Edward Thomas - The Heart of England

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Of the five songs printed at the end of this book, only La Fille du Roi has been published before, I believe. The Holm Bank Hunting Song and Poor Old Horse were sung by competitors for folk-song prizes at the annual Westmoreland Musical Festival, and I owe them to the kindness of Mr. George Rathbone. The Mowing Song and Mary, come into the Field, were given to me by friends.

Edward Thomas.

Sunday afternoon had perfected the silence of the suburban street. Every one had gone into his house to tea; none had yet started for church or promenade; the street was empty, except for a white pigeon that pecked idly in the middle of the road and once leaned upon one wing, raised the other so as to expose her tender side and took the rain deliciously; so calm and unmolested was the hour.

The houses were in unbroken rows and arranged in pairs, of which one had a bay window on the ground floor and one had not. Some had laurels in front; some had names. But they were so much alike that the street resembled a great storehouse where yards of goods, all of one pattern, are exposed, all with that painful lack of character that makes us wish to rescue one and take it away and wear it, and soil it, and humanise it rapidly.

Soon a boy of nine years old came out of one house and stood at the gate. At first he moved briskly and looked in every direction as if expecting to see some one whom he knew; but in a little while he paused and merely looked towards the pigeon, so fixedly that perhaps he saw it not. The calm silenced him, took him into its bosom, yet also depressed him. Had he dared, he would have shouted or run; he would have welcomed the sound of a piano, of a dog barking, of a starling coldly piping. While he still paused an old man rounded the corner of the street and came down in the roadway towards him.

The old man was small and straight, and to his thin figure the remains of a long black coat and grey trousers adhered with singular grace. You could not say that he was well dressed, but rather that he was in the penultimate stage of a transformation like Dryopes or Daphnes, which his pale face had not altogether escaped. His neglected body seemed to have grown this grey rind that flapped like birch bark. Had he been born in it the clothing could not have been more apt. The eye travelled from these clothes with perfect satisfactionas from a branch to its fruitto his little crumpled face and its partial crust of hair. Yet he walked. One hand on a stick, the other beneath a basket of watercress, he walked with quick, short steps, now and then calling out unexpectedly, as if in answer to a question, Watercresses! No one interrupted him. He was hungry; he nibbled at pieces of cress with his gums, and so kneaded his face as if it had been dough. He passed the boy; he stooped, picked up a rotten apple, and in the act frightened the pigeon, which rose, as the boy saw, and disappeared.

The boy raised his head and watched. He saw the old manas in an eloquent book and not with his own usually indolent eyesand thought him a traveller. Yes! that was how a traveller lookeda strange, free man, hatless, walking in the road, ignoring puddles, talking carelessly to himself; from the countrysuch was his stick and the manner of his clothes; with something magnificent and comely in his hoariness; sleeping the boy knew not where, perhaps not at all, but going on and on, certainly not to church, but perhaps to places with mountains, icebergs, houses in the branches of trees, great waters, camels, monkeys, crocodiles, parrots, ivory, cannibals, curved swords. And the boy flushed to think that the quiet street was an avenue to all the East, the Pole, the Amazon ... to dark men who wondered about the sunlight, the wind, the rain, and whence they came ... to towns set down in the heart of forests and lonely as ships at sea. But whatever he was, the old man was more blessed than any one whom the boy had ever seen.