The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
be understood until you can compare
Them with the woods by day.
The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these
trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in
the moving winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these
set the mind working on the thought of what you may have seen off a
foreland or over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a
diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling,
transitory surface of the sea. And yet in itself, as I say, the
strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt fully
without the sense of contrast. You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the
sun's light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at
even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness
of the groves.
And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes. If you
have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous
pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your
window - for there are no blind or shutters to keep him out - and the
room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines
all round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights. You may doze
a while longer by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men
and dogs and horses with which former occupants have defiled the
partitions: Thiers, with wily profile; local celebrities, pipe in
hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil. Meanwhile
artist after artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and
then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a
fagot, and sets of for what he calls his 'motive.' And artist
after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with him a
little following of dogs. For the dogs, who belong only nominally
to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest all day
long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit by
his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at
hunting. They would like to be under the trees all day. But they
cannot go alone. They require a pretext. And so they take the
passing artist as an excuse to go into the woods, as they might
take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe. With quick ears, long
spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with
a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will trot by your side
all day and come home with you at night, still showing white teeth
and wagging stunted tail. Their good humour is not to be
exhausted. You may pelt them with stones if you please, and all
they will do is to give you a wider berth. If once they come out
with you, to you they will remain faithful, and with you return;
although if you meet them next morning in the street, it is as like
as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass.
The forest - a strange thing for an Englishman - is very destitute of
birds. This is no country where every patch of wood among the
meadows gibes up an increase of song, and every valley wandered
through by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to with a
profusion of clear notes. And this rarity of birds is not to be
regretted on its own account only. For the insects prosper in
their absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt. Ants
swarm in the hot sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone; wherever
the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad
transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and
even between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays
into the dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual
drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things
between the trees. Nor are insects the only evil creatures that
haunt the forest. For you may plump into a cave among the rocks,
and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked
viper slither across the road.
Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a
sudden by a friend: 'I say, just keep where you are, will you?
You make the jolliest motive.' And you reply: 'Well, I don't
mind, if I may smoke.' And thereafter the hours go idly by. Your
friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide
shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring
sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of
another tree, and up to his waist in the fern. You cannot watch
your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk
beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip
through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the
trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of
light. But you know it is going forward; and, out of emulation
with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the
colour for a woodland scene in words.
Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers.
All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands
out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained
into its highest key.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 44 of 70
Words from 43882 to 44892
of 70588
