Lore of Proserpine | Page 8

been out
walking with our mother, and were now returning at dusk to our tea
through a wood which covered the top of a chalk down. I remember
vividly the scene. The carpet of drenched leaves under bare branches,
the thin spear-like shafts of the underwood, the grey lights between, the
pale frosty sky overhead with the sickle moon low down in it. I
remember, too, various sensations, such as the sudden chill which
affected me as the crimson globe of the sun disappeared; and again how,
when we emerged from the wood, I was enheartened by the sight of the
village shrouded under chimney smoke and by the one or two twinkling
lights dotted here and there about the dim wolds.

In the wood it was already twilight and very damp. Perhaps I had been
tired, more likely bored--as I always was when I was not being
somebody else. I remember that I had found the path interminable. I
had been silent, as I mostly was, while the other two had chattered and
played about our mother; and when presently I stayed behind for a
purpose I remember that I made no effort to catch them up. I knew the
way perfectly, of course, and had no fear of the dark. Oddly enough I
had no fear of that. I was far less imaginative in the night than in the
day. Besides that, by the time I was ready to go after them I had much
else to think of.
I must have been looking at him for some time before I made out that
he was there. So you may peer into a thicket a hundred times and see
nothing, and then a trick of the light or a flutter of the mood and you
see creatures where you had been sure was nothing. As children will, I
had stayed longer than I need, looking and wondering into the wood,
not observing but yet absorbing the effects of the lights and shades. The
trees were sapling chestnuts if I am not mistaken, Spanish chestnuts,
and used for hop-poles in those parts. Their leaves decay gradually, the
fleshy part, so to speak, dropping away from the articulation till at last
bleached skeleton leaves remain and flicker at every sigh of the wind.
The ground was densely carpeted with other leaves in the same state, or
about to become so. The silver grey was cross-hatched by the purple
lines of the serried stems, and as the view receded this dipped into blue
and there lost itself. It was very quiet--a windless fall of the light.
To-day I should find it most beautiful; and even then, I suspect, I felt its
beauty without knowing it to be so. Looking into it all without realising
it, I presently and gradually did realise something else: a shape, a
creature, a thing of form and pressure--not a wraith, not, I am quite
certain, a trick of the senses.
It was under a clump of the chestnut stems, kneeling and sitting on its
heels, and it was watching me with the bright, quick eyes of a mouse. If
I were to say that my first thought was of some peering and waiting
animal, I should go on to qualify the thought by reference to the
creature's eyes. They were eyes which, like all animals', could only
express one thing at a time. They expressed now attention, the closest:

not fear, not surprise, not apprehension of anything that I might be
meditating against their peace, but simply minute attention. The
absence of fear, no doubt, marked their owner off from the animals of
common acquaintance; but the fact that they did not at the same time
express the being itself showed him to be different from our human
breed. For whatever else the human pair of eyes may reveal, it reveals
the looker.
The eyes of this creature revealed nothing of itself except that it was
watching me narrowly. I could not even be sure of its sex, though I
believe it to have been a male, and shall hereafter treat of it as such. I
could see that he was young; I thought about my own age. He was very
pale, without being at all sickly--indeed, health and vigour and extreme
vivacity were implicit in every line and expressed in every act; he was
clear-skinned, but almost colourless. The shadow under his chin, I
remember, was bluish. His eyes were round, when not narrowed by that
closeness of his scrutiny of me, and though probably brown, showed to
be all black, with pupil indistinguishable from iris. The effect upon me
was of black, vivid black, unintelligent eyes--which see intensely but
cannot translate. His hair was dense and rather long. It covered his ears
and touched his shoulders.