CHAPTER II 



THE END OF WINTER SUFFOLK HAMPSHIRE 

 SUFFOLK. 



THERE are three sounds in the wood this morning 

 the sound of the waves that has not died away since the 

 sea carried off church and cottage and cliff and the other 

 half of what was once an inland wood; the sound of 

 trees, a multitudinous frenzied sound, of rustling dead 

 oak-leaves still on the bough, of others tripping along the 

 path like mice, or winding up in sudden spirals and falling 

 again, of dead boughs grating and grinding, of pliant 

 young branches lashing, of finest twigs and fir needles 

 sighing, of leaf and branch and trunk booming like one; 

 and through these sounds, the song of a thrush. Rain 

 falls and, for a moment only, the dyked marshland below 

 and beyond the wood is pale and luminous with its flooded 

 pools, the sails of windmills climb and plunge, the pale 

 sea is barred with swathes of foam, and on the whistling 

 sands the tall white waves vaunt, lean forward, topple 

 and lie quivering. But the rain increases : the sound and 

 the mist of it make a wall about the world, except the 

 world in the brain and except the thrush's song which, 

 so bright and clear, has a kind of humanity in it by 

 contrast with the huge bulk of the noises of sea and wood. 



Rain and wind cease together, and here on the short 

 grass at the cliff's edge is a strange birth a gently convex 

 fungus about two inches broad, the central boss of it 



15 



