Unhappy Far-Off Things | Page 3

have
never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the
melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely
walk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead as
mourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By this
road he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turned
from the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line of
bushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet had
rustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up to
step over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements and
bushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walked
through them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by huge
shells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grass that
had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon.
Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with such
walking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there a
little while a cat that seemed to have its home in that wild place started
suddenly up and leaped away over the weeds. It seemed an animal
totally wild, and utterly afraid of man.
Grey bare hills surrounded the waste: a partridge called far off: evening
was drawing in. He rose wearily, and yet with a certain fervour, as one
that pursues With devotion a lamentable quest. Looking round him as
he left his resting-place he saw a cabbage or two that after some while

had come back to what was a field and had sprouted on the edge of a
shell-hole. A yellowing convolvulus climbed up a dead weed. Weeds,
grass and tumbled earth were all about him. It would be no better when
he went on. Still he went on. A flower or two peeped up among the
weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscape and drew no hope from
that, the shattered trunk of a stricken tree leered near him, white
trenches scarred the hillside. He followed an old trench through a hedge
of elder, passed under more wire, by a great rusty shell that had not
burst, passed by a dug-out where something grey seemed to lie down at
the bottom of many steps. Black fungi grew near the entrance. He went
on and on over shell-holes, passing round them where they were deep,
stepping into or over the small ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he
went rustling on, the only sound in the waste but the clicking of
shattered iron. Now he was among nettles. He came by many small
unnatural valleys. He passed more trenches only guarded by fungi.
While it was light he followed little paths, marvelling who made them.
Once he got into a trench. Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar
his way, believing man to have gone and to have no right to return.
Weeds thronged, in thousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was
only they that seemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He
passed on down the trench and never knew whose trench it once had
been. Frightful shells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted
iron as though round gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a
moment and let it drop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more
dug-outs and black fungi, watching them; and then he left the trench,
going straight on over the open: again dead grasses hissed about his
feet, sometimes small wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of
nettles and thence to dead grass again. And now the light of the
afternoon was beginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his
journey's end by daylight, for he was past the time of life when one
wanders after dark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of
walking over that road, or dreamed that lanes he knew could be so
foundered and merged, in that mournful desolate moor.
Evening was filling fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the
cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn
grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their
innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:

and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of
iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that
would haunt the waste for ever.
And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombre
pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted forever a
grizzly place was haunted