The Blessing of Pan Read online

  SO ended the surge and tumult of those troubles, at war with the rapid host of a myriad thoughts, whose battlefield was the quiet of a clergyman’s mind. Nothing remains of those sorrows and agitations, that are more real to any mind in trouble than ought that the eye can see; not even a furrow in Anwrel’s cheery face seems to hint them to the observant. Nothing remains for me now to tell of but visible things.

  The village adhered to their worship at the Old Stones. Every midsummer’s day at dawn they sacrificed there, pouring the blood of a bull all over the long flat stone, that the savour of the blood might go up on first airs of the sunniest day, to be snuffed by whatever might lurk in the vast space of man’s ignorance.

  Other rites too they held there. There, both crowned with roses from Mrs. Airland’s garden, and garlanded with wild thyme, Lily and Tommy were wed one summer’s evening according to the rites of Pan. Some rumour of it strayed beyond the valley, and caused pain in certain quarters, and was fortunately soon hushed up. Indeed the listless content of the villagers, and the very able handling of their case, whenever there was risk of its causing attention, soon shut any news of them off from the places that matter; and the wider interests, the affairs of moment, soon went their way without them.

  Tommy remained their druid, their priest or inspirer, whatever be the right word: they merely called him the Piper.

  After a while the Bishop, with the consent of Convocation in Arches, and the approval of the Dean of Closes, amalgamated the parish with that of Hooton-on-Uplands. And it was understood that the Rector of Hooton should ask his curate to go to Wolding; “to run over to Wolding” were the exact words, for the arrangement was purely informal; in order to hold a service there at any time that might seem needful, indeed at any time at all. Anwrel was not unfrocked. It was felt, well, it was felt that such extreme action should only be taken in cases that merited such a measure. For some while he lived on at the vicarage. Then he and Augusta built themselves a hut nearer to Wold Hill, so as to be more amongst the people that were all the world to them.

  A wonderful quiet, a quiet you could feel if you ever strayed that way, some fragment of the quiet that the world had lost, came down upon Wolding. Tommy Duffin’s curious music that lured one away from the present, and that then seemed to wake up old memories that nobody guessed were there, seems to have come at a time when something sleeping within us first guessed that the way by which we were then progressing t’wards the noise of machinery and the clamour of sellers, amidst which we live today, was a wearying way, and they turned from it. And turning from it they turned away from the folk that were beginning to live as we do.

  Not a soul saw them outside the valley of Wolding. They had felt that if they did not break away quickly they would never do it at all. So there they lived, and you never saw one of them.

  After a fashion they ploughed and sowed. Indeed, had you seen them in the ploughing season, you had not at once seen the difference between them and other men. But birches slipped every year from the edges of woods, and began to grow, at first like fairy children, that you barely saw unless you were looking for magic. Then a few years went by, and there they were standing at the end of a field, with a silvery light on their leaves enchanting the green, and holding that part of the field for what was there before ploughshares. And in a little while you must have seen, had you strayed at all in those fields, that there was a certain neighbourliness permitted to any wild sapling, that showed that no industrious farmers dwelt there. They did not take deliberately to skins and untanned leather, but merely patched old clothes with these things, or whatever came handy, rather than trade with the world beyond, that was changing so fast away from them every year. They worked in a simple way at all the crafts that are necessary, and lived by their agriculture, though the woods were encroaching slowly all the while. For instance a clump of privet dwelt just at the edge of a wood, getting light all day from the South, and had never seemed to spread, so far as anyone noticed; but now it was doubling in size with every few years, and every North wind that blew seemed to carry it further; and when ten or twelve years had gone the fritillaries found it scattered all over the slope, that was once only golden grass in the glint of the sun. And of course the wayfaring tree came too, with its bouquet-like blossoms, and its scarlet berries aflame at the end of the year. In flat fields the plough still held back such encroachments as these, but wherever a difficult slope leaned to the sunlight these things of the wild came back. And even juniper began to appear. And thorn, of course, almost came leaping forward to regain what was lost to the wild for the last few centuries. It would seize a field and dot it with separate bushes, almost as though some wild plan had made the disorderly lines: and the bushes towered upward with none to harm them, till the flash of their green in April added a light to the Earth, and their whiteness in June was a splendour. Among them the nightingales sang all through May, the moment the blackbirds had ended, singing on through the dark till they woke the cuckoo. To such fields the wild clematis came, crawling and clambering, and joining bush to bush, till the place became a thicket too dense for man, and many a little creature could quietly rejoice in deep shadow or sing its triumph in sunlight from some high twig. And not only in upland fields was the wild returning, while man and his ways fell back on straiter defences; but even here and there in the village itself there were apple-trees dropping back at the edges of orchards to earlier and wilder memories, becoming more like crab-apples year after year; and lilac and laburnum leaned out over walls as though they too would stray away to the wild. And, by walls and by wire and by hedge, everything seemed to be pushing at man’s narrowed defences. Walls bulged and leaned awry; wire blackened; wire-netting fell into gaps that the rabbits found; gaps widened, and wire-netting at last would fall in showers, rustling on to dead leaves, if anyone touched it, and handfuls of it could almost be crumpled away. Hedges alone stood strong; but who could say if they were for man or the enemy?

  They put up no more wire, for they had none in the village and had no intercourse with the towns beyond: relics of it gripped by old trees, whose trunks had grown against it till they enclosed it, remained to show the lines man had formerly held. Wild roses, once an adornment of the lanes that ran through Wolding, now shone high over them, and curved inward and met, and sank with their own weight, and mixed with new tendrils slowly soaring below, till the mass of briar held the lanes against man. These and the clematis were slowly closing in Wolding.

  Foxes and badgers multiplied. And the whole valley became a draw for the Ulford Hounds. It was soon the surest draw they had in the East Downlands. But in a year or so they gave up coming there. There was something about the people that they found queer. A new member of the Hunt, dining at the Master’s house one evening and listening to talk about meets on the next card, as a young member of Parliament might listen to his leader telling plans for the coming session, would say, perhaps: “What about Wolding?”

  “Wolding?” the Master would say.

  “Yes,” says the young man. “It looked a good sort of place.”

  “Oh, well,” says the Master, “I don’t think we’ll go there.”

  And, likely as not, no more than that will be said. Or, if the young sportsman has come only lately into the Ulford country, he may ask, “No foxes there?”

  “Oh, the foxes are all right,” the Master will say.

  I have never heard of it being much discussed by any that hunt with the Ulford. Even a direct question to any of them will draw little enough information. If you said to one of them straight, “Is there anything wrong about Wolding?” he would be likely to say something like: “I don’t know about anything wrong. We don’t go there, that’s all.”

  It isn’t that they never discuss queer things; but there is something about the people of Wolding that seems so very queer to them that they don’t know where they would get if they once discussed it at all. I doubt if they even think of it.

  And then there is the Bishop’s in
fluence, spread so widely through his diocese, and always for good, that there is not a calling or occupation in the East Downlands that can be said to be quite unaffected by it. He set that influence from the very first against the Ulford Hounds drawing Wolding, and quiet and restrained though that influence was, it achieved no less success than his more direct commands in the matter of the two summer outings of the Sons of the Church Bicycling Union.

  So the world came our way, t’wards the things that we know today, while Wolding seemed to go by a path of its own, back and back to times that one thought were done with for ever. And the more they went backward, the more Nature all round them, with sprouting and singing and prowling, seemed to welcome them on their journey. Young limes seemed to shoot up taller and greener there than they did in the same time elsewhere; dawn seemed to vibrate in Wolding with a denser chorus of blackbirds than in any place that I know; and foxes slipped by at evening near to houses, with a certain air that may have been only my fancy, but that seemed to imply a knowledge that man was coming their way.

  At first a few of the bearded Wolding men would come quietly, and even furtively, on market days into Seldham: sugar was one of the things they seemed most to need of the world that lay beyond Wold Hill. But as soon as they had got sufficient bee-hives they came no longer even for this. Then perhaps no more than two or three times a year a man would slip over the hill to some small town of the downs, to bring back tobacco or to arrange for oranges to be left at a certain point of the Wolding road. The road through Wolding still remained open, if somewhat untidy and narrowed by riotous hedges; but none of those living outside who knew its story came near the place any more, and the few that chanced that way and drove through on some long journey got curious impressions of it that, vague though they were, decided them to go home by some other way.

  They had sufficient cattle there, and apples and plenty of pears, some strawberries in their gardens and a profusion of wild ones all over the slopes of the hills, and they cultivated enough crops for their needs, and something more that they stored in their great black barns, built of old beams and flint, and with which they might have bartered had they wished, but they kept themselves to themselves.

  Skegland still sold groceries, if he chanced to be in his shop when anyone entered, but he always seemed surprised to see a customer. His supplies grew honester, and safer to eat. After a while he gave up taking money, and merely exchanged what someone wanted for something he wanted himself.

  Perkin stayed on, and never left Wolding again. What he had found there it would be hard to say. Evidently content. But as the result of what search or answer the content had come, how could one tell? Those wits were driven too far for us to keep track of them. Of the furthest planets, and the bleak spaces between, and of stars immeasurably beyond our own little group of worlds, he had perpetually sought answers, driven on to question them by a fire in his spirit lit long ago by some grief. To deride him were easy; to keep pace with those wandering wits and say what they sought, and what at last they had found, were a task for some practising philosopher with ample leisure for work. He cut very good hazel-sticks and fastened light axe-heads to them, that he made himself out of flint, and there was scarcely a child in Wolding that had not one of them: indeed those that hadn’t an axe of chipped flint had his promise of one before the end of the year.

  In Perkin’s content Anwrel shared; indeed, after those months of bewilderment and disappointment, he found the restful days that men often look forward to during times of stress, and seldom find, for the world still urges onward though their time of struggle be over; but in Wolding nothing urged onward, and Anwrel found those quiet years of which many dream. To the village he remained the prophet or seer, the first of the men that were as themselves, Tommy Duffin being something apart from all, a being they did not dare to seek to explain. Indeed, Anwrel’s weary perplexities being over, there was no one that had any clue to the powers of Tommy Duffin, except old Mrs. Tichener. And she, in her great old age, kept her secret darkly, taking it with her down the declining years, saying nothing of pipes or piper; but everyone saw, even through the veil of her silence, that she treasured a wisdom deeper than all their guesses. Mr and Mrs. Duffin had no doubt more data to go on; but somehow or other had not the knack of putting it all together.

  Mrs. End had been right about the children requiring no more arithmetic, and came by much credit for that one remark, for it was of the nature of prophecy. She taught on still at the school, still with the old regularity of certain subjects in certain hours; but the list of a single day taken at random will show how far she had gone with all the rest of them, away from the things that are of importance to us.

  9 to 10 snaring.

  10 to 11 jam-making.

  11 to 12 soaking and cleaning rabbit-skins.

  1.30 to 2 chopping.

  On other days fishing was taught and every now and then boot-making.

  A longevity came to these people, till it almost seemed as though Death and modern commercialism, in the rush of their work, had forgotten Wolding together; and all the little community seemed surprised when they learned one day that Mrs. Airland was dead. So they put her into the trunk of a hollow tree, which they closed by wrapping it round and round with oziers, and carried her over the hill, and three times round the grave circle of ancient stones; while the pipes of Tommy Duffin uttered what none could say, of their thoughts that hovered reluctant to leave the past, where they crossed and recrossed old memories of Mrs. Airland like butterflies in their play, and then of their guesses peering by few lights into the future, to add their wonder to all that wanders lost in its dusk. And then they buried her just in the edge of the wood, above the field in which those hoary stones had gathered to watch the passing procession of centuries; and tall mysterious fox-gloves stood beside her for ever, for the wood was just on the line where the rich clay tips the chalk.

  To this queer community recruits came rarely from the lands beyond Wold Hill, from the world and the ways we know; rarely, but yet they came. For those pipes of Tommy Duffin playing often in summer evenings would drift their music perhaps a mile on still air, perhaps much further, till the notes would come to some hill beyond Wolding’s woods, where a picnic party from London would be sitting on a Sunday afternoon, throwing broken bottles for fun in the mint and thyme. It had to be a still evening; and even then not a sound would come so far but to ears that, weary with the same old mumble that some machine told over and over and over, were listening for something utterly strange and new. To such ears, as they leaned towards it, that music might faintly reach from where Tommy Duffin played on the slopes of Wolding. After that some girl would slip away alone from the lemonade and gramophone, and was seldom found till long after; and if they ever found her at all she would no longer seem to understand cities. And tired shopwalkers, sick of salesmanship, would sometimes find their way there, pushing through saplings and briar on a Bank-holiday, never to leave the valley for London any more.

  One intercourse they had with the outer world; for gipsies came and went by the one road running through Wolding, and camped awhile and passed on again, as though nothing to wonder at had happened at all. These folk soon picked up the knack of bringing whatever the people of Wolding needed from the world that lay over the hill; and any news that ever came into Wolding was always brought by the gipsies. To the tune that Tommy Duffin played on his pipes they would listen gravely and silently, but it never so utterly held them as to keep them for ever in Wolding: it seemed rather as though they had some mystery of their own that danced slowly on before them down sunny roads, and that would not abdicate even for the wonder there was in those pipes. Sure of a welcome always, they often came into Wolding, and there the Wolding folk would gather about them, to hear of the ways of the world they had forsaken; for, little though any wished to follow those ways, they found a quaintness in what the world said and did, which the gipsies never failed to increase in the telling. Thus news reached Wolding se
veral times in the year, and the cunning gipsies would get good fruit or com in exchange.

  And though some things altered in Wolding very much, some altered scarcely at all. To the same eaves the same swallows came on the same date all their lives, a date varying only a little by our almanacs, and varying not an hour by those invisible tides on which Spring sails northward in full view of the swallows. And when Summer ended they twittered and told the same story, and went the old way. And ploughing and sowing and harvest all went their round as of old, the furrows pointing the same way up the field, the sower singing slowly the same song as he scattered the grain, the harvest carried in with thankfulness to the unknowable, and all the old women gleaning. And village festivals, the same year after year, organised by Anwrel with the assistance of Hibbuts, and made solemn by the music of Tommy’s pipes of reed.

  All trivial things, it may be said; unchanging of course, but too trivial for record. Yet it was amongst such that the people of Wolding dwelt, and they seemed to find amongst silent unfoldings and ripenings, that are the great occasions of Nature, enough to replace those more resounding changes that are the triumph of man’s ingenuity, and which we have gained and they lost.

  THE END