News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest<br />Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, William Morris [best big ereader TXT] 📗

and I wanted to make you as happy as you could be.  To say the truth, there was a risk in it,” said she, blushing—“I mean as to Dick and Clara; for I must tell you, since we are going to be such close friends, that even amongst us, where there are so many beautiful women, I have often troubled men’s minds disastrously.  That is one reason why I was living alone with my father in the cottage at Runnymede.  But it did not answer on that score; for of course people came there, as the place is not a desert, and they seemed to find me all the more interesting for living alone like that, and fell to making stories of me to themselves—like I know you did, my friend.  Well, let that pass.  This evening, or to-morrow morning, I shall make a proposal to you to do something which would please me very much, and I think would not hurt you.”

I broke in eagerly, saying that I would do anything in the world for her; for indeed, in spite of my years and the too obvious signs of them (though that feeling of renewed youth was not a mere passing sensation, I think)—in spite of my years, I say, I felt altogether too happy in the company of this delightful girl, and was prepared to take her confidences for more than they meant perhaps.

She laughed now, but looked very kindly on me.  “Well,” she said, “meantime for the present we will let it be; for I must look at this new country that we are passing through.  See how the river has changed character again: it is broad now, and the reaches are long and very slow-running.  And look, there is a ferry!”

I told her the name of it, as I slowed off to put the ferry-chain over our heads; and on we went passing by a bank clad with oak trees on our left hand, till the stream narrowed again and deepened, and we rowed on between walls of tall reeds, whose population of reed sparrows and warblers were delightfully restless, twittering and chuckling as the wash of the boats stirred the reeds from the water upwards in the still, hot morning.

She smiled with pleasure, and her lazy enjoyment of the new scene seemed to bring out her beauty doubly as she leaned back amidst the cushions, though she was far from languid; her idleness being the idleness of a person, strong and well-knit both in body and mind, deliberately resting.

“Look!” she said, springing up suddenly from her place without any obvious effort, and balancing herself with exquisite grace and ease; “look at the beautiful old bridge ahead!”

“I need scarcely look at that,” said I, not turning my head away from her beauty.  “I know what it is; though” (with a smile) “we used not to call it the Old Bridge time agone.”

She looked down upon me kindly, and said, “How well we get on now you are no longer on your guard against me!”

And she stood looking thoughtfully at me still, till she had to sit down as we passed under the middle one of the row of little pointed arches of the oldest bridge across the Thames.

“O the beautiful fields!” she said; “I had no idea of the charm of a very small river like this.  The smallness of the scale of everything, the short reaches, and the speedy change of the banks, give one a feeling of going somewhere, of coming to something strange, a feeling of adventure which I have not felt in bigger waters.”

I looked up at her delightedly; for her voice, saying the very thing which I was thinking, was like a caress to me.  She caught my eye and her cheeks reddened under their tan, and she said simply:

“I must tell you, my friend, that when my father leaves the Thames this summer he will take me away to a place near the Roman wall in Cumberland; so that this voyage of mine is farewell to the south; of course with my goodwill in a way; and yet I am sorry for it.  I hadn’t the heart to tell Dick yesterday that we were as good as gone from the Thames-side; but somehow to you I must needs tell it.”

She stopped and seemed very thoughtful for awhile, and then said smiling:

“I must say that I don’t like moving about from one home to another; one gets so pleasantly used to all the detail of the life about one; it fits so harmoniously and happily into one’s own life, that beginning again, even in a small way, is a kind of pain.  But I daresay in the country which you come from, you would think this petty and unadventurous, and would think the worse of me for it.”

She smiled at me caressingly as she spoke, and I made haste to answer: “O, no, indeed; again you echo my very thoughts.  But I hardly expected to hear you speak so.  I gathered from all I have heard that there was a great deal of changing of abode amongst you in this country.”

“Well,” she said, “of course people are free to move about; but except for pleasure-parties, especially in harvest and hay-time, like this of ours, I don’t think they do so much.  I admit that I also have other moods than that of stay-at-home, as I hinted just now, and I should like to go with you all through the west country—thinking of nothing,” concluded she smiling.

“I should have plenty to think of,” said I.

CHAPTER XXIX: A RESTING-PLACE ON THE UPPER THAMES

Presently at a place where the river flowed round a headland of the meadows, we stopped a while for rest and victuals, and settled ourselves on a beautiful bank which almost reached the dignity of a hill-side: the wide meadows spread before us, and already the scythe was busy amidst the hay.  One change I noticed amidst the quiet beauty of the fields—to wit, that they were planted with trees here and there, often fruit-trees, and that there was none of the niggardly begrudging of space to a handsome tree which I remembered too well; and though the willows were often polled (or shrowded, as they call it in that country-side), this was done with some regard to beauty: I mean that there was no polling of rows on rows so as to destroy the pleasantness of half a mile of country, but a thoughtful sequence in the cutting, that prevented a sudden bareness anywhere.  To be short, the fields were everywhere treated as a garden made for the pleasure as well as the livelihood of all, as old Hammond told me was the case.

On this bank or bent of the hill, then, we had our mid-day meal; somewhat early for dinner, if that mattered, but we had been stirring early: the slender stream of the Thames winding below us between the garden of a country I have been telling of; a furlong from us was a beautiful little islet begrown with graceful trees; on the slopes westward of us was a wood of varied growth overhanging the narrow meadow on the south side of the river; while to the north was a wide stretch of mead rising very gradually from the river’s edge.  A delicate spire of an ancient building rose up from out of the trees in the middle distance, with a few grey houses clustered about it; while nearer to us, in fact not half a furlong from the water, was a quite modern stone house—a wide quadrangle of one story, the buildings that made it being quite low.  There was no garden between it and the river, nothing but a row of pear-trees still quite young and slender; and though there did not seem to be much ornament about it, it had a sort of natural elegance, like that of the trees themselves.

As we sat looking down on all this in the sweet June day, rather happy than merry, Ellen, who sat next me, her hand clasped about one knee, leaned sideways to me, and said in a low voice which Dick and Clara might have noted if they had not been busy in happy wordless love-making: “Friend, in your country were the houses of your field-labourers anything like that?”

I said: “Well, at any rate the houses of our rich men were not; they were mere blots upon the face of the land.”

“I find that hard to understand,” she said.  “I can see why the workmen, who were so oppressed, should not have been able to live in beautiful houses; for it takes time and leisure, and minds not over-burdened with care, to make beautiful dwellings; and I quite understand that these poor people were not allowed to live in such a way as to have these (to us) necessary good things.  But why the rich men, who had the time and the leisure and the materials for building, as it would be in this case, should not have housed themselves well, I do not understand as yet.  I know what you are meaning to say to me,” she said, looking me full in the eyes and blushing, “to wit that their houses and all belonging to them were generally ugly and base, unless they chanced to be ancient like yonder remnant of our forefathers’ work” (pointing to the spire); “that they were—let me see; what is the word?”

“Vulgar,” said I.  “We used to say,” said I, “that the ugliness and vulgarity of the rich men’s dwellings was a necessary reflection from the sordidness and bareness of life which they forced upon the poor people.”

She knit her brows as in thought; then turned a brightened face on me, as if she had caught the idea, and said: “Yes, friend, I see what you mean.  We have sometimes—those of us who look into these things—talked this very matter over; because, to say the truth, we have plenty of record of the so-called arts of the time before Equality of Life; and there are not wanting people who say that the state of that society was not the cause of all that ugliness; that they were ugly in their life because they liked to be, and could have had beautiful things about them if they had chosen; just as a man or body of men now may, if they please, make things more or less beautiful—Stop!  I know what you are going to say.”

“Do you?” said I, smiling, yet with a beating heart.

“Yes,” she said; “you are answering me, teaching me, in some way or another, although you have not spoken the words aloud.  You were going to say that in times of inequality it was an essential condition of the life of these rich men that they should not themselves make what they wanted for the adornment of their lives, but should force those to make them whom they forced to live pinched and sordid lives; and that as a necessary consequence the sordidness and pinching, the ugly barrenness of those ruined lives, were worked up into the adornment of the lives of the rich, and art died out amongst men?  Was that what you would say, my friend?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, looking at her eagerly; for she had risen and was standing on the edge of the bent, the light wind stirring her dainty raiment, one hand laid on her bosom, the other arm stretched downward and clenched in her earnestness.

“It is true,” she said, “it is true!  We have proved it true!”

I think amidst my—something more than interest in her, and admiration for her, I was beginning to wonder how it would all end.  I had a glimmering of fear of what might follow; of anxiety as to the remedy which this new age might offer for the missing of something one might set one’s heart on.  But now Dick rose to his feet and cried out in his hearty manner: “Neighbour Ellen, are you quarrelling with the guest, or are you worrying him to tell you things which he cannot properly explain to our ignorance?”

“Neither, dear neighbour,” she said.  “I was so far from quarrelling with him that I think I have been making him good friends both with himself and me.  Is it so, dear guest?” she said, looking down at me with a delightful smile of confidence in being understood.

“Indeed it is,” said I.

“Well, moreover,” she said, “I must say for him that he has explained himself to me very well indeed, so that I quite understand him.”

“All right,” quoth Dick.  “When I first set eyes on you at Runnymede I knew that there was something wonderful in your keenness of wits.  I don’t say that as a mere pretty speech to please you,” said he quickly, “but because it is true; and it made me want to see more of you.  But, come, we ought to be going; for we are not half way, and we ought to be in well before sunset.”

And therewith he took