One day at Abercorran House I heard Aurelius, Mr Morgan, and Mr Torrance in the Library, talking about wool-gathering. “Since Jessie told us about that river in Essex with the Welsh name,” said Mr Morgan, laughing, “we have travelled from Gwithavon to Battersea Park Road and a fishmonger’s advertisement. Such are the operations of the majestic intellect. How did we get all that way? Do you suppose the cave-men were very different, except that they did not trouble about philology and would have eaten their philologers, while they did without fishmongers because fish were caught to eat, not to sell, in those days?”
“Well!” said Aurelius, “we could not live if we had nothing in common with the cave-men. A man who was a mere fishmonger or a mere philologer could not live a day without artificial aid. Scratch a philologer sufficiently hard and you will find a sort of a cave-man.”
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“I think,” continued Mr Morgan, “that we ought to prove our self-respect by going soberly back on our steps to see what by-ways took us out of Gwithavon to this point.”
“I’m not afraid of you at that game,” said Aurelius. “I have often played it during church services, or rather after them. A church service needs no further defence if it can provide a number of boys with a chance of good wool-gathering.”
“Very true,” said Mr Torrance, who always agreed with Aurelius when it was possible. A fancy had struck him, and instead of turning it into a sonnet he said: “I like to think that the original wool-gatherers were men whose taste it was to wander the mountains and be before-hand with the nesting birds, gathering stray wool from the rocks and thorns, a taste that took them into all sorts of wild new places without over-loading them with wool, or with profit or applause.”
“Very pretty, Frank,” said Aurelius, who had himself now gone wool-gathering and gave us the benefit of it. He told us that he had just recalled a church and a preacher whose voice used to enchant his boyhood into a half-dream. The light was dim as with gold dust. It was[78] warm and sleepy, and to the boy all the other worshippers seemed to be asleep. The text was the three verses of the first chapter of Genesis which describe the work of creation on the fifth day. He heard the clergyman’s voice murmuring, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
“That was enough,” said Aurelius, “for me it was all the sermon. It summoned up before me a coast of red crags and a black sea that was white where the waves got lost in the long corridors between the crags. The moon, newly formed to rule the night, stood full, large, and white, at the top of the sky, which was as black as the sea and cloudless. And out of the water were rising, by twos and threes, but sometimes in multitudes like a cloud, the birds who were to fly in the open firmament of heaven. Out of the black waste emerged sea-birds, one at a time, their long white wings spread wide out at first, but then as they paused on the surface, uplifted like the sides of a lyre; in a moment they were skimming this way and that, and, rising up in circles, were presently screaming around the moon. Several had only[79] risen a little way when, falling back into the sea, they vanished, there, as I supposed, destined by the divine purpose to be deprived of their wings and to become fish. Eagles as red as the encircling crags came up also, but always solitary; they ascended as upon a whirlwind in one or two long spirals and, blackening the moon for a moment, towered out of sight. The little singing birds were usually cast up in cloudlets, white and yellow and blue and dappled, and, after hovering uncertainly at no great height, made for the crags, where they perched above the white foam, piping, warbling, and twittering, after their own kinds, either singly or in concert. Ever and anon flocks of those who had soared now floated downward across the moon and went over my head with necks outstretched, crying towards the mountains, moors, and marshes, or sloped still lower and alighted upon the water, where they screamed whenever the surface yawned at a new birth of white or many-coloured wings. Gradually the sea was chequered from shore to horizon with birds, and the sky was throbbing continually with others, so that the moon could either not be seen at all, or only in slits and wedges. The crags were covered, as if with moss and leaves, by lesser birds who[80] mingled their voices as if it were a dawn of May....”
In my turn I now went off wool-gathering, so that I cannot say how the fifth day ended in the fancy of Aurelius, if you call it fancy. It being then near the end of winter, that vision of birds set me thinking of the nests to come. I went over in my mind the eggs taken and to be taken by Philip and me at Lydiard Constantine. All of last year’s were in one long box, still haunted by the cheapest scent of the village shop. I had not troubled to arrange them; there was a confusion of moor-hens’ and coots’ big freckled eggs with the lesser blue or white or olive eggs, the blotted, blotched, and scrawled eggs. For a minute they were forgotten during the recollection of a poem I had begun to copy out, and had laid away with the eggs. It was the first poem I had ever read and re-read for my own pleasure, and I was copying it out in my best hand-writing, the capitals in red ink. I had got as far as “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest.” I tried to repeat the verses but could not, and so I returned to the eggs. I thought of April when we should once again butt our way through thickets of stiff, bristling stems, through thorn and briar and[81] bramble in the double hedges. We should find the thrushes’ nests in a certain copse of oak and blackthorn where the birds used hardly anything but moss, and you could see them far off among the dark branches, which seldom had many leaves, but were furred over with lichens. We would go to all those little ponds shadowed by hazels close to the farms, where there was likely to be a solitary moorhen’s home, and up into the pollard willow which once had four starling’s eggs at the bottom of a long narrow pocket. In all those spring days we had no conscious aim but finding nests, and if we were not scrambling in a wood we walked with heads lifted up to the trees, turned aside to the hedges, or bent down to the grass or undergrowth. We were not curious about the eggs; questions of numbers or variation in size, shape or colour, troubled us but fitfully. Sun, rain, wind, deep mud, water over the boots and knees, scratches to arms, legs, and face, dust in the eyes, fear of gamekeepers and farmers, excitement, dizziness, weariness, all were summed up by the plain or marked eggs in the scent box; they were all that visibly remained of these things, and I valued them in the same way and for the same reason as the athlete valued the parsley[82] crown. The winning of this one or that was recalled with regret, sometimes that I had taken more than I should have done from the same nest, sometimes that I had not taken as many as would have been excusable; I blushed with annoyance because we had not revisited certain nests which were unfinished or empty when we discovered them—the plough-boys doubtless had robbed them completely, or they had merely produced young birds. How careless the country boys were, putting eggs into their hats and often forgetting all about them, often breaking them wantonly. I envied them their opportunities and despised them for making so little use of them.
I thought of the flowers we tramped over, the smell and taste of cowslips and primroses, and various leaves, and of the young brier shoots which we chewed and spat out again as we walked. I do not know what Aurelius might have been saying, but I began to count up the Sundays that must pass before there would be any chance of finding rooks’ eggs, not at Lydiard, but at the rookery nearest to Abercorran House. Thus I was reminded of the rookery in the half-dozen elms of a farm-house home field, close by the best fishing-place of all[83] at Lydiard. There the arrow-headed reeds grew in thick beds, and the water looked extraordinarily mysterious on our side of them, as if it might contain fabulous fish. Only last season I had left my baited line out there while I slipped through the neighbouring hedge to look for a reed-bunting’s nest; and when I returned I had to pull in an empty line which some monster had gnawed through, escaping with hooks and bait. I wonder Philip did not notice. It was just there, between the beds of arrow-head and that immense water dock on the brink. I vowed to try again. Everybody had seen the monster, or at least the swirl made as he struck out into the deeps at a passing tread. “As long as my arm, I daresay,” said the carter, cracking his whip emphatically with a sort of suggestion that the fish was not to be caught by the like of us. Well, we shall see.
As usual the idea of fishing was connected with my aunt Rachel. There was no fishing worth speaking of unless we stayed with her in our holidays. The water in the ponds at Lydiard Constantine provoked magnificent hopes. I could have enjoyed fishing by those arrow-heads without a bait, so fishy did it look, especially on Sundays, when sport was forbidden:—it was[84] unbearable to see that look and lack rod and line. The fascinating look of water is indescribable, but it enables me to understand how
“Simple Simon went a-fishing
For to catch a whale,
But all the water he had got
Was in his mother’s pail.”
I have seen that look in tiny ponds, and have fished in one against popular advice, only giving it up because I caught newts there and nothing else.
But to my wool-gathering. In the Library, with Aurelius talking, I could see that shadowed water beside the reeds and the float in the midst. In fact I always had that picture at my command. We liked the water best when it was quite smooth; the mystery was greater, and we used to think that we caught more fish out of it in this state. I hoped it would be a still summer, and warm. It was nearly three quarters of a year since last we were in that rookery meadow—eight months since I had tasted my aunt’s doughy cake. I can see her making it, first stoning the raisins while the dough in a pan by the fire was rising; when she thought neither of us was looking she stoned them with her teeth, but this did not shock me,[85] and now I come to think of it they were very white even teeth, not too large or too small, so that I wonder no man ever married her for them alone. I am glad no man did marry her—at least, I was glad then. For she would probably have given up making doughy cakes full of raisins and spices, if she had married. I suppose that what with making cakes and wiping the dough off her fingers, and wondering if we had got drowned in the river, she had no time for lovers. She existed for those good acts which are mostly performed in the kitchen, for supplying us with lamb and mint sauce, and rhubarb tart with cream, when we came in from birds-nesting. How dull it must be for her, thought I, sitting alone there at Lydiard Constantine, the fishing over, the birds not laying yet, no nephews to be cared for, and therefore no doughy cakes, for she could not be so greedy as to make them for herself and herself alone. Aunt Rachel lived alone, when she was without us, in a little cottage in a row, at the edge of the village. Hers was an end house. The rest were neat and merely a little stained by age; hers was hidden by ivy, which thrust itself through the walls and up between the flagstones of the floor, flapped in at the windows, and spread itself so densely[86] over the panes that the mice ran up and down it, and you could see their pale, silky bellies through the glass—often they looked in and entered. The ivy was full of sparrows’ nests, and the neighbours were indignant that she would not have them pulled out; even we respected them.
To live there always, I thought, would be bliss, provided that Philip was with me, always in a house covered with ivy and conducted by an aunt who baked and fried for you and tied up your cuts, and would clean half a hundred perchlings for you without a murmur, though by the end of it her face and the adjacent windows were covered with the flying scales. “Why don’t you catch two or three really big ones?” she would question, sighing for weariness, but still smiling at us, and putting on her crafty-looking spectacles. “Whew, if we could,” we said one to another. It seemed possible for the moment; for she was a wonderful woman, and the house wonderful too, no anger, no sorrow, no fret, such a large fire-place, everything different from London, and better than anything in London except Abercorran House. The ticking of her three clocks was delicious, especially very early in the morning as you lay awake, or when you got home tired at twilight, before[87] lamps were lit. Everything had been as it was in Aunt Rachel’s house for untold time; it was natural like the trees; also it was never stale; you never came down in the morning feeling that you had done the same yesterday and would do the same to-morrow, as if each day was a new, badly written line in a copy-book, with the same senseless words at the head of every page. Why couldn’t we always live there? There was no church or chapel for us—Philip had never in his life been to either. Sunday at Lydiard Constantine was not the day of grim dulness when everyone was set free from work, only to show that he or she did not know what to do or not to do; if they had been chained slaves these people from Candelent Street and elsewhere could not have been stiffer or more savagely solemn.
Those adult people were a different race. I had no thought that Philip or I could become like that, and I laughed at them without a pang, not knowing what was to save Philip from such an end. How different from those people was my aunt, her face serene and kind, notwithstanding that she was bustling about all day and had trodden her heels down and had let her hair break out into horns and wisps.
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I thought of the race of women and girls. I thought (with a little pity) that they were nicer than men. I would rather be a man, I mused, yet I was sure women were better. I would not give up my right to be a man some day; but for the present there was no comparison between the two in my affections; and I should not have missed a single man except Aurelius. Nevertheless, women did odd things. They always wore gloves when they went out, for example. Now, if I put gloves on my hands, it was almost as bad as putting a handkerchief over my eyes or cotton wool in my ears. They picked flowers with gloved hands. Certainly they had their weaknesses. But think of the different ways of giving an apple. A man caused it to pass into your hands in a way that made it annoying to give thanks; a woman gave herself with it, it was as if the apple were part of her, and you took it away and ate it in peace, sitting alone, thinking of nothing. A boy threw an apple at you as if he wanted to knock your teeth out with it, and, of course, you threw it back at him with the same intent; a girl gave it in such a way that you wanted to give it back, if you were not somehow afraid. I began thinking of three girls who all lived[89] near my aunt and would do anything I wanted, as if it was not I but they that wanted it. Perhaps it was. Perhaps they wanted nothing except to give. Well, and that was rather stupid, too.
Half released from the spell by one of the voices in the Library, I turned to a dozen things at once—as what time it was, whether one of the pigeons would have laid its second egg by now, whether Monday’s post would bring a letter from a friend who was in Kent, going about the woods with a gamekeeper who gave him squirrels, stoats, jays, magpies, an owl, and once a woodcock, to skin. I recalled the sweet smell of the squirrels; it was abominable to kill them, but I liked skinning them.... I turned to thoughts of the increasing row of books on my shelf. First came The Compleat Angler. That gave me a brief entry into a thinly populated world of men rising early, using strange baits, catching many fish, talking to milkmaids with beautiful voices and songs fit for them. The book—in a cheap and unattractive edition—shut up between its gilded covers a different, embalmed, enchanted life without any care. Philip and I knew a great deal of it by heart, and took a strong fancy to certain passages[90] and phrases, so that we used to repeat out of all reason “as wholesome as a pearch of Rhine,” which gave a perfect image of actual perch swimming in clear water down the green streets of their ponds on sunny days.... Then there were Sir Walter Scott’s poems, containing the magic words—
“And, Saxon, I am Rhoderick Dhu.”
Next, Robinson Crusoe, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the Iliad, a mass of almost babyish books, tattered and now never touched, and lastly The Adventures of King Arthur and the Round Table. I heard the Lady of the Lake say to Merlin (who had a face like Aurelius) “Inexorable man, thy powers are resistless”: moonlit waters overhung by mountains, and crags crowned by towers, boats with mysterious dark freight; knights taller than Roland, trampling and glittering; sorceries, battles, dragons, kings, and maidens, stormed or flitted through my mind, some only as words and phrases, some as pictures. It was a shadow entertainment, with an indefinable quality of remoteness tinged by the pale Arthurian moonlight and its reflection in that cold lake, which finally suggested the solid comfort of tea at my[91] aunt’s house, and thick slices, “cut ugly,” of the doughy cake.
At this point Jessie came in to say that tea was ready. “So am I,” said I, and we raced downstairs. Jessie won.