Mighty Oaks Stand To The Ankles In A Fine Tracery Of
Underwood; Thence The Tall Shaft Climbs Upwards, And The Great
Forest Of Stalwart Boughs Spreads Out Into The Golden Evening Sky,
Where The Rooks Are Flying And Calling.
On the sward of the Bois
d'Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like
fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and the
sound of the axe is rarely still.
But strangest of all, and in
appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts
of young wood. The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn
with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark. Rocks lie crouching in
the thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with
years and the rigours of the changeful seasons. Brown and yellow
butterflies are sown and carried away again by the light air - like
thistledown. The loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that
there are moments when pleasure draws to the verge of fear. You
listen and listen for some noise to break the silence, till you
grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the strain; your sense of
your own identity is troubled; your brain reels, like that of some
gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles; and should
you see your own outspread feet, you see them, not as anything of
yours, but as a feature of the scene around you.
Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always
unbroken. You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the
tree-tops; sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes
with a long steady rush, like the breaking of waves. And
sometimes, close at band, the branches move, a moan goes through
the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart. Perhaps you may
hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry
continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time
your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's axe.
From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by;
and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear,
not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of
voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places.
Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs;
scared deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood; then a
man or two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a
bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar
of rifle-shots. Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are
blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through the clearings, and
the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you, where you sit
perched among the rocks and heather. The boar is afoot, and all
over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a vague
excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.
Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are
few people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters
plying their axes steadily, and old women and children gathering
wood for the fire. You may meet such a party coming home in the
twilight: the old woman laden with a fagot of chips, and the
little ones hauling a long branch behind them in her wake. That is
the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what
once happened to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise
you with false hopes; for the adventure was unique. It was on a
very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a
frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here be
nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked
boulders. He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated
under a tree in an open. The old father knitted a sock, the mother
sat staring at the fire. The eldest son, in the uniform of a
private of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-bugle. Two or
three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets. And the
whole party as grave and silent as the woods around them! My
friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held their peace;
not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single
notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and
made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows. They
took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
dragoon. And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the
woods with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a
growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much
for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels.
It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was
followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever
transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata;
or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that
this is all another chapter of Heine's 'Gods in Exile'; that the
upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove,
and the young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or
Mars.
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