Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  ‘The rugged mountain’s scanty cloak

  Was dwarfish shrubs of birch and oak,

  With shingles bare, and cliffs between,

  And patches bright of bracken green,

  And heather black that waved so high

  It held the copse in rivalry.’

  Out of the ambush of copse and heather and bracken had started up at a chieftain’s whistle—’wild as the scream of the curlew’ — a host of mountaineers, while the chieftain revealed himself to the enemy who had imagined him alone:

  ‘And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu.’

  ‘What is the matter, Arthur?’ asked Harry when I came to this line. I answered him with a look of trembling contempt. The whole scene so fascinated me — I so thrilled with admiration at everything done by the Highland chieftain — that his magic whistle at last pierced me to the marrow with exquisite joy. In my excitement I said the words, ‘And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu,’ aloud, yet not loud enough to make anything but a husky muttering audible. I was choking and blushing with pleasant pains and with a desire to pass them on to another, myself not lacking glory as the discoverer. Hence my muttering those words aloud: hence the contempt of my answer to Harry, upon not being instantly and enthusiastically understood. The contempt, however, was not satisfying.... I, too, wished that I possessed a tower upon a mountain where I could live for ever in a state of poetic pain. Therefore I went out silently, saying no good night, not seeing Philip again.

  Fog and cold cured me rapidly. On that wretched night I could no more go on thinking of a tower on a mountain than I could jump into a pond. I had to run to get warm. Then I thought of the book once more: I recovered my pleasure and my pride. The fog, pierced by some feeble sparkles of lamps, and dim glows of windows from invisible houses, the silence, broken by the dead leaf that rustled after me, made the world a shadowy vast stage on which I was the one real thing. The solitary grandeur was better than any tower, and at the end of my run, on entering again among people and bright lights, I could flit out of it as easily as possible, which was more than Morgan could do, since to escape from his tower he had to die.

  CHAPTER XVI. THE HOUSE OF THE DAYS OF THE YEAR

  LEWIS never did raise a tower in the Wilderness. His towers were in the air. A wish, with him, was seldom father to any deed. I think he expected the wish of itself to create; or if not, he was at least always angered when the nature of things proved to be against him. He would not have been unduly astonished, and would have been wildly grateful, if he had seen looming through the fog next morning a tower such as he desired. But except on paper he never did. As he drew it, the tower was tall and slender as the tallest and slenderest factory chimney, more like a pillar for St Simeon Stylites than a castle in Spain. It would have been several times the height of the elms in the Wilderness which he had furiously refused to take into his service. It was to be climbed within by a spiral staircase, each step apparently having its own little window. Thus it was riddled by windows.

  Now, if this idea had come to Philip he would have executed it. As it was, Lewis’s drawing delighted him. He liked all those windows that made it look as if it were a dead stem rotting away. ‘But,’ said he, ‘I know a house better than that, with a window for every day of the year. It would be just the thing for you, Lewis, because it is built without hands, without bricks, stones, cement, or any expense whatever.... It was only a dream,’ he continued, one day as he and I were going down the long street which took us almost straight out into Our Country. But he did not really think it no more than a dream. He had seen it many times, a large, shadowy house, with windows which he had never counted, but knew to be as many as the days of the year, no more, no less. The house itself was always dark, with lights in some of the windows, never, perhaps, in all.

  The strange thing was that Philip believed this house must actually exist. Perhaps, I suggested, it was hidden among the trees of our woods, like several other houses. No: he dismissed this as fancy. His house was not a fancy. It lay somewhere in a great city, or at the verge of one. On his first visit he had approached it by long wanderings through innumerable, unknown and deserted streets, following a trail of white pebbles like the children in the fairy tale. In all those streets he passed nobody and heard no sound; nor did this surprise him, in spite of the fact that he felt the houses to be thronged with people. Suddenly out of the last narrow street he came as it were on a wall of darkness, like night itself. Into this he was stepping forward when he saw just beneath and before him a broad, black river, crossed by a low bridge leading over to where, high up, a light beamed in the window of an invisible building. When he began to cross the bridge he could see that it was the greatest house he had ever beheld. It was a house that might be supposed to contain ‘many mansions.’

  ‘You could not make a house like that one out of this whole street,’ said Philip. ‘It stretched across the world, but it was a house.’ On the other side of the river it seemed still equally far off. Birds flying to and fro before it never rose up over it, nor did any come from the other side. Philip hastened forward to reach the house. But the one light went out and he awoke.

  Philip used to look out for this house when he was crossing the bridges in London. He scanned carefully the warehouses and factories rising out of the water, in long rows with uncounted windows, that made him wonder what went on behind them. With this material, he said, a magician could make a house like the one he was in search of. Once, when he got home in the evening from London, he was confident that his house lay between Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Bridge, but next time he was there he was dead against any such suggestion. A factory on the edge of a tract of suburb waste fulfilled his conditions for an hour at another time. He had been thrilled, too, by a photograph shown to him by Mr Stodham — of an ancient palace standing at the foot of a desolate mountain in the remote South.

  When we were walking together towards the country Philip used to look, as a matter of course, down every side street to right or left, as he always looked up dark alleys in London. Nor was he content to look once down any one street, lest he should miss some transformation or transfiguration. As we began to get clear of London, and houses were fewer and all had long front gardens, and shops ceased, Philip looked ahead now and then as well as from side to side. Beyond the wide, level fields and the tall Lombardy poplars bounding them, there was nothing, but there was room for the house. Fog thickened early in the afternoon over our vacant territories, but we saw only the trees and a Gypsy tent under a hedge.

  Next day Philip came home feverish from school, and was put to bed in the middle of the pale sunny afternoon. He lay happily stretched out with his eyes fixed on a glass of water near the window. It flickered in the light.... He saw the black river gleaming as when a candle for the first time illuminates a lake in the bowels of a mountain. There was the house beyond the river. Six or seven of its windows were lit up, one large one low down, the rest small, high up, and, except two of them, wide apart. Now and then, at other windows here and there, lights appeared momentarily, like stars uncovered by rapid clouds.... A lofty central door slowly swung open. A tiny figure, as solitary as the first star in the sky, paused at the threshold, to be swallowed up a moment later in darkness. At the same moment Philip awoke with a cry, knowing that the figure was himself.

  After this Philip was not so confident of discovering the house. Yet he was more than ever certain that it existed, that all the time of the intervals between his visits it was somewhere. I told him the story about Irem Dhat El’Imad, the Terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son of Ad, King of the World, which Aurelius had read to me. Philip was pleased with the part where the geometricians and sages, labourers and artificers of the King search over all the earth, until they come to rivers and an illimitable plain, and choose it for the site of the palace which was three hundred years building. But he said that this story was not true. His own great house never disappeared, he said; it was he that disappeared. By this time he had become so f
amiliar with the house that he probably passed hardly a day without a sight of it, sleeping or waking. He was familiar with its monotonous front, the many storeys of not quite regular diminishing windows. It always seemed to lie out beyond a tract of solitude, silence, and blackness; it was beyond the black river; it was at the edge of the earth. In none of his visits could he get round to the other side. Several times again, as on that feverish afternoon, he saw himself entering through the lofty doorway, never emerging. What this self (for so he called it, touching his breast) saw inside the door he never knew. That self which looked on could never reach the door, could not cross the space between it and the river, though it seemed of no formidable immensity. Many times he set out to cross and go in at the other door after the other self, but could not. Finally he used to imagine that if once he penetrated to the other side he would see another world.

  Once or twice Philip and I found ourselves in streets which he thought were connected with his first journey, but he vainly tried to remember how. He even used to say that at a certain number — once it was lived some one who could help. When another dream took him along the original route of streets he told me that they were now thronged with people going with or against him. They were still all about him as he emerged from the streets in sight of the house, where every window was blazing with lights as he had never seen it before. The crowd was making towards the light across the hitherto always desolate bridge. Nevertheless, beyond the river, in the space before the house, he was alone as before. He resolved to cross the space. The great door ahead was empty; no other self at least had the privilege denied to him. He stood still, looking not at the door, but at the windows and at the multitudes passing behind them. His eyes were fixed on the upper windows and on each face in turn that appeared. Some faces he recognised without being able to give a name to one. They must have been people whom he had encountered in the street, and forgotten and never seen again until now. Apparently not one of them saw him standing out there, in the darkness, looking up at them. He was separated from them as from the dead, or as a dead man might be from the living. The moment he lowered his head to look towards the door, the dream was over.

  More than once afterwards, when Lewis had ceased to think of his tower, Philip saw the hundreds of windows burning in the night above the black river, and saw the stream of faces at the windows; but he gave up expecting to see the house by the light of our sun or moon. He had even a feeling that he would rather not discover it, that if he were to enter it and join those faces at the windows he might not return, never stand out in the dark again and look up at the house.

  CHAPTER XVII. PHILIP AND THE OUTLAWS OF THE ISLAND

  THAT winter when Philip was ill, for the first time, I used to spend every evening at Abercorran House, chiefly upstairs, reading aloud or talking. I was supposed to entertain him, but he did most of the entertaining. Out of his own head or out of books he told me hundreds of tales; in either case they were very much his own. I cannot imitate him. For example, he would always bring his characters before himself and his listener by comparing them to persons known to both. When he was well and out of doors he would pick out a man or woman passing us, or at a window, for a comparison. ‘This Palomides,’ he would say, ‘was like that butcher, but dressed differently: you could see what good legs he had.’ Another was ‘like my brother Roland, and if he had been alive now he could have jumped over spiked railings up to his own shoulder, though he was not a little man.’ The Icelandic Thorbeorg was ‘like our Jessie: only she would use a knife, and she had fair hair.’ A certain villain was ‘a scoundrel, but he had a face like Higgs.’ The man who resembled Roland was an Icelander, Haurd by name, whom Philip called Roland throughout the tale. Thorbeorg was his sister. This was the tale: Haurd was a head taller than most men, and he had grand hair. He was clever, strong, and bold. He swam better than all others, and his eyesight was wonderful. But he was a touchy man. Not being asked in the proper manner to his sister Thurid’s wedding feast, he refused to go when the bridegroom, Illuge, came on purpose to fetch him. Yet a little after, when Geir, his own foster-brother, asked him to go just to please him, he went. However, at the feast he treated Illuge lightly; refused the present of a shield — accepted a ring, but with the remark that in his opinion being a brother-in-law would not mean much to Illuge. Hearing Haurd say such things in a lazy way for no apparent reason and taken aback by it, he did not answer. As soon as he got home, Haurd gave the ring to his sister, Thorbeorg, bidding her remember him when he was dead. Soon afterwards, with Geir and his other foster-brother, Helge, who was a tramp’s son, he left home.

  Twenty years before that, when Thorbeorg’s mother Signy was married to Grimkel, her brother Torfe took offence in the same way, because he was not consulted. Signy was very fond of him, and it was at his house that she gave birth to Thorbeorg and died the same day. Grief for his sister made him hate the child; he cast it out of the house, and chance alone saved its life. Thus Grimkel had a quarrel with Torfe over Signy’s marriage portion and the injury to his child, Thorbeorg.

  Fifteen years Haurd stayed away from home. He got renown as a fighter. He won honour, wealth, and an earl’s daughter, Helga, for a wife. This Helga was as noble a lady as Thorbeorg.

  Geir was the first of the exiles to return. He went to take possession of the farm at Netherbottom, on the death of Grim, his father. Here now, with Geir, were living his old mother and Thorbeorg, Haurd’s sister. Perhaps Geir wished to marry Thorbeorg, but he was not the king of men she wanted, though he was honest and feared nothing; so he did not win her. She preferred one named Eindride, who came wooing her once in Geir’s absence. She was not in love with him, but her father, Grimkel, liked the match, and maybe she expected to be freer. When the wedding was over Grimkel consulted a witch about the future. Whatever she answered, it was bad, and the old man died that evening. Until his son, Haurd, came back, Grimkel’s property fell into the care of the two sons-in-law, Illuge and Eindride.

  Haurd came back with Helge, with Sigrod his uncle, Torfe’s foster-son, and thirty followers. The quarrel with Torfe and Illuge soon had an opportunity of growing. In a fit of anger Helge killed a boy for injuring a horse which belonged to Haurd. Haurd offered to atone for the crime to Ead, the boy’s father, but too late. Torfe, replied the man, had already listened to his complaint and was taking up the case. At this, Haurd drew his sword in fury and hewed the man in two and a servant with him. He burnt Ead’s homestead, his stores, and two women who were afraid to come out of hiding.

  Haurd would have liked to win over to his part his sister Thorbeorg’s husband, Eindride, but instead of going himself he sent Helge. If a good man had come, said Thorbeorg afterwards, things might have turned out differently. Eindride excused himself on account of an engagement with Illuge; not content to let this end the matter, he suggested that Haurd should come over himself. Helge turned upon him and taunted him with being a craven if he would not break that engagement with Illuge, but Eindride had nothing to add. All that Helge brought back to Haurd was that Eindride offered no help.

  Everyone being against them, Haurd and Helge were outlawed. They had to quit the homestead, and rather than leave it for Torfe, they burnt it and all the hay with it. They and the household took refuge at Geir’s house, Netherbottom. From here they raided the country on every side, carrying off whatever they wanted. Before long men gathered together to subdue them. Geir was for making a fort against the attack. Haurd, fearing that they would be starved out, proposed retreating to an impregnable islet which lay not far from land by a river’s mouth. Haurd prevailed and they took possession. The islet consisted of precipices surmounted by a single level platform, ‘not half the size of the Wilderness,’ from which one steep pathway led to the sea. With timber from Netherbottom, the outlaws built a hall on this platform; and it had underground passages. The islet was called Geir’s Holm, and they raided from it as they had done before, both craftily and boldly. Once on the islet they were safe from any att
ack. ‘It was the very place for Lewis,’ said Philip; ‘only there was no water in it, and no food unless there were sea-gulls’ eggs.’

  Many of the landless and outlawed men of Iceland attached themselves to Haurd and Geir, swearing to be faithful to these two and to one another, and to share in all labours. It was a law of Geir’s Holm that if a man was ill more than three nights he was to be thrown over the cliffs. The most that were on the island at one time was two hundred, the least eighty. Haurd, Geir, Sigrod, Helge, Thord Colt, and Thorgar Girdlebeard, were the chief men. The cruellest of all was Thorgar, and the readiest for every kind of wrongdoing.

  At last men met together to consider how they might stop the raiding. Thorbeorg would not be left behind by Eindride, though he warned her that she would hear nothing pleasant at the meeting. The crowd became silent as she entered, and she spoke immediately to some of the chief men — Here, Philip got up out of bed looking very grim while he uttered the words of Thorbeorg: ‘I know what you want to do. Very good. I cannot stop you by myself. But this I can do, and will — I will be the death of the man who kills Haurd....’ Philip stood entranced and still as a statue at the window, as if he could see her so long as he remained still. His weakness, however, made him totter, and he got into bed, saying: ‘She was magnificent. I would have done anything for her. She said nothing else. She rode away without waiting for an answer.’ Torfe advised swift and violent measures against the Islanders, but when Ref suggested that someone should put them off their guard by pretending that they were free to go where they wished and be at peace with all men, he thought well of the plan: in fact he said they should ride that very night to a place out of sight of the Islanders. Next day they saw Thorgar and Sigrod with twelve other outlaws coming for water. Twice their number were sent against them. Thorgar and seven others ran away. He formed a band of his own and was only killed after a long freedom. Sigrod and those who were left made a hard fight, but all were killed.