Over the River eotc-3

by John Galsworthy

  “The reception was held on the terrace and lawn; everybody came, schoolchildren and all, a quaint mix-up, but jolly, it seemed to me. I didn’t know I was so fond of the old place. However much one may believe in levelling-up chances, there’s something about old places. They can’t be re-created if they’re once let slip, and they focus landscape in a queer kind of way. Some villages and landscapes seem to have no core—you can’t explain why, but they feel hollow, and shallow and flat. A real old place puts heart into a neighbourhood. If the people who live in it are not just selfish pigs, it means a lot in a quiet way to people who have no actual ownership in it. The Grange is a sort of anchor to this neighbourhood. I doubt if you’d find a single villager, however poor, who grudged its existence, or wouldn’t feel the worse for its ruination. Generations of love and trouble, and goodness knows not too much money, have been spent on it, and the result is something very hand-made and special. Everything’s changing, and has got to change, no doubt, and how to save the old that’s worth saving, whether in landscape, houses, manners, institutions, or human types, is one of our greatest problems, and the one that we bother least about. We save our works of art, our old furniture, we have our cult—and a strong one—of ‘antiques,’ and not even the most go-ahead modern thought objects to that. Why not the same throughout our social life? ‘The old order changeth’—yes, but we ought to be able to preserve beauty and dignity, and the sense of service, and manners—things that have come very slowly, and can be made to vanish very fast if we aren’t set on preserving them somehow. Human nature being what it is, nothing seems to me more futile than to level to the ground and start again. The old order had many excrescences, and was by no means ‘all werry capital,’ but, now that the housebreakers are in, one does see that you can smash in an hour what has taken centuries to produce; and that, unless you can see your way pretty clearly to replace what admittedly wasn’t perfect with something more perfect, you’re throwing human life back instead of advancing it. The thing is to pick on what’s worth preserving, though I don’t say there’s very much that is. Well, that’s all very portentous! To come back to Dinny—they’re going to spend their honeymoon in Shropshire, round about where Dornford comes from. Then they come back here for a bit, then settle in on Campden Hill. I hope this weather will last for them. Honeymooning in wet weather, especially when one is keener on the other than the other is on the one, should be very trying. Dinny’s ‘going away’ frock, you may like to know, was blue, and suited her not quite down to the ground. We had a minute together. I gave her your love, and she sent you hers, and said: ‘Well, I’m very nearly over, Uncle dear. Wish me luck!’ I felt like piping my eye. Over what? Well, anyway, if wishes for luck will help, she goes wreathed with them; but all that kissing business is hard to get through. Con and Liz took theirs down at the car. I felt rather a brute, looking at their faces when she’d gone. They went away in Dornford’s car, with himself driving. After that I confess that I slunk off. They’re all right, I know, but it didn’t feel like it. There’s such cursed finality about a wedding, however easy divorce is or may become; besides, Dinny is not the sort who would take someone who loved her and then let him down; it’s the old-fashioned ‘for better for worse’ there, but I think it’ll be ‘for better’—in the long run, anyway. I sneaked out of sight into the orchard and then up through the fields to the woods. I hope it was as gorgeous a day with you as it was here. These beech-woods on the slopes are more beautiful than the careful beech-clumps they plant on downs, though even those have a sort of temple-like effect, in spite of being meant as landmarks or to give shade to sheep. I can assure you that wood about half-past five was enchanted. I went up the slope and sat down and just enjoyed it. Great shifting shafts of sunlight coming in below and splashing the trunks; and ever-so-green cool spaces between—only one word for it, holy. The trees, many of them, go up branchless for a long way, and some of the trunks looked almost white. Not much undergrowth and very little ‘life’ except jays and a brown squirrel. When you’re in a wood as lovely as that, and think of death duties and timber, your heart turns over and over as if you’d supped entirely off Spanish onions. Two hundred years in His sight may be as yesterday, but in mine I confess they’re like eternity. These woods are no longer ‘shot,’ and anybody can come into them. I suppose the young folk do—what a place to wander about in, lovering! I lay down in a patch of sunlight and thought of you; and two small grey wood-doves perched about fifty yards off and talked cosily to each other, so that I could have done with my field-glasses. Willow-herb and tansy were out where trees have come down and been cleared away—foxgloves don’t seem to flourish round here. It was very restful, except that one ached a bit because it was green and beautiful. Queer, that ‘beauty’ ache! Lurking consciousness of mortality, perhaps knowledge that all things must slip away from one in time, and the greater their beauty the greater the loss in store! Mistake in our make-up, that. We ought to feel: The greater the earth’s beauty, the more marvellous the screen of light and wind and foliage, the lovelier nature, in fact—the deeper and sweeter our rest in her will be. All very puzzling! I know the sight of a dead rabbit out in a wood like that affects me more than it does in a poulterer’s shop. I passed one as I was going back—killed by a weasel; its soft limpness seemed saying: ‘Pity I’m dead!’ Death may be a good thing, but life’s a better. A dead shape that’s still a shape moves one horribly. Shape IS life, and when life’s gone one can’t see why shape should remain even for the little time it does. I’d have liked to stay and see the moon come up and peer about in there, and slowly fill it all up with ghostly glistening; then I might have caught the feeling that shape lives on in rarefied form, and all of us, even the dead rabbits and birds and moths, still move and have their being—which may be the truth, for all I know or ever shall. But dinner was at eight, so I had to come away with the light still green and golden—there flows alliteration again like a twopenny brook! Outside, on the terrace, I met Dinny’s spaniel, Foch. Knowing his history, it was like meeting a banshee—not that he was howling; but it reminded me sharply of what Dinny has been through. He was sitting on his haunches and looking down at nothing, as dogs—especially spaniels—will when things are beyond them, and the one and only scent is no more, for the time being. He’ll go with them, of course, to Campden Hill when they come back. I went up and had a bath, and dressed, and stood at my window, listening to the drone of a tractor still cutting corn, and getting a little drunk on whiffs from the honeysuckle that climbs and flowers round my window. I see now what Dinny meant by: ‘Over.’ Over the river that she used to dream she couldn’t cross. Well, all life is crossing rivers, or getting drowned on the way. I hope—I believe—she’s touching shore. Dinner was just like dinner always is—we didn’t talk of her, or mention our feelings in any way. I played Clare a game of billiards—she struck me as softer and more attractive than I’ve ever seen her. And then I sat up till past midnight with Con, in order, apparently, that we might say nothing. They’ll miss her a lot, I’m afraid.

  “The silence in my room, when I got up here at last, was stunning, and the moonlight almost yellow. The moon’s hiding, now, behind one of the elms, and the evening star shining above a dead branch. A few other stars are out, but very dim. It’s a night far from our time, far even from our world. Not an owl hooting, but the honeysuckle still sweet. And so, my most dear, here endeth the tale! Good night!

  “Your ever loving

  “ADRIAN.”

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 7dbbcf2c-f522-4329-88ee-32555912ff9e

  Document version: 1

  Document creation date: 2006-06-21

  Created using: FB Tools software

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  olimo

  Source URLs :

  http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/g/galsworthy/john/

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