The Silent Isle, Arthur Christopher Benson [best book reader txt] 📗

view over the dappled plain, the blue waters of the lonely dyke, the old farm-house blinking pleasantly among its barns and outbuildings, the tall church-tower that you see for miles over the flat, the busy cawing of rooks in the village grove; the very people that one meets wear a smiling and friendly air, from the old labourer trudging slowly home, to the jolly, smooth-faced ploughboy riding a big horse, clanking and plodding down the highway. One sees the world as it was meant to be made; a life in the open air, labour among the wide fields, seems the joyful lot of man. The very food that one eats by the quick-set thorn on the edge of a dyke, where the fish poise and hang in dark pools, has a finer savour, and is like a sacrament of peace; hour after hour, from morning to sunset, one can range without weariness and without care, one's thoughts reduced to a mere flow of gentle perceptions, murmuring along like a clear stream. Pleasant, too, is the return home when one swings in at the familiar gate; and then comes the quiet solitary evening when one recounts the hoarded store of delicate impressions. Then follow hours of dreamless sleep, till one wakes again upon a bright world, with the thrushes fluting in the shrubbery and the morning sun flooding the room.


LVI


It was by what we clumsily call chance but really by what I am learning to perceive to be the subtlest and prettiest surprises of the Power that walks beside us, that I found myself in Ely yesterday morning--the first real day of summer. The air was full of sunshine, like golden dust, and all the plants had taken a leap forward in the night, and were unfurling their crumpled flags as speedily as they might. I came vaguely down to the river, guided by the same good spirit, and there at the boat-wharf I found a little motor-launch lying, which could be hired for the day. I took it, like the Lady of Shalott; but I did not write my name on the prow, because it had already some silly, darting kind of name. A mild, taciturn man took charge of my craft; and without delay we clicked and gurgled out into the stream.

I wish I could describe the day, for it was sweeter than honey and the honeycomb; and I should like to pour out of my stored sweetness for others. But I can hardly say what happened. It was all just like the tale of Shalott, with this difference, that there was no shadow of doom overhanging me; I felt more like a fairy prince with some pretty adventure awaiting me as soon as the town, with gardens and balconies, should begin to fringe the stream; perhaps a hand would be waved from the lawn, embowered in lilacs, of some sequestered house by the water-side. There was no singing aloud of mournful carols either, but my heart made a quiet and wistful music of its own.

I thought that I should have liked a more grave and ancient mode of conveyance; but how silly to desire that! The Lady of Shalott's boat was no doubt of the latest and neatest trim, fully up to her drowsy date; and as for quaintness, no doubt a couple of hundred years hence, when our river-craft may be cigar-shaped torpedoes of aluminium for all I know, a picture of myself in my homely motor-boat, with antiquated hat and odd grey suit, will appear quaint and old-timed enough. And, anyhow, the ripple gurgled under the prow, the motor ticked tranquilly, and the bubbles danced in the wake. We went on swiftly enough, and every time that I turned the great towers had grown fainter in the haze; we slid by the green flood-banks, with here and there a bunch of kingcups blazing in glory, the elbows of the bank full of white cow-parsley, comfrey, and water-dock. I heard the sedge-warbler whistle drily in the willow-patch, and a nightingale sang with infinite sweetness in a close of thorn-bushes now bursting into bloom; blue sky above, a sapphire streak of waterway ahead, green banks on either side; a little enough matter to fill a heart with joy. Once I had a thrill when a pair of sandpipers flicked out of a tiny cove and flew, glancing white, with pointed wings ahead of us. Again we started them, and again, till they wearied of the chase and flew back, with a wide circuit, to their first haunt. A cuckoo in a great poplar fluted solemnly and richly as we murmured past; the world was mostly hidden from us, but now and then a church tower looked gravely over the bank, and ran beside us for a time, or the lowing of cattle came softly from a pasture, or I heard the laughter of unseen children from a cottage garth. Once or twice we passed an inn, with cheerful, leisurely people sitting smiling together on a lawn, like a scene out of a romance; and then at last, on passing Baitsbite lock, we slipped into a merrier world. Here we heard the beat of rowlocks, the horse-hoofs of a coach thudded on the bank, and a crew of jolly young men went gliding past, with a cox shouting directions, just as I might have been doing thirty years ago! Thirty years ago! And it seems like yesterday, and I not a scrap older or wiser, though, thank God, a good deal happier. Even so we drift on to the unseen. Then we passed a village, the thatched cottages with their white gables rising prettily from the blossoming orchards. Ditton on its little hill; and the old iron bridge thundered and clanked with a passing train; then came the rattle of the grinds; and the mean houses of Barnwell; and soon we were gliding up among the backs, under the bridge of St. John's, by the willow-hung walks of Trinity, by the ivied walls and trim gardens of Clare, past the great white palace-front of King's, and so by the brick gables and oriels of Queens' into the Newnham mill-pool. It was somehow not like Cambridge, but like some enchanted town of palaces; and I would not break the spell; so we swung about, made no stay, and then slowly reversed the whole panorama again, through the long, still afternoon.

The old life of Cambridge--it was all there, after the long years, just the same, full of freshness and laughter; but I came into it as a revenant, and yet with no sense of sadness, rather of joy that it should all be so continuous and bright. I did not want it back; I did not desire any part in it, but was merely glad to watch and remember. I thought of myself as a fitful boy full of dreams and hopes, some fulfilled, some unfulfilled; those that I have realised so strangely unlike what I expected, those unrealised still beckoning with radiant visage. I did not even desire any companionship, any interchange of thought and mood. Was it selfish, dull, unenterprising to be so content? I do not think so, for a stream of gentle emotion, which I know was sweet and which I think was pure, lapsed softly through my mind all day. It is not always thus with me, and I took the good day from the hands of God as a perfect gift; and though it would be easy to argue that I could have been better employed, a deeper instinct said to me that I was meant to be thus, and that, after all, God sends us into the world to live, though often enough our life tosses like a fretful stream among rocky boulders and under troubled skies. God can give and he can withhold; I do not question his power or his right; I mourn over the hard gifts from his hand; but when he sends me a sweet gift, let me try to realise, what I do not doubt, that indeed he wishes me well.

Once in the afternoon we stayed our boat, and I climbed to the top of the flood-bank and sate looking out over the wide fen; I saw the long dykes run eastward, the far-off churches, the distant hazy hills; and I thought of all the troubles that men make for each other, adding so wantonly to the woes of the world. And I wondered what was this strange fibre of pain so inwoven in the life of the world, wondered wistfully and rebelliously, till I felt that I drew nearer in that quiet hour to the Heart of God. I could not be mistaken. There was peace hidden there, the peace that to-day brooded over the kindly earth, all carpeted with delicate green, in the cool water lapping in the reeds, in the green thorn-bush and the birds' sudden song, even in this restless heart that would fain find its haven and its home.


LVII


To-day was oppressively hot, brooding, airless; or rather, not so much without air, as that the air was thick and viscous like honey, without the thin, fine quality. One drank rather than breathed it. Yet nature revelled and rejoiced in it with an almost shameless intoxication; the trees unfolded their leaves and shook themselves out, crumpled by the belated and chilly spring. The air was full of clouds of hurrying, dizzy insects, speeding at a furious rate, on no particular errand, but merely stung with the fierce joy of life and motion. In the road crawled stout bronze-green beetles, in blind and clumsy haste, pushing through grass-blades, tumbling over stones, waving feeble legs as they lay helpless on their backs, with the air of an elderly clergyman knocked down by an omnibus--and, on recovering their equilibrium, struggling breathlessly on. The birds gobbled fiercely in all directions, or sang loud and sweet upon the hedges. I saw half-a-dozen cuckoos, gliding silvery grey and beating the hedges for nests. Everything was making the most of life, in a prodigious hurry to live.

Indeed, I was very well content with the world myself as I sauntered through the lanes. I found a favourite place, an old clunch-quarry, on the side of a hill, where the white road comes sleepily up out of the fen. It is a pretty place, the quarry; it is all grass-grown now, and is full of small dingles covered with hawthorns. It is a great place for tramps to camp in, and half the dingles have little grey circles in them where the camping fires have been lit. I did not mind that evidence of life, but I did not like the cast-off clothing, draggled hats, coats, skirts, and boots that lay about. I never can fathom the mystery of tramps' wardrobes. They are never well-dressed exactly, but wherever they encamp they appear to discard clothing enough for two or three persons, clothing which, though I should not personally like to make use of it, still appears to be serviceable enough. I suppose it is a part of the haphazard life of the open air, and that if a tramp gets an old coat given him which is better than his own, he just leaves the old one behind him at the next halting-place.

The chalk-pit to-day was full of cowslips and daisies, the former in quite incredible profusion. I suppose it is a cowslip year. The common plants seem to have cycles, and almost each year has a succession of characteristic flowers, which have found, I suppose, the particular arrangements of the season suit them; or rather, I suppose that an outburst of a particular flower in a particular year shows that the previous year was a good seeding-time. This year has been remarkable for two plants so far, a sort of