sentences, as 
 savages decorate their huts with scalps and bones. 
 
 And we all take up our pens, and order the 
 words out, and turn them and twist them, and 
 hustle and push them, until we have them where 
 we think that they should be. We even play 
 tricks with them, and, in our assurance, tell them 
 to mean things that they never meant before. 
 And these words that we so lightly use were living 
 centuries before us, and will be living long after 
 we are gone — long after what we did with them, 
 whether good or bad, has been forgotten. They 
 are living things. Associations have gathered 
 about them. Great men have used them, and 
 they have lived on enriched by that companion- 
 ship. They have memories fuller than the mem- 
 ory of any man. To those who have the ears 
 they speak of a thousand things that they know 
 and of a thousand places where they have been. 
 
 We pick up this or that piece of stuff and say, 
 "This was part of the dress of Queen Elizabeth. 
 How strange to think that she actually wore it! 
 
 [io8] 
 
SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 
 
 It makes one realise that she was a living woman 
 more than all the history books." Or we look 
 round a panelled room, and murmur, "What a 
 funny old bed. There were no spring mattresses 
 in those days, but how wonderful to think that 
 Charles I. actually slept in it. He must have 
 looked out of this window standing where we are 
 now before he went down to breakfast — ^but 
 perhaps they didn't have breakfast then. Really 
 one wouldn't be surprised to see him come in at 
 that door." Or we stand in front of a Crusader's 
 sword : "To think that perhaps this black mark is 
 the blood of a man who died centuries ago. This 
 does make one feel the past. I wish they did not 
 say we are not to touch." 
 
 But no one ever thinks in this way of words 
 or remembers how old they are, or treats them as 
 living things, things which are not forbidden to 
 him to touch, but which he may use, and which 
 unite him with many centuries, and with great 
 men long since dead. No man has ever said to 
 another, "Sir, that word you have just spoken 
 (though you have not used it in quite the right 
 sense) gave much delight to Chaucer, You have 
 only to see how he used it here and used it there, 
 to know that he must have loved the very sound 
 of it." Or, " Speak that word with some rever- 
 
 [109] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 ence. You can see, reading it in such a play, that 
 it was like a trumpet to Shakespeare. It stirred 
 him to the heart. When he wrote it down he was 
 looking out across all England, and remembering 
 his love for the fields and woods and river of his 
 own home. He saw men going out to die for her. 
 He must have felt, for that moment when he 
 wrote it, as if his quill feathered an arrow which 
 he was fitting to a long bow. Do not use that 
 word ignobly. It may be a poor thing to you, but 
 it has lived greatly." 
 
 Though we do not speak in this way, nor 
 remember the history of words ; nor think of them 
 as uniting us to our past ; nor feel that great men 
 live in them, as much as in the clothes they wore 
 or the swords they carried or the rooms where 
 they slept, yet unconsciously we are under the 
 influence of their rich companionships. These 
 indeed do change them. So that not only may 
 the same word mean entirely different things and 
 we not feel it strange, but the very sound of it 
 be changed to our ears, and, according to its 
 meaning, be noble or mean, beautiful or ugly. 
 It is only the very childish or very primitive 
 mind which feels it comic that one word should 
 mean two different things, or be reminded of the 
 one when he hears the other. 
 
 [no] 
 
SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 
 
 So it is with this strange word "lamb." I still 
 have a well-inked school-book called "Chosen 
 English" in which, above the essay on Chimney 
 Sweepers, some unknown hand wrote, after the 
 word "Lamb," "And Mint Sauce." I believe 
 that I was annoyed at the time; for that essay, 
 with its rich and coloured quaintness, was a new 
 country of words for me; but now I treasure the 
 book for the sake of that annotation. 
 
 Lambs of the flock, lamb and mint sauce, 
 Charles Lamb, the Lamb of God — there is no 
 word in all the language so modestly born, that 
 has lived such a variety of wonderful lives and 
 has been so enriched and ennobled by its past. 
 
 Yet there is another reason why that last and 
 most singular phrase, the Lamb of God, might 
 suddenly and fantastically be chosen by a mind 
 which knew nothing of its past, to describe a 
 gentle God come to earth among men. For liter- 
 ally, as one looks at a flock of sheep on the 
 Downs, it might be something come from the sky. 
 There is nothing on earth more like the gentle, 
 wandering, white clouds of summer. So do the 
 sheep wander across the green curves of the 
 Downs which are as smooth as the hollows of the 
 sky above. They move exactly like the summer 
 clouds, never still yet never hurrying, always 
 
 [III] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 changing yet always the same, dividing, uniting, 
 wandering on, as gentle and unconcerned as a 
 cloud, until they slip over the crest of a hill and 
 are gone, as if, like a cloud, the sun had drawn 
 them away. And the grey sheep-dogs pass in 
 and out among them, moving them this way and 
 that, turning them and guiding them, all uncon- 
 scious, like little puffs of dark wind blowing 
 through the clouds. 
 
 On this day that I have in mind we were com- 
 ing down one of the deep coombes above Firle, 
 where the chalk path went between banks of my 
 lady's bedstraw, and in the fields that filled the 
 bottom of the hollow was a shepherd with his 
 flock. The sheep were gathered in a dark patch, 
 rather deep in growth, and the shepherd stood 
 beyond, an old man who moved very stiff and 
 slow. Then his high harsh, and, as it seemed, 
 scarcely human voice came up to us, and sud- 
 denly his dog had split the flock, as the wind will 
 suddenly split the clouds on a stormy day right 
 through to the sun. 
 
 Sheep feed so quietly, move so suddenly when 
 the dog moves, and stop so abruptly when he has 
 passed, that they seem to have a very great 
 speed, and this change from utter peace to fu- 
 rious movement, and back to peace again, is as 
 
 [112] 
 
SHEEP ON THE DOWNS 
 
 awesome as the sudden coining and going of the 
 wind round a house on a still night. The dog 
 seems to run with such savagery, the sheep to 
 fly with such terror, and then — ^the dog is sitting 
 quietly on his haunches, and the sheep are feed- 
 ing again as though through the whole day they 
 had not moved more than a step at a time, nor 
 lifted their heads from cropping. It is like the 
 beginning of a sudden tragedy, and the stillness 
 afterwards, but the tragic act itself left out. And 
 all the while the master of the show stood at the 
 back not moving, and we heard the high distant 
 sound of his voice but no intelligible words. 
 
 Then he counted his flock, and the dog gath- 
 ered it together again, and it drifted away until a 
 curve of the hillside hid it, the dog moving like a 
 shadow on the turf and the sheep like a wander- 
 ing cloud. 
 
 ["3l 
 
ROADS OF WAR 
 
 IT was in a mining village in the north of 
 ■'• France, and troops were going through, 
 stumbling and splashing and singing and then 
 falling suddenly into silence. The road was 
 horribly worn, with deep holes full of black liquid 
 mud, yet on this windy autumn afternoon it was 
 a strange and wonderful road. Just beyond the 
 village it rose a little from the flatness and made 
 a firm ridge against the sky, and along the ridge 
 and across the road the rain was blowing in 
 sudden silver gusts. When they passed the air 
 was very clear, and it looked as though from that 
 road, ending abrupt and clean at the top of the 
 ridge, one could step straight into the clouds. 
 
 I had been watching the road for some time 
 when I saw the Frenchman standing close under 
 the wall of a house across the village street. I 
 saw him when he waved to one of our men. He 
 looked to be over middle age — of solid and 
 rounded figure with a heavy spade beard — but 
 when I crossed and spoke to him, and he turned, 
 
 [115] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 I saw only the youth of his eyes, and, as he spoke, 
 of his vivacious hands. 
 
 "What am I doing," said he, "in the wind and 
 the rain ? I watch the troops and the road. I am 
 a lover of roads," and he smiled. Then he drew 
 himself up. " I have worked on the roads," he 
 said, " I was of those who worked on the road that 
 saved France ;" and at that he crossed himself. 
 
 A battalion went by and we two stood watch- 
 ing it. As the last company passed over the 
 ridge the rain blew down again and hid the men. 
 It came with the suddenness of a door closing 
 behind them. 
 
 "A few miles, and the road ends, is it not so?" 
 said the Frenchman. 
 
 "Yes," said I. "Before very long they'll go 
 underground." 
 
 "And yet," he said, "to look at it you would 
 think it never ended, that road." 
 
 The rain gust had passed and the ridge stood 
 up against the low clouds. I was thinking of 
 those roads across the Downs that you see many 
 miles away, white in the green turf, that seem to 
 end suddenly at the steps of the sky. But the 
 Frenchman was thinking of other things. 
 
 "You might cross Europe by that road," he 
 said. "Such roads are great roads. No one 
 
 [116] 
 
ROADS OF WAR 
 
 knows how far one may go by them ; even the sea 
 cannot stop them. Your old roads in England, 
 are they not after all ours ? The Romans made 
 them for you. They are the roads of Gaul that 
 went on and crossed England as if your channel 
 had not been there." 
 
 He raised his eyebrows as if he were waiting to 
 see what I should say to that. 
 
 "But there are others," I said; "some that 
 were there even before your roadmakers came 
 from Gaul." And I told him of the old turf road 
 from Winchester to Canterbury and then of a 
 warm summer road lifting and falling over the 
 feet of the Downs, a rambling, winding, beautiful 
 road, with red villages and beech trees and tower- 
 ing hedges all flowers — such hedges as do not 
 grow in France. As I talked I could almost smell 
 its clean and kindly dust. 
 
 The Frenchman was staring up that straight 
 road as I talked. When I finished he turned and 
 looked at me, an odd look that was half amuse- 
 ment, half surprise. 
 
 "Ah — it is so that you think of roads," said 
 he; "but you must understand that we have 
 suffered on the roads, we French." 
 
 He paused for a moment, as if searching for 
 what he wanted to say. 
 
 ["7] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 "Look," he went on; "they are to us what the 
 sea is to you. We have laid our bones at the road- 
 side. I could tell you tales of the roads. Three 
 generations of us have tales to tell of them. 
 
 "When I was little and he was very old, my 
 grandfather used to tell me a tale of the road — 
 the road from Brussels to Charleroi, the last road 
 that the Great Army travelled. He was only a 
 boy when he went by it, but it was in his memory 
 after he had forgotten nearly everything else. 
 He would tell me how he left the road, worn out, 
 and lay for the night in a field ; and all that night 
 he heard the army hurrying by on that road. 
 'Like the noise of a river in flood,' he would say, 
 and I could see his old hands tremble 'like the 
 Isere' — ^for that was the river I knew. It is 
 always grey and tumbling. He told the tale 
 alvvays in the same way — ^for he was then a very 
 old man — ^until I saw that road as half road, half 
 river, as a road with a river pouring down it — ^I 
 knew not what — and men were struggling in it, 
 as once I had seen a man struggle in the Isere 
 under the white bridges. But that road haunted 
 me! 
 
 "And my father would tell his tale of the 
 roads. They would talk together, he and old 
 grandfather, and he would shake his head, for 
 
 [ii8] 
 
ROADS OF WAR 
 
 the road he knew was from Metz to Verdun. He 
 had seen the Emperor ride out on that road from 
 Gravelotte, on his way back to Verdun, and when 
 he saw his face — so he would tell the story — ^he 
 said, ' It is finished.' All France believed then in 
 Bazaine, but when he saw the Emperor's face 
 that day he said, ' It is finished.' And that was 
 before Rezonville was fought. He would tell us 
 of that battle. He would tell us how they fought 
 for that road, the great road from Metz to Ver- 
 dun, lest the Prussians should cross it and cut 
 them off from France, and how in the afternoon 
 they drove the Prussians back across that road, 
 and had them beaten, if only they had known. 
 
 "'If only we had known,' he would say sadly, 
 and then his face would grow eager. * But French 
 armies will go again by that road from Verdun 
 to Metz,' he would say. ' Do not forget, you may 
 go with them.' And he would describe a little 
 wood with wide clearings, by the roadside where 
 they drove the Germans out. (It was there that 
 he killed his German, fighting hand to hand.) 
 He would describe it very carefully that I, when 
 I went by that road to capture Metz, might know 
 it again. 
 
 "And so when I shovelled there on the road up 
 to Verdun, I thought of those two and of their 
 
 [1191 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 tales of the roads, and of their pride in me, could 
 they have seen me; and I would say, 'This is the 
 road to Metz, one must look beyond.' When all 
 the world spoke of Verdun I looked beyond. I 
 remembered that this also was the road to 
 Metz." 
 
 He stopped, and we stepped close in under the 
 wall as a column of ponderous hooded motor 
 lorries went through the village and over the 
 ridge. The Frenchman watched them with a 
 kindling eye until the last had gone, then he 
 turned to me and smiled, brushing the rain from 
 his beard. 
 
 "Monsieur will understand," he said, "why I 
 am a lover of roads." 
 
 [120] 
 
THE SPRING RIVER 
 
 FOR more than a week the mill at the weir had 
 stood idle, cut off from the stream. The 
 river was moving too full and strong for its old 
 joints. It was at the level of the fields, the beds 
 of reeds were hidden; the willow trees dipped 
 deep in its flood; the middle of its course was 
 marked continually with ragged drifts of foam, 
 and its waters fell across the weir with the long 
 vibrating sound of the distant sea. They fell, 
 smoothly, unhurriedly, in a strong clean curve as 
 of steel ; and then at the bottom they broke into 
 water again and their foam rose, like little angry 
 heads, and hit back hurriedly at the weir. 
 
 In that full smooth curve of water there was a 
 spell — ^not the evil spell that the hurrying 
 unending movement of water, always changing 
 and always the same can sometimes put on the 
 senses of men, luring their minds away until it 
 draws them down into it to their destruction — 
 but the good spell of a thing that holds the senses 
 and mind together. It was the double spell of a 
 
 [lai] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 thing living and moving and yet at the same time 
 fixed in a beautiful shape. That curve of water 
 was as full and complete and unchanging as a 
 great curve of the green Downs, or the line of a 
 statue, but it moved more quickly than the eye 
 could follow. 
 
 The spring flood of the river is not so beautiful 
 nor so mysterious as the autumn flood. In the 
 still autumn the river is a mirror of lovely things. 
 It is deep-bosomed and the colour of old silver. 
 It flows slowly, so brimming full that its centre 
 seems higher than its low banks. Its willows are 
 turned to gold; the green beeches carry golden 
 crests, and everything — ^trees and fields, hedges 
 and reeds, all the rich and coloured ripeness of 
 autumn — is thrown into its waters with not a line 
 broken nor a colour dimmed. At every bend of 
 its winding course its banks meet in the reflection. 
 You seem to pass not along your familiar river, 
 but from pool to hidden pool ; and as you enter 
 each your way closes mysteriously behind. 
 
 But this spring flood was a hurrying of brown 
 and naked waters in a brown world. Everything 
 was brown, from the earth-stained river to the 
 ploughed fields deep coloured with the rains, and 
 the branches of the high trees. It was the last 
 brown look of the world before the green came. 
 
 [122] 
 
THE SPRING RIVER 
 
 The winds had driven the mists away into the far 
 distance, and in their place was the pale and 
 wandering sunlight of spring, coming, going, and 
 coming again, as the wind blew 
 
 To the bare brown branches of the hedges a few 
 briar leaves still clung, yellow as parchment and 
 crimson rimmed, the last forgotten flags still 
 flying for the old year, dead three months before. 
 But in their sheltered under-hoUows the green 
 was already coming, and all along the river banks 
 the bare willow branches were like soft brown 
 mists with a green shadow lurking in them. 
 
 Across that brown world the wind galloped, 
 carrying clouds and sunshine with it. The 
 clouds, as they passed, turned their black faces 
 to the earth and threw back a winter darkness 
 into the empty branches of the trees, and the 
 wandering sunshine lit on those green shadows 
 as they waited for their time. 
 
 But for the moment the world belonged to the 
 hurrying river. Its banks and its trees no longer 
 hid it. One could see it far across the fields. In 
 the distance were curves and long reaches which 
 no one seemed to have known to be there. In 
 some places it flowed high and clear, in others it 
 was a brown mist. In others, it had poured out, 
 filled a field with silver and then hurried on. In 
 
 [123] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 a little it would sink and sink again beneath the 
 red sand and deep green eaves of its banks, and 
 the reeds would spring up, and the willows and 
 the grasses bend over to hide its waters; and it 
 would flow on, easy and unconcerned, and care 
 nothing whether it was seen or hidden. 
 
 But now it was in front of all the other things 
 of the world. The rains had brought the new life 
 to it, while they still waited. It would be seen. 
 And every little stream and every ditch had the 
 same ambition. They too were swollen with 
 importance and sudden waters. For a little time 
 they too were rivers. They had lain muddy and 
 stagnant. Leaves and branches and all the dead 
 things of the banks had fallen into them, and 
 stayed there rotting. Their waters had grown 
 tainted, with no power to cover the dead things 
 or to sweep them away. And then the rains 
 came, and they were full of fierce and living 
 waters. They had at last the power to move, a 
 current that could beat on the banks and strike 
 up a song. So they went, lapping against the 
 drain pipes, as the rivers lap round their bridges, 
 sweeping in sudden musical rushes against the 
 submerged twigs, whirling in gay eddies and 
 little dancing hollows of water. To them also 
 this sudden life had cojne while the rest of the 
 
 1 124] 
 
THE SPRING RIVER 
 
 world still waited. It was as short as a gnat's 
 life, but as gay. These ditches were the dancing, 
 singing insects of this time when the world waited 
 for spring. In a very little while the waters that 
 filled them would have gone as suddenly as they 
 had come. They would dry in the heat and be 
 still again, and the living gnats would dance 
 above them in the sunshine 
 
 When the half gods go 
 The gods arrive. 
 
 But for this little while it was they that lived, 
 and danced, and sung. 
 
 li«5l 
 
THE COUNTRY 'BUS 
 
 IT was on this day, a warm day in July, that I 
 swore to abjure from that time forward all 
 such phrases as steam-power, petrol-power, and 
 electric-power, as phrases made by a mechanical 
 age to its false glorification, as phrases misusing 
 a great word, and harmful to whatever is beauti- 
 ful and truthful in our speech. 
 
 Consider the things that we burn to serve our 
 different ends. Of them all wood is the greatest. 
 It is the oldest, by some thousands of years, the 
 most kindly and the most beautiful ; and men by 
 burning it have done wonderful things. It was 
 by wood, when they first set light to it, that they 
 first raised themselves a little above the beasts — 
 there was power indeed! — and to this day the 
 smell and sound of a wood fire fill men with a 
 happiness which they cannot explain. Yet no 
 one has ever spoken of wood-power. Men have 
 called it a fuel from the beginning to this day. 
 Why should petrol have a greater name ? Let us 
 keep that word " power" for the things that move 
 
 [127] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 the souls of men, and call a fuel a fuel however 
 fast we may travel by it. Some day, when the 
 world is cured of our particular follies, a wise 
 critic will put his finger on that word "power," 
 and explain our age by it, pointing out how we 
 gave it to all the wrong things. 
 
 Having talked of these false powers like the 
 rest, I saw suddenly the folly and the vulgarity 
 and the falsehood of it on this afternoon in July, 
 standing by the main road from Salisbury to 
 Blandford which goes by way of Tarrant Hinton, 
 leaving ToUard Royal on the right and on the 
 left Gussage St. Michael, Gussage All Saints, and 
 Wimborne St. Giles, places which I have never 
 seen, but whose names upon the map enrich the 
 countryside. We had gone down by the side of a 
 British village, under the crest of the Downs on 
 their southern slope, where now only wild thorns 
 grow, and by the chase where the deer-stealers 
 used to lie hid in the trees, and across a field 
 which of all the English fields I have ever seen 
 did most deserve that phrase "painted with 
 delight." Its rich and ancient turf, that can 
 never have known the plough, blossomed, like 
 triumphant youth, with thyme and trefoil and 
 rock roses, and its wild strawberries were in full 
 fruit. Purple and orange, blood-red and the pale 
 
 [128] 
 
THE COUNTRY 'BUS 
 
 gold of the stars — ^it was painted these colours 
 across four splendid acres of delight. 
 
 At the bottom of the field was a causeway, 
 which once had carried a Roman road. There it 
 was, clear, solid, not to be mistaken, raised a foot 
 or perhaps two, above the fields. The turf now 
 covered it and the rabbits burrowed in its $ides, 
 nor had anyone marched by it for many hun- 
 dreds of years, yet in its age and decay it was 
 still masterful. For among that open turf, with- 
 out tree or hedge, one stood upon it — and how 
 much more would not one have marched along 
 it.? — as if one were high above the surrounding 
 country and commanded it all. 
 
 Beside it ran the modern road, smooth and 
 beautifully clean, powdered with fine white 
 stones that glittered a little in the sun, showing 
 no mark of the rare traffic which travelled by it, 
 pressing a few inches below the level of the turf 
 on either side. It looked like a carpet which, 
 that very morning, had been laid, fresh and new, 
 across the fields, and by evening would be rolled 
 up again and carried away, leaving the grasses 
 beneath it to raise their heads in the dews of 
 night, and the ghosts to travel by that ancient 
 causeway of a thousand years. 
 
 To us in that contented mellow time of mid- 
 9 [129] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 afternoon, as we stood between the two roads, 
 feeling the influences which lived mysteriously in 
 that old turf, came the country bus, lifting slowly 
 over the full curve of the white road. It was 
 driven — ^let it be said for the last time — ^by petrol 
 power. But what power had petrol over it? 
 Upon its high roof, set round with a small iron 
 rail, its passengers stiffly sat on stools. Their 
 multitudinous parcels — for it was market day — 
 lay round their feet, and the ladder by which they 
 had climbed was strapped to the bus's side. Up 
 the short and easy hill it came, at a staid four, or 
 it may have been five, miles an hour, and we 
 laughed aloud with delight to see it, for it had 
 an air that is not to be described of rustic 
 and ancient things. It was a revelation of the 
 enduring spirit triumphant over all material 
 change. 
 
 Along the road there came a puff of dust to- 
 wards it, and a motor bicycle went by. In that 
 magic moment there would have been no sur- 
 prise if the bicycle had suddenly stopped and a 
 masked figure in its saddle held up the driver of 
 the bus with a pistol. Had the bus itself come 
 rolling and rumbling along the Roman causeway 
 instead of the modern road, it would have seemed 
 more natural. It was as if petrol power — ^the 
 
 [130I 
 
THE COUNTRY 'BUS 
 
 phrase shall be used no more — instead of sweep- 
 ing us onward into a glorious future of liquid and 
 electric fuels, had suddenly gone all astray and 
 carried us into past centuries. Tom Jones might 
 have hailed that bus from the roadside, as he 
 journeyed from Gloucester to London, and never 
 noticed that no horses drew it. Mr. Wardle 
 might have entertained luncheon party after 
 luncheon party on its roof and never realised 
 that he sat above an internal combustion engine. 
 For in that motor bus still travelled the spirit of 
 all country coaches as it must have been since 
 roads were first made and wheels to run upon 
 them; and neither steam nor petrol nor any 
 such thing has had or ever can have any power 
 over it. 
 
 Someday airplanes will have taken the place 
 of all the buses, but still that indomitable spirit 
 of the country road will travel on whatever 
 machine shall fly from Salisbury to Blandford, 
 going by way of Tarrant Hinton, and leaving 
 ToUard Royal on the right and on the left Gus- 
 sage St. Michael, Gussage All Saints, and Wim- 
 borne St. Giles 
 
 I can see it. It will be such an ancient, comic, 
 rustic thing, lumbering above the road, that still 
 Tom Jones might hail it without surprise, or 
 
 [131] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 Mr. Wardle unpack pigeon pie and lobsters sit- 
 ting on its wings. 
 
 Turning we went back across the Roman road, 
 where already the rabbits were sitting at their 
 ease in the evening sun. We went solemnly and 
 with a strange content. When the bus had 
 crossed the hill and we had laughed at it, we felt 
 as if, in that brief moment, we had slipped from 
 the power of time and seen the borderlands be- 
 yond. For what, after all, can Eternity be, if it 
 is not to have all the new things without losing 
 or changing any of the old ? 
 
 1 132] 
 
THE ENCHANTED FOREST 
 
 * I 'O Keats it was full of fruits and paths and 
 * ferns, and rushes and ivy banks; and to 
 Coleridge it was of cedar trees; and to Shake- 
 speare of oak and thorn and elm and all the 
 flowers of English field and hedge, and Midsum- 
 mer in it came in May; and to Lucian it was of 
 pines and cypresses growing out of the sea, and 
 his ship sailed over its leafy tops; and to Virgil 
 it was of pines and great holm oaks and there he 
 found the enchanted golden bough, growing on 
 an oak tree like the mistletoe ; and to the Brothers 
 Grimm it was full of quaint and homely things 
 like the tree that opened with a golden key and 
 had a basin of bread and milk inside — ^though 
 what the tree was they do not say; and to Hans 
 Andersen it stood high above the sea, and the old 
 oak tree in it dreamed dreams. 
 
 Such a forest, so wonderful and so diverse, to 
 be recognised by so many different things, cannot 
 be hard to find, and many times we two thought 
 that we had reached its borderland or were on a 
 
 [133] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 road that would lead us to it. Once it was in a 
 
 little wood of dead fir trees standing forlorn on 
 
 the open Downs with the trees so close together 
 
 that one could scarcely go into it ; and within it 
 
 was as dark and still as a shuttered room. Once 
 
 it was in a wanton and beautiful lane which 
 
 started from nowhere on the side of Windover 
 
 Hill, and was so deep in tall grasses and so roofed 
 
 and arched with bushes that it was less like a 
 
 road than a twisting green pipe, leading down 
 
 and down until we thought that it must take us 
 
 at last into the very heart of ancient forests, 
 
 into 
 
 Gloomy shades, sequestered deep. 
 Where no man went. 
 
 But instead it brought us out to a plain high 
 road. And many times we thought we must be 
 near it when we were walking on the Downs 
 where the great trees have come up from the 
 weald, and stand along each side of the old turf 
 road, so that you look always downwards into 
 the woods, among the olive trunks of the beeches 
 where the air is like still green water, and down 
 long low aisles of hazel bushes with little un- 
 coloured Gothic windows at the end. But the 
 enchanted forest was among none of these. 
 
 [134I 
 
THE ENCHANTED FOREST 
 
 Then one hot day in summer when the road- 
 side hedges were grey with dust, and the air was 
 shimmering, and the chalk track up the Downs 
 was more dazzHng in the sun than snow, we 
 climbed from the weald until at last we saw the 
 sea, not cool and green and full of delight but like 
 a great grey plain with a hard glitter of gold 
 under the sun. So, longing for coolness and for 
 rest, we threw ourselves down on the turf where a 
 little wind moved, and lost all the world but the 
 grass heads nodding above our faces and above 
 them the sky. In that place, where the nearest 
 tree was miles away and the tallest bush was no 
 taller than a man, I found the enchanted forest. 
 
 The sun was hot on my eyelids, and I turned 
 over to escape it, pressing my face deep down to 
 the grass roots where, even on this hot day, the 
 sun's rays had not pierced and there lingered 
 still an odorous dampness. The grasses seemed 
 to rise enormously above me, standing against 
 the sky. In that drowsy dreaming heat, all of 
 my body beyond my shoulder was asleep and 
 forgotten. I lived only in one ear, pressed deep 
 into the sweet moist turf, listening to the little 
 sounds that ran softly through it, and one eye 
 beneath a flickering lid that peered through the 
 undergrowth. I was sunk deep in this little 
 
 [135] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 forest where the ants and spiders can find shade, 
 looking up at the slender grass stems which 
 seemed so tall that only those with wings could 
 ever reach their nodding heads. 
 
 It was an ant that I saw first, travelling 
 through the forest with a load as large as herself, 
 toiling up and down over the pathless, terrible 
 tangle of the green grass blades. It was like a 
 jungle laced across and across with creepers; it 
 was like that enchanted forest in a Russian fairy 
 tale which grew from a comb so that the witch 
 was caught in its twisting branches and, fight 
 as she would, could not go on. But the ant 
 struggled up and tumbled down, never forsaking 
 her load, sometimes pushing it up before her, 
 sometimes moving backwards as she climbed, 
 and drawing it after her. I seemed, as I watched 
 her on this courageous journey, to be no bigger 
 than she. I felt, through her, the awful toils of 
 that jungle below the grass stems. High above 
 me a fly sat with diamond wings. He could fly 
 above it all ; it had no toils for him ; and on an- 
 other stem, nearly at the tufted head, sat a snail. 
 The slender stem bent a little under his weight. 
 As I looked up at him from the depths below, 
 where I stood and the ant struggled, I felt for 
 him an envy and an admiration such as I had 
 
 fi36] 
 
THE ENCHANTED FOREST 
 
 never thought before that a snail could inspire. 
 He had no wings to carry him out of that jungle. 
 He was not better equipped than the ant and I. 
 He had nothing but a firm grip and a determined 
 heart, and there was he at the top of the highest 
 tree, far above the undergrowth, sitting where 
 the winged things came. 
 
 I had turned towards the ant again in her 
 struggles when suddenly there came a flash of 
 darkness on us two below as if a cloud had passed 
 above the forest, and I looked up to see that a 
 butterfly had settled on a grass's head near the 
 snail. That moment's darkness was thrown by 
 her wings before she closed them. Away beyond 
 her was a great scarlet circle like the setting of 
 some monstrous sun above the tree tops. 
 
 All was still for a time in that enchanted place. 
 The butterfly and the snail and the fly sat on 
 their tree tops. The ant had dropped her burden 
 and returned for it. The undergrowth was full of 
 the wet sweet smell of earth and of grass. Then, 
 far away, beyond the great red sun and the edges 
 of the world, came a strange shrill song, louder 
 than all the winds. It lasted for a long time ris- 
 mg and falling, and at last it ceased — ^to be 
 followed by a more terrible thing, for through the 
 forest came a great green creature, not climbing 
 
 h37] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 over its undergrowth, as the ant climbed, nor 
 trampling it down as it walked, but in enormous 
 leaps that lifted it over glade and thicket and the 
 high tree tops. Its last leap carried it right across 
 the face of the red sun, and it looked as if it were 
 passing clean out of the forest into the sky, but it 
 came to earth, crouching on the tangled under- 
 growth, and the song burst out again filling all 
 the forest with its noise. 
 
 Then the song stopped — suddenly stopped, but 
 the great green thing still crouched, and in the 
 awesome sinister silence which followed that 
 song I started, and sat up. 
 
 I was in my own world again. It was there 
 unaltered, as when I had lain down, and all 
 around was the curving sunlit turf. 
 
 I looked down at the turf where I sat. A single 
 poppy was growing just within reach of my hand, 
 and I saw a tiny snail at the top of a stem of 
 grass. As I looked a grasshopper jumped before 
 me and disappeared. 
 
 Away to the southwards was the grey sea, and 
 northwards were the dark woods of the weald. I 
 thought of them as they might be, in monstrous 
 dreams, with an undergrowth so tangled and 
 thick that no man could force his way through 
 it; with birds as large as clouds settling on their 
 
 1 138] 
 
THE ENCHANTED FOREST 
 
 branches, with strange creatures in shells slowly 
 climbing their trunks; with enormous green 
 dragons leaping through them higher than their 
 tree tops, and singing terrible triumphant songs 
 that shook them as if the'"' had been reeds. 
 
 I139I 
 
THE FISHERMEN OF AMBERLEY 
 
 /^F their craft I know nothing, nor of its 
 ^-^ pleasures. There have been fishermen in 
 the family but I am not of these. I understand 
 the delights of walking and sleeping in the open 
 air, but of that subtle, and, as I can well believe 
 it to be, that delectable state between the two 
 extremes in which fishermen seem to live, I know 
 nothing. I have no right to speak of them at all, 
 except that I love them. I love them as I love 
 the windmills, and the little solitary trees on the 
 Downs, and the cows in the fields and the golden 
 ricks. I love them as part of the landscape. 
 They are not so beautiful as the willows, which, 
 like them, dip delicate branches into the stream, 
 but, like the willows, they breathe that perfect 
 content of slow, silver streams and water mead- 
 ows where the cattle feed and the gentle twilight 
 of summer evening. There they sit. . . . 
 They are common men as I. They are dressed as 
 I. If I met them in the streets of London I 
 might sometimes think them stout and unlovely, 
 
 {141I 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 but now they are changed. It is as if that line 
 which they hold above the stream were some 
 fairy root by which they were planted at the 
 river's side, drawing up through it the still con- 
 tentment of the grasses and the flowers. 
 
 We used to meet them on Sunday mornings on 
 the Fishermen's Train to Amberley which 
 started when London had scarcely begun to 
 wake, and the early .stillness of Victoria was un- 
 disturbed except by the gathering of these men 
 from their many homes, each setting out for the 
 meadows of the Arun with his rod in its case and 
 at his side his great basket, of which I have never 
 been able to determine, either going or returning, 
 whether it was full or empty. We alone, carrying 
 walking-sticks, were not of the brotherhood. 
 
 From the Station of Amberley we would pour 
 out with them into the road, a little crowd all 
 bristling with fishing rods, like a dock-side with 
 masts. And then, in a moment, we would be 
 alone. They had turned suddenly downwards 
 and we had turned up — ^up beneath a great hedge 
 of privet, hazel, and clematis, walking on turf that 
 was all purple with thyme, and giving thanks 
 that so few men, even when they are not fisher- 
 men, will go up hill when they can go down. 
 Giving thanks I say — ^for fishermen are still only 
 
 [142] 
 
THE FISHERMEN OF AMBERLEY 
 
 men until they are dispersed along their river 
 bank, immobile, contented, rooted deep in the 
 stream. That path would take us up until, far 
 away, we could feel that dim emptiness which 
 was the sea, and behind us was sombre Parham 
 wood with its long grey house, half hidden, and 
 its lake which seemed on the edge of brimming 
 over, and beyond it the grey towers of Amberley, 
 and one curve of the Arun gleaming among the 
 meadows where, unseen, the fishermen now sat. 
 
 So in solitude we went all day, by open turf 
 and twisted thorn, until at evening we would find 
 a road, and turn again towards Amberley, the 
 chill east and the coming of night behind us, 
 while in front the sunset blazed like a noble fire 
 lit to welcome the gods as they came home, and 
 the meadows of Arun were a great plain before 
 us, full of loneliness and enchantment. 
 
 And then, at the last turn of the road round a 
 shoulder of the Downs, we would see below us, 
 not gods going home, but all the fishermen. 
 They came, climbing up very slowly, out of the 
 deep fields, and stepping along the road, and 
 across the grey four-spanned bridge of Arun, 
 with such an air of ripe leisure and contentment 
 as is not to be described. Then they gathered 
 round the door of the Bridge Inn. Above them 
 
 [143] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 the train waited in the station — their train — as 
 if it would wait on until the last and slowest of 
 them had set down his tankard and had come. 
 
 There is no sight in the world — ^not cows as 
 they go in to milking, nor the smoke of cottages 
 rising in the quiet air at dusk, nor children sleep- 
 ing when they are tired with happiness, nor men 
 at ease with their pipes when they have eaten 
 at the end of a hard day — no sight so full of the 
 ease of this world, of bodies satisfied and minds 
 at peace, as that slow ingathering of the fisher- 
 men of Amberley on a summer evening. 
 
 [144] 
 
THE MAGICIAN OF THE HILLS 
 
 * I 'HE rain had begun again before we left the 
 •*■ road with its low walls of grey stone. By 
 the time that we had crossed the first field and 
 reached the stream which we meant to follow 
 up the valley, it was falling with a steadily 
 increasing stroke. We pushed on. The hills 
 stood high about us. The valley was deep and 
 sheltered. Its heavy wet grass pressed against 
 our knees -as we moved toilsomely through it, 
 and the clumps of heather shook the water over 
 our feet. The disappearing hills and the still air 
 itself seemed to be turning to grey water. We 
 no longer felt the rain as a separate thing. A 
 wet and breathless heat wrapped us about. 
 We panted for dry cool air, and the only good 
 thing, in all that clammy prison where we 
 struggled, was the stream. Its cool and tum- 
 bling brown water seemed altogether different 
 from the grey rain which choked us, until we 
 almost felt that we should breathe again if only 
 we plunged our faces into its pools. 
 
 [ H5 ] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 We struggled on for two hours, leaving the 
 stream, climbing over turf that was covered with 
 broken boulders, and ploughing our way up a 
 little path of screes. So at last we came to the 
 head of the pass where great rocks stood firm in 
 the turf and the moss ; and there the world sud- 
 denly and splendidly changed. We met and 
 knew the rain again. It no longer wrapped us 
 round, grey, silent and stifling, but came at us 
 with quick cold strokes that stirred us like a song. 
 For the wind was behind it. He filled us with 
 life. 
 
 He is the great magician of the hills. Without 
 him that day had been nothing but the blank, 
 unchanging wetness of the sky lying on a dreary 
 sodden earth. With him, blowing his unseen life 
 through it all, the sky and the earth were magic- 
 ally changed. Everything in those wet hills and 
 the clouds above them, seemed, as he passed, 
 to take shape, to put on a strange half-human 
 life, to move as if it came from some other world 
 beyond the hills; and then, as the wind fell, its 
 life went out. 
 
 We crossed the pass, and climbed by a broken 
 path up the side of the valley beyond. Across 
 it we could see the rain moving along the face of 
 the hill. It went in slender shadowy lines, one by 
 
 [146] 
 
THE MAGICIAN OF THE HILLS 
 
 one, that stopped and gathered in the valley end, 
 hiding the pass by which we had come. They 
 were like beautiful half-formed figures of night 
 coming out of the clouds. As they went so 
 statelily by, brushing the earth and turning its 
 colours grey, they might have been the ghosts of 
 the sunbeams. 
 
 The wind blew, and the ghosts passed; and 
 other and stranger forms came up from the 
 valley — ^great lazy white clouds that seemed to 
 fondle the hills as they drifted by them ; and a line 
 of black cloud, with an edge straight as a sword, 
 and in its darkness a glow of bronze, a cloud like 
 the sinister, half-formed shape of an invading 
 army; and clouds that pushed grotesque heads 
 across the hills, like monsters coming out of the 
 fairy tales to burn whole valleys with their 
 breath. 
 
 All the clouds and the rain and the great bare 
 hills were as full of the life of that half-world 
 which lies between plants and men as are the 
 woods and the streams in the old tales. But 
 when the wind passed their life went out, and the 
 clouds and the rain melted once more into dismal 
 waters. Then he returned, gathering all the 
 clouds together, and the grey regiments of rain 
 broke out of them, sweeping across the hills, 
 
 [1471 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 while we bent to them, pushing sightless through 
 their ranks. 
 
 Even the little plants of the hillside were 
 changed by his coming. He blew through them 
 also a breath from a fairy world. The pale 
 rushes moved beautifully before him with a sud- 
 den glitter like a little water thrown through a 
 sunbeam. The brown tufts of grass bent stoical 
 heads, and let their ragged hairs go with his 
 blast, like patient horses, and the bracken as he 
 shook its fronds became suddenly human — a 
 crowd of flustered little people, rocking and 
 gesticulating with fear, brandishing arms in 
 comical despair. Then the wind passed; the 
 crowd had gone, and in its place were still, grace- 
 ful ferns gathering rain-pearls at the tops of their 
 fronds. 
 
 I would not exchange such a day — ^fuU of this 
 strange half-comical, half-magical life of the 
 clouds and the rain and the hillside, that comes 
 and goes with the wind like a ripple or a shadow — 
 for all the heat and colour of a clear sky, and the 
 wide, sun-dusty view of distant hills. 
 
 But suddenly — it was now the late afternoon — 
 the sun came out. At his touch all was changed 
 once more, and we with the rest. We came back 
 to this comfortable earth. We felt the warmth, 
 
 [148] 
 
THE MAGICIAN OF THE HILLS 
 
 luxuriously, for we had been wet and dried again 
 by the wind three or four times that day. Our 
 way was by a level valley. We were tired, and 
 yet we walked in an ease that, for the moment, 
 was more delightful even than physical rest. The 
 wind had gone, taking with him all the clouds. 
 The clear hills looked down very friendlily. The 
 musical noise of the streams, swelled with the 
 rains, rose more and more loudly in the still air. 
 All the wild magic of the morning had passed, 
 and in its place was a content of this earth. Our 
 bodies were happy in their weariness, knowing of 
 the rest to come. Our minds dreamed peacefully 
 in the sun. 
 
 [149] 
 
THE ADVENTURERS 
 
 ' I 'HERE were two of them, little green fellows, 
 *• swinging bravely above the dust of the 
 road. Peering close we could see that each hung 
 on a silver thread which seemed attached to 
 nothing but the grey air above. One hung his 
 full length. The other had curled himself up. 
 Sometimes they twirled giddily. Then they 
 would drop a little, but neither seemed in a hurry 
 to descend. They swung in the wind, and when 
 it came with a stronger puflf we would see them 
 for a moment at the beginning of a swift upward 
 curve before they were lost against the green of 
 the tree. They seemed to have been blown into 
 space or the upper leaves, but each time they 
 reappeared, hanging tranquilly above the road. 
 
 Several motor bicycles went by in a roar and 
 swirl of dust, and each time we stepped back 
 feeling sure that now the two adventurers had 
 been destroyed or had been whirled away on a 
 more terrible journey, but each time, as the dust 
 settled, we found them still secure in space. 
 
 [151] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 They and their invisible ladders were charmed; 
 nor did they seem in the least disturbed by these 
 devastating interruptions. They took it all in 
 the day's journey, as they spun their way to earth 
 from the branches of the oak. It is a bold thing 
 to come down from that peaceful green world into 
 the very middle of a main road on a summer 
 afternoon, but no doubt, like other travellers, 
 they went cheerfully, being ignorant of the 
 dangers about them. 
 
 As they came nearer to earth we stood close 
 above them, and the one, with that quickness to 
 seize an opportunity which we admire in all the 
 great adventurers, immediately made himself 
 secure by spinning a second thread from my 
 shoulder. Thence he descended to earth. The 
 other whirled furiously before us, as the wind 
 caught him, swept upwards in a glorious circle, 
 and then descending, came to rest on my finger. 
 He waved his two front legs languidly, and then 
 sank down, as it seemed to me, with the graceful 
 exhaustion of the trained performer. I laid him 
 among the grasses at the road side. The other 
 had already disappeared. 
 
 One does not commonly think of the cater- 
 pillar as a graceful thing of the air. He is a pest, 
 a furious eater. But when one comes on him 
 
 [152] 
 
THE ADVENTURERS 
 
 suddenly in the middle of so splendid and peril- 
 ous a journey one forgives him for some of the 
 many things that he has devoured. He may have 
 a voracious stomach, but he has also his spin- 
 neret. When you think of the leaves that he has 
 eaten to the ribs and the oak trees that he has 
 devastated, remember also this silver thread by 
 which he travels through space. No one who can 
 set out on such a journey is to be altogether 
 hated and despised. This adventurer, I thought, 
 must somewhere in literature be celebrated as 
 something more than a mere destroying insect, 
 and I went in search of whoever had written of 
 him worthily. First, in an old natural history 
 book I found, not a piece of prose but at least a 
 picture, the work of an artist whom the cater- 
 pillar, poor greedy grub, had moved to feelings of 
 awe and even fear. It was an old-fashioned book, 
 old enough, that is, to be illustrated not with 
 diagrams and plates but with real pictures, and 
 this picture showed the processional caterpillar 
 on the march. 
 
 It was night. In orderly ranks the caterpillars 
 descended a fir tree and crossed the ground 
 below. Their leader marched alone. Behind 
 him was a rank of two ; behind these were three ; 
 behind these again four, and so the ranks went in 
 
 I153] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 ascending scale until they were lost among the 
 branches of the fir tree. They advanced like an 
 army, and the last touch of horror was given to 
 the scene by a dim rabbit in the background, 
 flying in terror beneath a shadowy moon. These 
 processional caterpillars of that old book were 
 very different from their pathetic, yet heroic, 
 descendants on whom M. Fabre made his un- 
 kind experiments with the flower pot. These, 
 one could see, would have swept over and de- 
 voured any naturalist so presumptuous as to 
 stand across their path. They were the demi- 
 gods and giants of the early morning of the 
 caterpillar world, for by an imaginative but un- 
 scrupulous use of perspective the artist had made 
 them appear to be larger than the rabbit. It was 
 an enchanting picture — ^but still I had not found 
 either the prose or verse for which I sought. 
 
 There is only one caterpillar in Hans Andersen 
 and he has not even a story to himself. He 
 makes no more than a brief appearance in the 
 story of the beetle, as a modest sentimental crea- 
 ture, a foil to the beetle's conceit, " How beauti- 
 ful the world is," says he, "the sun is so warm 
 and everything so happy! And when I one day 
 fall asleep and die, as they call it, I shall awake 
 as a butterfly." But surely no one who has a 
 
 [1541 
 
THE ADVENTURERS 
 
 spinneret inside him would ever dream of be- 
 coming something else. 
 
 And then at last, I found an old pamphlet, 
 very roughly printed, with the date 1659. It had 
 the title "The Caterpillars of this Nation, 
 anatomised in brief discovery of housebreakers, 
 pickpockets, etc. With the life of a penitent 
 Highwayman." Here, thought I, was the cater- 
 pillar not unworthily treated. He carries his 
 rope within him. He is the natural associate of 
 the daring criminal and of those also who have 
 made heroic escapes. Casanova, Cellini, Baron 
 Trenck are among the great caterpillars of 
 history. But when I opened the pamphlet I 
 found that the caterpillar, after all, was intro- 
 duced only on account of his destructive appe- 
 tite. Housebreakers and pickpockets, said the 
 penitent highwayman (who must either have 
 been a hypocrite or an invention of some pious 
 sentimental journalist of the Commonwealth), 
 are "the catterpillars of this nation which do eat 
 into men's estates and lives." 
 
 The search has failed, but I still hope that 
 some day, when I am not looking, I shall find the 
 poet who has sung of this adventurer as he de- 
 serves — of him, and his journeys, and his silver 
 rope. 
 
 [155] 
 
THE VILLAGE AT THE WORLD'S END 
 
 * I 'HE road to the village at the world's end 
 •■• turns aside from a valley in the south of 
 England just before this valley reaches the sea. 
 It is cut abruptly into the side of the Downs, 
 and rises at once in a little hill, so that nothing of 
 it is to be seen but the first few yards. Nor, 
 though there are scarcely any roads now in all 
 the south of England without their sign-posts, is 
 there any sign at the corner of this road, and for 
 that reason no one would go by it unless he liked 
 the look of the road or because he wondered 
 whither it went. 
 
 One follows this road, expecting nothing, yet 
 wondering all the while what there is to find, and 
 then, where the heart of solitude should be, one 
 comes to the village at the world's end. 
 
 It is more securely hidden than if it were in the 
 middle of a forest without paths, or among the 
 deep, unseen folds of the mountains, for it is 
 hidden without artifice. It lies in a great bowl of 
 the Downs, open from morning until evening to 
 
 [157] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 the sun ; and because it is hidden without artifice 
 it is all the more beautiful to have found it. 
 Moreover of its discovery it can be said (as of few 
 of the great discoveries of life, like falling in 
 love, or learning that some day one must die) 
 that one can remember the exact place at which 
 the discovery was made. There is a place on 
 that road (and you can return to it) at which 
 you knew nothing of this village, and then, be- 
 fore another breath was drawn, had found it all. 
 At that place you look at it at about the level 
 of its little church tower, with ivy growing all 
 over it and creeping in at the lips of the wooden 
 lattices under its red tiles. It has few houses but 
 many trees, all gathered together, as it seems, for 
 companionship ; and so near and so modestly do 
 its roofs lie at your feet that you feel you could 
 almost step across them to the Downs at the 
 other side. These things about it are delightful, 
 but you do not know at first that this is indeed 
 the village at the world's end, though already you 
 can see that the road which you have followed, 
 which dips from your feet into the village and 
 rises beyond it, ends in the turf just below the 
 further rim of the Downs, as if those who had 
 made it knew very well that beyond that ridge 
 was no place to which it could go. 
 
 1 158] 
 
THE VILLAGE AT THE WORLD'S END 
 
 You do not know at first that this is the village 
 at the world's end, because the poets have not 
 prepared your mind to find it as it is. In this 
 village are no magic casements opening on peril- 
 ous seas; nor enchanted woods "haunted by- 
 woman wailing for her demon lover"; nor such 
 things beyond words to tell, as Kilmeny found ; 
 nor the frozen houses of Tong Tong Tarrup on 
 the great crag looking over the edge of the world. 
 Yet any one of the poets who have told us of 
 these things might have been very well content, 
 when he came to the world's end, to find such a 
 little English village as this. 
 
 After you have gone down into the village and 
 been there for a while you begin to understand, 
 even without speaking to any one of its inhabit- 
 ants, that belief which is theirs. You begin 
 to understand it as you look up on every side at 
 that unbroken rim of the great bowl of the Downs 
 in which the village lies. It does not tower above 
 it, nor menace it, nor fling at it clouds and 
 twisted shadows and crooked winds, nor play the 
 terrible and grotesque as mountains do to the 
 villages at their feet. But it surrounds it very 
 gently, and closes all the world to it. 
 
 There is no clock in the church tower. Of a 
 clock the village has no need. Its inhabitants 
 
 [159] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 measure the morning by the shadow as it climbs 
 and disappears over the eastern rim of their 
 great bowl of the Downs, and they measure the 
 change of the day towards evening as the shadow 
 returns, coming gently as a friend, down the 
 western slope of sunlit grass until it touches their 
 houses. Across this rim, where their only road 
 ends, they watch the day pass. The sea mists 
 roll in to them across it as from another world, 
 and if a tall man were to stand on tiptoe on their 
 church tower he would just fail to look over it. 
 
 By day the gold of the sun makes a mist above 
 it, but when the day has burnt out behind it into 
 a few grey ashes of cloud which the night wind 
 blows away, when all the colours have faded from 
 its grass and it is left a dark line, clear and 
 mournful against the sky, that great rim of the 
 Downs has something not to be described except 
 that it is final, satisfying, and complete. It is 
 then that you both understand and share the 
 simple faith of those who live in this village. For 
 while we believe that the world is round and has 
 no end at all, and the ancients believed that it 
 was flat and that its end was the swift encircling 
 stream of Oceanus, their faith is that the world is 
 a great bowl and no man may climb to its rim, 
 but if you stand on tiptoe on the church tower 
 
 [i6o] 
 
THE VILLAGE AT THE WORLD'S END 
 
 you can nearly see over it. For those who live 
 in this serene place and see each day pass across 
 their world and go out beyond that dark horizon 
 of the Downs there could be no other faith. 
 
 One thing more there is in proof that the men 
 and women of this village do indeed hold this 
 faith, believing that here the world ends and that 
 by their road no travellers will come on their way 
 to other places. And this one thing also makes 
 this village — ^habitable and familiar as it is — ^akin 
 to those places which the poets discover in the 
 borderlands between the worlds. Though the 
 poets find them beautiful, containing those things 
 that they have never had and desire, and those 
 things also that once they had in this world and 
 long to find again, yet always there is something 
 that is remote, scarcely human, and that chills 
 the heart. So also is it with this village at the 
 world's end. It has no inn. 
 
 i6i 
 
WINDOWS 
 
 ' I 'HE war was long since over, but Private Steep 
 •■■ still lay in a hospital ward, and when he 
 talked at all he talked of the war. He would tell 
 you that he knew men who had not been able to 
 stand it. For himself he was glad to say that it 
 had not troubled his nerves. If you asked him 
 what he did lying there, he would say that he did 
 not do much. He did not care to read, and 
 though sometimes people would offer to read to 
 him he found it difficult to listen. The sentences 
 were too long. He was very well, he would add, 
 but he felt tired. The war had been rather a 
 tiring job. He liked best to lie and do nothing, 
 and look at the white wall opposite. 
 
 It was then that he was moved to the window. 
 " Give a man like that nothing but a wall to look 
 at and he'll see things on it," said the doctor; 
 "he'll see all the things that he ought to forget." 
 But by the window he still lay and looked at 
 nothing, or at whatever else it was that his mind 
 
 [163] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 saw. He was content with nothing. That was 
 his disease. 
 
 He had been by the window a week or more 
 when chance brought to that ward a great parcel 
 of old magazines, gathered from the tops of book- 
 shelves and cupboards. They were only ten and 
 fifteen years old, but they seemed more ancient 
 than the Flood, and the patients looked curi- 
 ously, as into another world, at pictures of for- 
 gotten events, at the ascending ages of celebrities 
 whom no one now knew, at cartoons of un- 
 remembered controversies. 
 
 Private Steep turned them over without inter- 
 est. He looked at the pictures with a dull eye. 
 He was too tired to puzzle out the jokes. He 
 gave up the attempt. And then, as he pushed 
 them away, he found between a Punch and a 
 Strand Magazine, a book of coloured pictures 
 called Mediceval Masters. They were queer, but 
 that did not trouble him like the queerness of the 
 fashions and the jokes of fifteen years ago. For 
 there was something very firm and clear about 
 them. 
 
 It was at their brilliant colours that he looked 
 first, and then he saw with satisfaction that he 
 knew at once what each thing was. He had never 
 seen such chairs and cups, strangely shaped and 
 
 [164] 
 
WINDOWS 
 
 carved, but he knew that they were chairs and 
 cups. Nor had he ever seen such women, with 
 their long white fingers and wonderful dresses. 
 
 He looked through that book and not until it 
 was finished did he remember to be tired. Two 
 days later he surprised his nurse by being angry 
 because another patient had the book when he 
 wanted it. He had not troubled before to be 
 angry. 
 
 He was content at first to look at the bright- 
 ness of the colours, and at those women who 
 were, in some strange way, both beautiful and 
 comic. Then he began to look into the pictures, 
 at the carving of furniture, and the embroidery 
 of dresses. In one an open book lay on a cushion. 
 He could see the drawings in the book. He began 
 to go round those pictures like a child examining 
 a new room. 
 
 It was then that he noticed a picture which 
 seemed to him very odd. It was called "Ma- 
 donna Enthroned with Angels," but the throne 
 was not such as he had ever imagined, and, most 
 curious of all, in the throne was a window. He 
 looked through the window and saw trees, very 
 tall trees as delicate as feathers ; he saw a shore, 
 where a man was running down towards the 
 quaintest of little ships; and far away on an 
 
 [165] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 island was a shadowy blue city, a city that 
 looked as if it had risen straight from the sea. 
 
 He turned through the book again and found, 
 what he had not noticed before, that in nearly 
 every one of the pictures was a window. Even 
 those that were not rooms yet had their windows, 
 and none of the windows was empty. Through 
 one he looked up a winding valley to hills as blue 
 as the sea, and through another at a little town. 
 Instead of looking into those pictures he began 
 now to look out of them. 
 
 It was the window with the little town that 
 pleased him most. For it was a window in a real 
 room, a room with a tiled floor, and a three- 
 cornered chair, and a carved wooden bench where 
 the mother sat feeding her child. The window 
 itself was very small, with a heavy iron studded 
 frame folded back from it, but through it you 
 saw the whole town — Chouses, and people walking 
 in the square, and a tall church tower, and behind 
 it a road that crossed the hills. It was all ex- 
 traordinarily small, and far away, but as clear 
 as a summer's day. He wished that he could 
 have put his head out of that window and seen a 
 little more, but it was wonderful how much one 
 could see. 
 
 He had long since lost the feeling that in those 
 [166] 
 
WINDOWS 
 
 pictures was anything odd. The women re- 
 mained beautiful, but they no longer seemed 
 comic. It was right that in gardens and in 
 thrones you should find windows looking out on 
 other worlds. Then one day he suddenly realised 
 that he had a window of his own and had never 
 looked through it; and when he came to look 
 through it he found, what was still more strange, 
 that it was not very unlike the little town 
 through the window of the picture. He looked 
 down a slope of chimneys and roofs, and across 
 them to another slope where houses stood, and 
 he could see a tall brick tower with a clock. He 
 could see also one bend of a road, where trams 
 passed. They were very small but as vivid a red 
 as the wonderful dress of the woman in the 
 picture. 
 
 It was not as good to look at as the little town. 
 At first he disliked it because it was never for 
 two days the same, and that troubled him. But 
 the more he looked at it the more his interest 
 in it grew. Sometimes in the sunlight it was 
 almost as clear as the town in the picture, but 
 even when the rains drew their grey brush across 
 it, he could see the tower with its clock, and the 
 bend of the road. 
 
 At last he began to feel a pleasure in its 
 [167] 
 
WAYFARERS IN ARCADY 
 
 changes, and to watch for them — ^for the coming 
 of the sun, and the shadows, and the rain, that 
 were always making it look different though they 
 left it always the same. 
 
 However much he looked he would never see 
 more of the little town, in its perpetual clearness, 
 nor find where the road led, that crossed the hills. 
 But here was a road below him, and one day 
 when he was well he would take the tram along 
 it and find where it went. 
 
 The doctor's notes on his case (which were 
 published in a medical journal and were read 
 with interest by other doctors) described the 
 various treatments which led to his recovery. 
 But they did less than justice to the book of 
 MedicBval Masters. Indeed they did not mention 
 it at all unless it was included in the phrase " a 
 judicious combination of psycho-therapy and 
 occupation." What they did not say was that 
 through the quaint windows of those pictures he 
 had learnt to look out again on his own world. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [168] 
 

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