The Spirit Of The Place Seemed To
Be All Attention; The Wood Listened As I Went, And Held Its Breath
To Number My Footfalls.
One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves.
It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of
the open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon
the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the
wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to
be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller,
and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward,
and so shift my point of view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in
the wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and
gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I
advanced towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and
I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure
walls, and something like the tops of a rickyard. And sure enough,
a rickyard it proved to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with
the beech-woods growing almost to the door of it. Just before me,
however, as I came upon the path, the trees drew back and let in a
wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn. It was here that the
noises had their origin. More than a score of peacocks (there are
altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of peahens, and
a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary barn-
door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn
among the beeches. They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and
fro, and came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which
the surface was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird
guzzled his head along the ground after the scattered corn. The
clucking, cooing noise that had led me thither was formed by the
blending together of countless expressions of individual
contentment into one collective expression of contentment, or
general grace during meat. Every now and again a big peacock would
separate himself from the mob and take a stately turn or two about
the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon the rail, and there
shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with himself and what
he had to eat. It happened, for my sins, that none of these
admirable birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail.
Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then. But they had their
necks for all that; and by their necks alone they do as much
surpass all the other birds of our grey climate as they fall in
quality of song below the blackbird or the lark. Surely the
peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour and the
scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted
throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden,
have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and
support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not
quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a
studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these
melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would
have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all
the spring woods. For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of
a man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres
of stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown
ploughlands and white roads, was like going three whole days'
journey to the southward, or a month back into the summer.
I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm - for so the place is called,
after the name of its splendid pensioners - and go forwards again in
the quiet woods. It began to grow both damp and dusk under the
beeches; and as the day declined the colour faded out of the
foliage; and shadow, without form and void, took the place of all
the fine tracery of leaves and delicate gradations of living green
that had before accompanied my walk. I had been sorry to leave
Peacock Farm, but I was not sorry to find myself once more in the
open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky,
and put my best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street
should go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen
with a new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of
neighbours to join in his heresy. It would have somewhat the look
of an abortive watering-place, such as we may now see them here and
there along the coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely
quiet design of some of them, and the look of long habitation, of a
life that is settled and rooted, and makes it worth while to train
flowers about the windows, and otherwise shape the dwelling to the
humour of the inhabitant. The church, which might perhaps have
served as rallying-point for these loose houses, and pulled the
township into something like intelligible unity, stands some
distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take the public
buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to be the
principal street:
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