124 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the 

 myriad leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns 

 the boom, the splitting roar, and the echo in the hills. 

 When it is over it has put a final sweetness into the 

 blackbird's voice and into the calm of the evening garden 

 when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute 

 at the feet of the enormous silence. Frail is that voice 

 as the ghost-moth dancing above the grass so faithfully 

 that it seems a flower attached to a swaying stem, or as 

 the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a draught of the hedge 

 like a signalling hand while all the rest of the leaves are as 

 if they could not move again, or as the full moon that is 

 foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. 

 More large and more calm and emptier of familiar things 

 grows the land as I pass through it, under the hoverings 

 of the low-flying but swiftly-turning nightjar, until at 

 midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle 

 desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and 

 discloses a sky all strewn with white stars like the flowers 

 of an immense jessamine. It closes up again, and day is 

 born unawares in its pale arms, and earth is for the 

 moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and 

 the branch of red roses that hangs heavily laden and 

 drowsed with its weight and beauty over my path, dipping 

 Its last spray in the dew of the grass. 



The day is a Sunday, and no one is on foot or on wheel 

 in the broad arable country that ripples in squares of 

 green, or brown, or yellow, or grey, to the green Downs 

 and their dark, high-perched woods. As if for some 

 invisible beholder, the green elders and their yellow-green 

 flower-buds make their harmony with the yellow-lichened 

 barns against which they lean; the grass and the noble 



