Two Songs
Over slopes of English hills looking south in the time of violets,
evening was falling.
Shadows at edges of woods moved, and then merged in the gloaming.
The bat, like a shadow himself, finding that spring was come, slipped
from the dark of the wood as far as a clump of beech trees and
fluttered back again on his wonderful quiet wings.
Pairing pigeons were home.
Very young rabbits stole out to gaze at the calm still world. They
came out as the stars come. At one time they were not there, and then
you saw them, but you did not see them come.
Towering clouds to the west built palaces, cities and mountains;
bastions of rose and precipices of gold; giants went home over them
draped in mauve by steep rose-pink ravines into emerald-green empires.
Turbulences of colour broke out above the departed sun; giants merged
into mountains, and cities became seas, and new processions of other
fantastic things sailed by. But the chalk slopes facing south smiled
on with the same calm light, as though every blade of grass gathered a
ray from the gloaming. All the hills faced the evening with that same
quiet glow, which faded softly as the air grew colder; and the first
star appeared.
Voices came up in the hush, clear from the valley, and ceased. A light
was lit, like a spark, in a distant window: more stars appeared and
the woods were all dark now, and shapes even on the hill slopes began
to grow indistinct.
Home by a laneway in the dim, still evening a girl was going, singing
the Marseillaise.
In France where the downs in the north roll away without hedges, as
though they were great free giants that man had never confined, as
though they were stretching their vast free limbs in the evening, the
same light was smiling and glimmering softly away.
A road wound over the downs and away round one of their shoulders. A
hush lay over them as though the giants slept, or as though they
guarded in silence their ancient, wonderful history.
The stillness deepened and the dimness of twilight; and just before
colours fade, while shapes can still be distinguished, there came by
the road a farmer leading his Norman horse. High over the horse's
withers his collar pointed with brass made him fantastic and huge and
strange to see in the evening.
They moved together through that mellow light towards where unseen
among the clustered downs the old French farmer's house was sheltered
away.
He was going home at evening humming ``God Save the King.''
Read next: Tale 18 - The Punishment
Read previous: Tale 16 - Spring and the Kaiser
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