A Writer's Notebook (18 page)

The pine wood was cool and silent, fitting my humour. The tall trunks, straight and slender like the masts of sailing boats;
the gentle aromatic odour; the light subdued; and the purple mist, so tenuous as to be scarcely discernible, a mere tinge of warmth in the atmosphere—it all gave me an exquisite sense of rest. My footfall on the brown needles was noiseless, and the tread was soft and easy. The odours filled me with a drowsy intoxication, like an Eastern drug. The tints were so soft that one could not believe it possible for paints and paintbrushes to reproduce them; the faintly-coloured air visibly surrounded things and softened their outlines. A pleasant reverie possessed me, unanalysable, a waking dream of half-voluptuous emotion.

How fortunate is his lot who can accept the charming emotions that Nature gives him without trying to analyse the charm!

The wind sighed through the pine trees with the pitifulness of a girl sighing for a love that was dead.

The field all yellow with countless buttercups, a spring carpet whereon might fitly walk the angels of Messer Perugino.

It was a concert of endless variety; in every hedgerow, in the branches of every tree, hidden among the leaves, sang the birds. Each one, as though trying to outsing the rest, sang as if his life depended on it, and as if life were irresponsible and joyous.

The country was undulating and afforded spacious views of verdant hills and fat Kentish fields. It was the most fertile part of the county and thickly wooded. Elms, oak trees and chestnuts. Each generation had done its best, and the country was tended like a garden.

It was a landscape as formal as Poussin's or Claude's. It
had no abandon, no freedom; the hand of man was perpetually obvious in the trimness and in the careful arrangement.

Sometimes, from a hill a little higher than the rest, I could look down into the plain bathed in sunlight, golden and dazzling. The fields of corn, the fields of clover, the roads and the rivulets, formed themselves, in that flood of light, into an harmonious pattern, glowing and ethereal.

A square white house of stucco, with two great bow windows and a veranda overgrown with honeysuckle and the monthly rose. Nature could do little to beautify the hideous structure, a bastard product of Georgian architecture and merciless common-sense. Yet it had an air of comfort and of solidity. It was surrounded by fine-grown trees, and the garden in summer was rich with a dozen varieties of rose. It was separated by a low hedge from the green where in the long evenings the village boys played cricket. Opposite, in convenient propinquity, stood the village church and the village public-house.

The sky was slate grey, and so drab and melancholy was its colour that it seemed a work of man. It was a colour of infinite sorrow.

St. James's Park.

The sky was grey, even and low; and the sun, a narrow circle of white shining through uncertainly, cast a rippling gleam on the dark waters. The trees, in the dingy day, had lost their verdure; an infinitely subtle mist obscured their massive foliage. Beyond, half hidden by the poplars, in uneven outlines, were the Government offices and the heavy roofs of Trafalgar Square.

The water, reflecting the grey sky and the sombre trees, was
dark and restful; and the moist, stagnant odour that arose from it made one faint and sick.

In the sun, the valley, all green and wooded, was pleasant and cool; but when the clouds rolled up from the west, heavy and grey, brushing the surrounding hills, the aspect was so circumscribed that I could have cried out as with physical pain. The primness of the scene was insufferable. The sombre, well-ordered elms, the meadows so carefully kept. When the massive clouds joined with the hills, I felt myself shut in. Then to get out of that little circle seemed a task impossible, and all power of flight seemed to abandon me. It was a scene so ordered and arranged that it made me feel that my life cast amid such surroundings could never escape its thraldom. The past centuries of people, living in a certain way, actuated by certain standards, influenced by certain emotions, were too strong for me. I felt myself like a foolish bird, a bird born in a cage without power to attain freedom. My lust for a free life was futile, for I knew myself devoid of the power it needed. I walked along the fields, by the neat iron railing with which they were enclosed. All about me was visible the care of man. Nature herself seemed under the power of the formal influence, and flourished with rigidity and decorum. Nothing was left wild. The trees were lopped into proper shape, cut down here where their presence seemed inelegant and planted there to complete the symmetry of a group.

The sky after the storm, swept clean by the howling wind, had the terrible inhumanity of justice.

Over the past swept a light mist, a painted haze which enveloped my memories, subduing their harshness so that they had something of an exotic charm; they were like a city or a
harbour that you see from a distance through a veil of evening light, its contours indistinct and its flaming colours softened into a more delicate and subtler harmony. But the mist crept up from that deep sea of eternity, unrelenting and unrelieved, and the years at last hid my recollections in a grey, unfathomable night.