The Heart of England/Chapter 29
CHAPTER XXIX
A WINTER MORNING
Night was soon to pass into a winter day as I looked out of the window to see what kind of a world it was that had been, since I began to read, shutting me off effectually from everything but my book.
For truth's sake, what woe afterwards befell,
'Twould humour many a heart to leave them thus,
Shut from the busy world of more incredulous."
The words were still fresh in my brain.
But, outside, the trees and barns and shed were quiet and dim, and as much submerged and hidden from the air in which I had been living as the green streets of motionless lily and weed at the bottom of some lonely pool where carp and tench go slowly. The road went straight away from the window to the invisible beyond; hard and dry, it was trying to shine, as if it recalled the sunlight. Half way along, at one side, under a broad oak, there was a formless but pregnant shadow. The farm buildings that lay about the road were huddled, dark, colourless and indistinguishable because of their shadows; they might have been heaped up by a great plough, of which the road was the shining furrow; they were not so much the vague wreckage of what I had known yesterday, as a chaos out of which perhaps something was to be born. Yet the outside world was vaster than it had seemed when I could see three ranges of hills and guess at the sea beyond; and strange it was when the words—
Charioting foremost in the envious race
Like a young love, with calm, uneager face,
And fell into a swooning love of him"—
came back to me. How frail and perilous and small was the poet's shielded world! The outside world threatened it as the smooth escarpment of tall, toppling water threatens the little piping sea-bird. And yet this poet's world was for the time being my life. Beyond his words there were, perhaps, the gay, the dear, the beautiful persons whom I knew; Nobby, the tinker, and many more; but probably they slept; they were vain if they were not fictitious; if they could be supposed to live, my only proof of it was that somehow they were connected with a very distant light that refused to go out among the westward copses. They were hardly more credible than the words of a stale preacher talking of charity, or an artful poet writing of love.
So I clung to Keats, the reality, until the road grew almost white, and under that broad oak some rational, nay, beautiful outlines begin to appear, which the shadow enveloped like a cocoon. The outlines were hardly built until they were seen to be a waggon, and its birth out of the shadow was a mighty thing that shared the idiom of stately trees and the motions of great waters and of cliffs that look on sunset and a noble sea. Dimly, uncertainly, powerfully, never quite expressing itself in any known language—as was natural in what seemed to belong to an early brood of the giant earth—the waggon emerged, with ponderous wheels and slender, curving timbers and trailing shafts. The chariot of Dis coming up to Persephone looked thus majestic. Yet the waggon suggested nothing definite, at least no history. It had no such articulate power. But antiquity played about it as, an hour before, it had played about my shelves and books. It was simply the richer for its long life, like a violin or a wise man; and, like them, it neither carried its legend on its exterior nor encouraged anything more than joyful surmise.
It was the one clearly visible piece of man's work among all those potent shadows and uncertain forms of roof and wall; it was crowned by the last stars. Becoming clearer as morning came, it was an important part of the recreation of the world, and involved in it, just as a brazen image may seem to be part of the good fortune or calamity which follows prayer to it. It filled the white road with emotion. It was more intelligible than some men are when they say "I worship" or "I love." Keats left my mind. From my memory, I added melodies of voice and harp and reed, and noise of seas and winds in forests and houses by night, and organ music, with its many demons blithe and terrible, exploring the skiey roof of some cathedral and knocking at the clerestory to get out, floating, sad or happy, about the aisles, and settling at last to make the old purples and greens and blues in the glass more solemn than before; and yet I could not reproduce the melody or anything like it, with which the old waggon pervaded the farmyard. Slowly the light came, and the world was filled with it as imperceptibly as the brain with a great thought. It fell upon the spokes of the waggon wheel, and they seemed to move. Then all was over.
The clear face of things which it is so hard to enjoy was back again. The determined starlings flew swift and straight overhead. The clouds about the risen sun went stately upon their errands through the sky.