THE CHANGE: A Fantasy of Whitefoot Lane
(To J. R.)
HE was standing at the edge of the strip of wood, quite still, and looking towards the east as though at something far away. No wind was blowing.
As I approached he did not move, although my feet made a sighing in the long grass. Abruptly he turned.
“When I was last here, the field swept away, open and free, for many miles. In summer, the wheat grew yellow in the sunshine. Now the houses are nearly to the wood, and the little piece of land left is turned into allotments. But even those are deserted, for they are going to build shortly.”
Dreary patches of decaying cabbages, their leaves sodden and drab, were between the edge of the wood and the fences protecting the small back-gardens. Old broken pails and bundles of bean-sticks littered the allotments; sparrows chirped as they searched the backyards for crumbs.
“This was a field for poppies,” he said softly. “Before the stems of wheat stiffened, while the awns and flags whispered softly in the air, the poppies were among the green corn like blood-drops. What untamed colours there were amongst the civilised wheat! The yellow charlock grew every year; we hated the wild mustard, but still it grew. Everywhere the alien creeps in, and hangs fiercely to life. Great big thistles held their spears and purple plumes higher than the grain with the yellow ragwort in August. And the moon daisies, sought by the moths at night. But you think that I am talking foolishly. Perhaps wild flowers are nothing to you.”
He looked at me quickly, and in his face was youth. Yet he had said that he remembered the field before it became part of the suburb: that must have been many years ago.
“Sweetest of all things is wild-flower air,” I quoted from old memory.
“Ah! You have not forgotten!”
With a wild poignancy he spoke.
“I am remembering now.”
He faced me so abruptly that the hair flung over his forehead. Then he spoke again, and my heart was heavy.
“In the early morning the birds sang sweetly, and the air was pure. I used to creep down the stairs, holding my boots in my hand. The third step from the bottom creaked and had to be avoided. The cat asleep on its rug in the kitchen stirred and stretched and yawned as I opened the door, then curled and slept again. It’s funny how I remember things like that so vividly. When my boots were laced, I used to tiptoe to the door, draw the bolt and turn that creaking lock with its huge key, and then outside into the morning. Sometimes I came to this very place, listening to a nightingale, and his song then was not yearning as it was at night. I watched the warblers at their work of weaving cradles among the brambles. I had a friend in those days, a true friend, to whom I told all the things in my heart. Together we wandered and explored the big woods in the country.”
He sighed, while a little wind stirred a leaf upon the oak tree above, a leaf alone among the guarded buds of next spring and the buff oak apples upon the twigs. The leaf made a faint risping as it spun and shook, and he looked up at it, and never had I seen a face so sad.
“Not so long ago that leaf was a bud, opening timorously to the spring sunshine and the lark-song far up into heaven. I wonder if, in its own obscure way, it wondered about the world, and wove a little dream of happiness for ever, like the dream of a child. The nightingale sings no more when it is spring; he is gone like the wheat and its silky wind-wave. Terry—that was the name of my friend—came to me one day and held out his hand, and said shyly, ‘I say, shall we swear life-friendship?’ He had been reading some romantic book. After that we went everywhere together. Ah, now you begin to remember the round pond over by the Seven Fields.”
“Terry and I would go and fish there at five in the morning. Yes, well may you remember those lovely summer morns, the sun staining the air and charging its loveliness with light and life. We made our own rods of hazel wands, and floats from gray goose-quills and corks. The eagerness with which we put ground bait down the night before in the hope of snaring one of the monster carp that lurked in that little pond! I suppose really that none were there at all, but all through those springs and summers of boyhood we fished, never catching anything bigger than a small roach or dace. We used to argue about the merits of different baits: aniseed paste, small boiled potatoes, brandling worms and broad beans. Do you know what that pond is like now?” he cried, tragic eyes looking into mine. “All the people from the suburbs have cast their unwanted cats and split boots into the water. There are no fish in it now, not even an eft remains to float to the surface, turn over and show a stain of fire as he swims to the bottom. Everything is dead, dead! When the sun slants through the trees at its edge, you can see the blur of rusting tins and papers deep underneath. But in those days it was beautiful and beloved of a wandering kingfisher. By the shallow drinking-place the cattle came down to ponder, as with soft stare they stood in the mud. Sometimes a bullfinch came, and a turtle dove from the hawthorn: all the birds loved to splash and ruffle in the water. That little lake in the wood was a place of glamour and romance, especially in later years when I was deeply in love.”
The sun came over the houses, the starlings whistled and clucked among the smoke-burnt and red chimney pots. Wives in the houses were preparing breakfast for their men who soon would walk quickly down the pavements towards the station; another day’s work in London was beginning.
“Yes, I was deeply in love,” the pale stranger continued, “with Louise. That was her name to me, a name I gave her because——”
He faltered and ended. I looked away, for pain had come into his eyes and his voice. The heaped bean-sticks became indistinct as I looked. Again he spoke,—
“When I first saw her, I knew that I would love her, and that she would love me. The bluebells had drooped and faded, their spirits gone to make the sky a deeper hue, and somewhere in the wind pealed the ghostly chimes of their fragrance. The meadow was glorious with buttercups, and the light reflected upwards from so thick a cluster of golden rivets driven into the grasses glowed on her face as she walked slowly across the field. She wore a print dress, and her brown hair was thick and loosely coiled. But it was her eyes that made her face so sweet—they were gentle like those of a hare. I just stood and looked at her. Then she was gone, and I hid behind a hedge, but she did not look back. Her father was an artist living in a cottage by the farm, and she was his only daughter. When we knew each other, I used to talk a lot with him, and she would listen with earnest eyes upon me, as I could see without actually looking at her. When I did glance at her, she would look on the ground, and then we smiled, and in her cheeks I saw the bramble blossom steal and die. Her father sang the song of Julien in the opera Louise, and would think of his dead wife as he sat at the piano. And I would think of Louise as I first saw her, in her simple dress, bareheaded in the meadow, with a rich golden-brown light on her cheeks like the lacquered ripples of a stream hovering and gleaming under a bridge.”
“You are very sad,” I said.
“A poet is always sad,” he answered.
“Then there should be no poets if that is so. Happiness is greater than poetry.”
“You are right,” he whispered presently, “but let me tell you my tale before it is too late, for shortly the wood will be down, and on the place where we stand will be houses. And when that happens the last link will be broken.”
“Terry and I and Louise became fast friends, and so we grew up. I went away to London in order to learn the tea trade. Terry stopped here with his father, and, instead of sitting on a stool in a dim office, helped with the sowing and the reaping. One day in summer Louise and I were walking over the Seven Fields, and by a stile I put my arm round her, and she said, ‘No, Julien, not yet,’ but said it so softly and timidly that I knew she loved me. And I held her, the little thing that she was, in my arms, just to feel her making a small struggle, and to watch her shy eyes and tinted cheeks. But she would not let me kiss her, so I pretended to say farewell to her, but she pressed my hand and told me to stay. And when I asked her if she loved me, she would not answer.
“‘Would you break my heart, Louise?’ I said. ‘You know I love you.’
“‘No, Julien,’ she answered very softly, ‘but I do not want you to break your own.’
“‘What do you mean, Louise?’
“But she would not say immediately, and when the time came for us to go back to the cottage, she kissed me nervously on the cheek and whispered that she might be enough for me now, but not later on; that she was only a silly girl. Of course I loved her all the more, and thinking of her, could not work much during the day at the tea trade, but wrote books at night feverishly in order to immortalise my love. All that summer we walked among the flowers, and one day I asked her to marry me. She shook her head, and her eyes were wet and sorrowful.
“‘Not yet,’ she whispered.
“‘I don’t want to marry you now,’ I cried, the impetuous, eager fool that I was, ‘I only want to know if you love me enough to marry me some day. I want to feel that I possess you.’
“She laughed a little shaky laugh, and I took her close to kiss her; but she drew back slightly, and immediately I felt that I wasn’t wanted, and to cover my humiliation I spoke coldly and brutally. Fool that I was!” he cried bitterly.
The drone of a tramcar passing towards Catford along the newly-made high road a mile below the wood rose in pitch as it went faster with its first burden of artisans and factory hands. The stranger brooded, thinking of that time before the field had been built upon. And yet he was still a youth, alone with me in the early hours of the winter morning, standing in the long grass at the eastern edge of the wood. Almost immediately he went on: his voice became wild with yearning.
“Spring came again, with the larks battling over the Seven Fields and the wind anemones rising like wan-white stars above the dead leaves. I fretted with brooding why she withheld herself. I was intensely poetical and equally egoistical. The great artist rises above egoism, the little one is killed by it, and becomes embittered—egoism narrows the view and ruins happiness. But I could not help it—I was held in chains by the tyranny of my own immature thoughts. Ah, God, if I had only known!”
His thin hands covered the pale face, his shoulders shook, and once again the bean-sticks were a smudge.
“One day I kissed her brutally and suddenly—Louise, more fragile of spirit than the tenderest windflower. One day I crushed her lips with my mouth. She struggled away, and the tenderest girl became a spitfire. She reviled me for a weakling. She said that I had no sense of honour, that I was not worthy of being a man—and then she seemed to shrink, her expression of anger fled, and the tears streaming down her face, she sobbed,—
“‘Julien, Julien, won’t you make a great effort to kill your egoism? Cannot you see that your intolerance of all people because they have not the same fervour about poetry as yourself will eventually cripple all your powers? You sneer at Terry, who is one of the dearest boys, because he doesn’t want to hear you quote “The Hound of Heaven”; you sneer at your own father because you say that he doesn’t understand you. Oh, Julien, won’t you try to alter things for your own sake?’
“‘Not for yours?’ I sneered.
“‘For your own, Julien,’ she replied quietly.
“‘You don’t love me?’
“‘Not as you love me, Julien.’
“‘No, of course not! You don’t know what love is! I can eat my heart out for you; dream, dream, dream in London all the time, pine in the smoke, and no one understands me. No one! The poet is always the outcast, from Christ downwards. The world smashes and destroys genius—the genius that is always trying to make others see the beauty in the world, and make humanity happier.’
“‘No, not an outcast, Julien: a beloved friend who will rise above introspection, and be happy. But if that man be caged by egoism, isn’t it best to try to undo the door of that cage? Oh, Julien, if only you would believe.’
“She was distressed, and at the thought of hurting her a devil in me rejoiced. She had called Terry one of the dearest of boys. I seized upon the remark.
“‘No doubt you are in love with Terry, who is blue-eyed and has such nice wavy hair. Well, go and marry him. I shall never ask you to marry me again. Good-bye, Louise.’
“I walked away, and after a while turned to go back to her. We had been quarrelling, at least I had made my pitiable remarks, just where we are standing now. But when I returned she had gone. An insane conceit made me want to hurt her. I wanted to break her spirit—to make her believe in me first: then I would try to alter my views. Already I could see the truth of her remarks. I brooded, and my vitality was sapped. My pride, or conceit, faltered. Then, when I determined to crave her pity, I found she had gone away to Devon with her father. I wrote a bitter letter to her and left my home. I never wrote again to Louise, nor did she write to me. Not for a year. Then she wrote to me. And I came back. I was already a changed man. Her letter was short, and in it she said that she wished and prayed for my happiness. I came back humbly to see her——”
He put a shaky hand up to his forehead, wet with moisture. His anguish was unbearable. I looked away to the yellow houses with their blue-gray roofs of slate; another tram passed in the High Street.
“She had died,” he muttered. “Little sweet Louise had pined away and become ill. One day she got wet through and developed rapid consumption. She was only eighteen—a child. They said it was consumption, but I knew better. I killed her. I, the self-flaunted idealist, my eyes brimming for humanity, had neglected every one around me. I only realised it then. She had known it all the while, because love was a far holier and greater thing to her than it was to me. I thought because I had wanted to pour out my heart’s blood at her feet that therefore my love was not selfish, but real, divine! Ah, what did I know about love! I went to the churchyard and saw the mounded grave with a simple stone at the head, and it seemed to me that she was near, wearing the print frock and standing among the buttercups that reflected a gold vapour about her, her eyes dark with a shadow. The maiden eyes, the eyes soft with love, and yet so sad, regarded me, and so sharp was the impression of her standing there that I could hear her pleading, ‘Julien, for my sake now, Julien!’ In the churchyard I stood alone, looking at her, while in an orchard near the blossom was shaken by the fluttering of goldfinches. Spring was in the hearts of the wild birds I loved, but my heart was dead. What was there left? To recreate that love and cruelty, and write out of my sorrow and folly! Greater than all written art is life and happiness: a simple living with a beloved and the joy of children’s young voices. By the grassy mound I stayed with the shadows. My heart was broken, the more irretrievably because I had broken it myself. Remorse, remorse!”
Memory ceased. Again the dry whisper of the leaf overbore the wintry solitude and song-silence in that little wood in Whitefoot Lane, where the bark of the trees was stripped, and all undergrowth was trampled down. The green woodpeckers would laugh no more in spring: only a few poor wind-flowers and bluebells would tell of past loveliness. The pale visitant was gone, and with no sound of footfall.
The leaf spun insistently as the wind passed wearily onwards, and beside me the long green grasses held their drops of light-laden water, nor was there any mark as of feet having pressed there, nor any trail leading away.
With a vague mournfulness I turned and went along the miry path to the roadway, where a tattered fence gaped forlornly. The land would be sold, the trees cut down, and useful houses erected. Perhaps the spirit of the dead haunted that wilderness of torn branches and charred fire-circles, to find rest only where all was changed. Never again would I go back among those poor trees, where in the cruel days of youth sweet hopes had been crushed like a wood-anemone under careless and unknowing feet.