WIND AND COLOUR
By E. L. WOODWARD
FROM my windows I have seen, yesterday and today, a Union Jack flying at half-mast above the gate tower of Brasenose. The morning wind has tossed and twisted, furled and unfurled the flag, drawn the flagrope taut as a bowstring, and released it again, 'Until I think that the air must be shot through with the arrows of unseen death. For a second the flag is out- stretched, and the St. George's cross foursquare ; then the lines and patterns of the- three crosses are bent and curved in the wind, the blue and white and red crumpled, or limp, or vanishing almost to the thinness of a sword-blade, as the gusts blow the flag straight towards me. I can feel the strain on the stays sup- porting the flagpole, the litheness and resistance of the wood, the sharp tap-tap of the rope. Once or twice, there has been a sudden stillness, and the flag has moved slowly to and fro, from east to west, as though a warning were being sent from signal station to signal station: Then the wind has seized the borders, and the restless tugging and sweeping have begun again.
The sight of the flag, its thousand affirmations and memories, called up image after image to my mind. By an odd chance I was reading a book written by a German about the development of the German fleet ; a harsh book, written polemically, and directed against many things which I have known and accepted from childhood, and of which this flag has been the symbol. Sentence after sentence spoke of the idea of a fleet die Deutschland als Weltmacht zumal gegen England sichern sollte- while year in year out I had seen the ships leaving English harbours without question of the right of sea- power. I had set my mind, as one must set one's mind, to think as a German in Germany ; to understand the fears and hopes which balanced English fears and hopes, the narrowness which is the counterpart of 'English narrowness, the loyalty of Germans which like the loyalty of Englishmen supports national patriotism. ' Yet when I looked up from my book, or took- my pen to add' to my pages of notes, or alter, in the light of new facts, a *chapter which I had written, I saw this flag casting a quick' shadow across the tower, or flung out to the fullest curve of the rope. The wind rose just before noon ; eastwards the two poplars in Queen's garden yielded to every gust and eddy, and a grey mist came up from the north west almost to the meridian. This wind, blowing across England, from sea to sea, teasing and pulling the flagropes, sounding through every wood and spinney, seemed to jumble and confuse the Gothic lettering of my book : Aktenntassiges cur Vorgeschichte des deutschen Schlachtflottenbaus. . . .
Ship for ship, the English flag against the German flag ; a world of fruitless, violent action ; whistle of shells, as the quarry is bracketed. Anhang I: Nicht- gehaltene Reichstagsrede van Kantreadmiral Tirpilz. Lawyers discussing the theory of a bellum jv-sium, rights of neutrals, definitions of contraband. Heinrich Karl Marx, writing away, with sneers and snarls at his friends, and even the love of justice turned atrabilious. (I wondered suddenly how Jenny von Westphalen liked it all, and again remembered how many times. socialists have told me proudly of this " von." Anyhow it wasn't all beer and skittles to be the wife of a prophet who thought of his mother's death in terms of the increase in his own income. Heinrich Karl was dead thirty years before the battle of Jutland, or he might have found hatreds even stronger than his own.) Anhang II. Entwicklungsgeschichte des ersten Floi- -tengesetzes. You can reduce it all to simple terms if you -walk down the back streets of Chatham, Gillingham and New Brompton or if you look at the double-decker washing lines put up by sailors for their wives in the yards backing on the railway between Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse. Multiply these towns by two, or rather, add a second group ; the new group will have names which seem outlandish unless you think of the names in the sagas or on old English land charters ; Helgoland ; Wesermunde ; Cuxhaven.
A sudden gust shook my windows ; this wind coming from sea to sea. I wanted to taste the salt on the wind. The four walls of my room became a narrow enclosure, the four windows which give me lasting and noble pleasure day in day out were slits in a cage. It is curious how one's senses work cleverly together in constructing an image of the sea. Here, -inland, and in a room with windows almost closed on the windward side, I found myself, absurdly, sheltering a match with my hand as I lighted a pipe. The very quiet and familiarity of the place had cheated me for a moment. There were my books and papers strewn over my table and on the floor at my side ; my M.A. hood lying across a chair ; a travelling inkpot in a red case pigeonholed in my desk since last long vacation ; all the clocks striking the hour ; five and twenty pinnacles stuck round this queer quadrangle like candles round a cake ; uncorrected proofs, an essay to be read, a report on the chapel boiler, a wine merchant's catalogue ; notes of a committee meeting. A little copy of Boyle's Court and Country Guide and Town Visiting Directory caught my eye. I had wanted to look up some one's town house in 1810. Mr. Boyle gave me the address ; the town address, and another address in Suisex, with the mileage from London. (" Mr. J. Boyle engages to deliver all Visiting Cards, Cards of Invitation, Thanks, Routs, &c„ within 24 hours after the receipt thereof, provided the parties directed. for (sic) reside within the Circle of Fashion." I had come upon, in 1810, a sad year for the Boyle family and a year of high resolution. Mr. J. Boyle's mother, " widow of the late P. Boyle, deeply impressed, &c., has only to add that to merit the continuance of public favour, to provide for the wants of a numerous and infant family, and to establish her own reputation, are the powerful motives, which cannot fail to animate her future exertions . . . ").
They were soundless, these books and papers, while I heard now the though of water against a ship's side, the beat of a ship's engines. There was a silvery film of light on my table ; the surface is very old, and the edges gnarled so that they catch the light, but it is almost like moonlight, while I could feel the brightness of chalk cliffs or the plain of the sea broken by waves. The room was still ; the flag tugged at its pole, and the poplars bent to and fro, now hiding, now showing, the green dome of Queen's tower, but I could see a line of ships moving across the horizon. The fruit trees in the Warden's garden had scattered petals over the lawn, petals faintly coloured and ever so faintly scented, but before my eyes there was a line of glistening seaweed at the high tide mark, touched now and again by the receding water ; smooth to the hand, heavy as one gathered a long bunch and trailed the ribbons in the wind.
Yet there are tides, and recession of moods, in one's mind. As one thinks of the restlessness and immensity of ocean, the untired, insentient winds and play of light and shadow and infinite changes of pattern, one looks for a harbour ; relief from this energy beyond the flickering, dying lamp of human imagination. I thought of the quietest of harbours, where the Thames is narrow enough for one to see the colour of a man's eyes across the stream. There is a dock, the smallest of docks (one English poet has found it, and oddly, only one among the score who have come to this place) on the Thames near Cassington, midway in the reach between Eynsham and King's Weir, and the silent confluence of Evenlode and Windrush with Thames. This child's harbour is set among water meadows ; away to the south is the heronry in Wytham Woods ; westwards, the arches of Swinford Bridge. I do not know who built the water-steps, or the stone house half hidden among the trees a few yards from the bank. The steps are worn, the iron ring rusted with age.
If the flags were torn from every English flagpost, there would still be an England distinct from the whole world as long as I had strength to remember this harbour ; and even now, while the lamp of imagination is still lit, for all the excitement of unchecked winds and a horizon unbounded, I might choose for myself this measured, stormless landing place. Men have set, at the last. a river, and not the encompassing sea, as the boundary between things known and those things of which there cannot be knowledge.
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