第16章

On a frosty morning with a little February sun,Clifford and Connie went for a walk across the park to the wood.That is,Clifford chuffed in his motor-chair,and Connie walked beside him.

The hard air was still sulphurous,but they were both used to it.Round the near horizon went the haze,opalescent with frost and smoke,and on the top lay the small blue sky;so that it was like being inside an enclosure,always inside.Life always a dream or a frenzy,inside an enclosure.

The sheep coughed in the rough,sere grass of the park,where frost lay bluish in the sockets of the tufts.Across the park ran a path to the wood-gate,a fine ribbon of pink.Clifford had had it newly gravelled with sifted gravel from the pit-bank.When the rock and refuse of the underworld had burned and given off its sulphur,it turned bright pink,shrimp-coloured on dry days,darker,crab-coloured on wet.Now it was pale shrimp-colour,with a bluish-white hoar of frost.It always pleased Connie,this underfoot of sifted,bright pink.It's an ill wind that brings nobody good.

Clifford steered cautiously down the slope of the knoll from the hall,and Connie kept her hand on the chair.In front lay the wood,the hazel thicket nearest,the purplish density of oaks beyond.From the wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled.Rooks suddenly rose in a black train,and went trailing off over the little sky.

Connie opened the wood-gate,and Clifford puffed slowly through into the broad riding that ran up an incline between the clean-whipped thickets of the hazel.The wood was a remnant of the great forest where Robin Hood hunted,and this riding was an old,old thoroughfare coming across country.

But now,of course,it was only a riding through the private wood.The road from Mansfield swerved round to the north.

In the wood everything was motionless,the old leaves on the ground keeping the frost on their underside.A jay called harshly,many little birds fluttered.But there was no game;no pheasants.They had been killed off during the war,and the wood had been left unprotected,till now Clifford had got his game-keeper again.

Clifford loved the wood;he loved the old oak-trees.He felt they were his own through generations.He wanted to protect them.He wanted this place inviolate,shut off from the world.

The chair chuffed slowly up the incline,rocking and jolting on the frozen clods.And suddenly,on the left,came a clearing where there was nothing but a ravel of dead bracken,a thin and spindly sapling leaning here and there,big sawn stumps,showing their tops and their grasping roots,lifeless.And patches of blackness where the woodmen had burned the brushwood and rubbish.

This was one of the places that Sir Geoffrey had cut during the war for trench timber.The whole knoll,which rose softly on the right of the riding,was denuded and strangely forlorn.On the crown of the knoll where the oaks had stood,now was bareness;and from there you could look out over the trees to the colliery railway,and the new works at Stacks Gate.

Connie had stood and looked,it was a breach in the pure seclusion of the wood.It let in the world.But she didn't tell Clifford.

This denuded place always made Clifford curiously angry.He had been through the war,had seen what it meant.But he didn't get really angry till he saw this bare hill.He was having it replanted.But it made him hate Sir Geoffrey.

Clifford sat with a fixed face as the chair slowly mounted.When they came to the top of the rise he stopped;he would not risk the long and very jolty down-slope.He sat looking at the greenish sweep of the riding downwards,a clear way through the bracken and oaks.It swerved at the bottom of the hill and disappeared;but it had such a lovely easy curve,of knights riding and ladies on palfreys.

'I consider this is really the heart of England,'said Clifford to Connie,as he sat there in the dim February sunshine.

'Do you?'she said,seating herself in her blue knitted dress,on a stump by the path.

'I do!this is the old England,the heart of it;and I intend to keep it intact.'

'Oh yes!'said Connie.But,as she said it she heard the eleven-o'clock hooters at Stacks Gate colliery.Clifford was too used to the sound to notice.

'I want this wood perfect...untouched.I want nobody to trespass in it,'said Clifford.

There was a certain pathos.The wood still had some of the mystery of wild,old England;but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a blow.How still the trees were,with their crinkly,innumerable twigs against the sky,and their grey,obstinate trunks rising from the brown bracken!How safely the birds flitted among them!And once there had been deer,and archers,and monks padding along on asses.The place remembered,still remembered.

Clifford sat in the pale sun,with the light on his smooth,rather blond hair,his reddish full face inscrutable.

'I mind more,not having a son,when I come here,than any other time,'he said.

'But the wood is older than your family,'said Connie gently.

'Quite!'said Clifford.'But we've preserved it.Except for us it would go...it would be gone already,like the rest of the forest.One must preserve some of the old England!'

'Must one?'said Connie.'If it has to be preserved,and preserved against the new England?It's sad,I know.'

'If some of the old England isn't preserved,there'll be no England at all,'said Clifford.'And we who have this kind of property,and the feeling for it,must preserve it.'

There was a sad pause.'Yes,for a little while,'said Connie.

'For a little while!It's all we can do.We can only do our bit.I feel every man of my family has done his bit here,since we've had the place.

One may go against convention,but one must keep up tradition.'Again there was a pause.

'What tradition?'asked Connie.

'The tradition of England!of this!'

'Yes,'she said slowly.

'That's why having a son helps;one is only a link in a chain,'he said.