In the Season of the Planting of Trees
By E. L. WOODWARD
WE went down to the river through Christ Church Meadow. After a week's rain the stream ran high ; here and there little waves lapped against the embankment. We had passed a few stonemasons at their work under the shadow of Merton Tower. We heard the sound of hammering and the sawing of wood in one of the yards below Christ Church. The Long Walk was empty, but in the field behind Salter's Yard three men were setting out bamboo canes along the brook to mark the emplacement of trees. We watched them for a time. As we looked at these dried, yellow, bamboo sticks cut in some Indian or Chinese plantation, I thought of a garden withered twelve hundred, years ago :
"Before his hall bamboos spring of their own accord Behind his hall Forget-Sorrow grass grows self-sown.
Autumn sees Forget-Sorrow grass already dead, But even in frost bamboo branches do not change.
Do not loose the hand when cutting sunflowers : Sunflower roots are injured if the hand be loosed."
These lines were written. before Charlemagne was crowned in Rome. At such a time a Chinese poet might talk philosophy in a garden -sheltered from barbarians.
"On the level terrace, as the sun sinks, Sipping new tea in the season of spring."
In the East, a high civilization ; but here, only a few huts rising above the marshes of the Thames ; darkness of the mind as on the remotest banks of African rivers.
The air was sweet ; a warm wind was blowing. Soon there would be aconites and snowdrops and the first sins of spring. We were talking of a- voyage we had planned to make before the year was out. I saw our- ship leaving the docks ; the slow movement of the lock-gate at Tilbury ; the long corridors between the cabins. The ship turned, and as in a crystal I saw other ships at anchor. Their mastheads tapered to the sky ; their - funnels were set back to meet the winds. Their decks were tiered like the palaces at Lhasa. While we talked, I remembered the lighthouses on the English coast ; great beams of light swinging from east to west or west to east.
As we planned the time of our voyage, we turned into the path along the banks of the Cherwell. The noise of the flood water was more insistent here. Cherwell ; Thame ; .Kennet ; Mole ; Darent. I knew these tributaries of the Thames. As a boy I had spent hour upon hour in small tugs at the river mouth, where the land opens to coldness and starlight (" The jade-band constellations "). There were no tree-hung paths about the estuary ; only wide mud flats, a line of oil-tanks, batteries of guns skilfully marked ; a waste of sea stretching to the forests of Scandinavia. * * The planting of trees. Thomas Hardy had written a novel about theplanting of trees ; then he had put the whole theme of the novel into a single poem. So our voyage could be brought within the compass of a single vision. There, above -Foxcombe Hill, hung the waning moon. Its continents shone as a silver and dark brooch against the winter sky. There before my eyes -was a mirror of the beginning and end of journeys. The ship was home again. I heard the rattling of the anchor chains, sharp and sudden as the discharge of a volley over a grave. The gangways were drawn across to• the decks. There were formalities—British this way—have you anything to declare—the whistle of trains—sudden echoes and sounds of the land unfamiliar after the elemental sounds of wind and water.
Movement and rest, movement and rest, Why should you and I go on journeys ? There will be quiet -enough for us before these great oaks above the river have fallen. Let us stay inland, and avoid the noise and the trouble of the sea. Yet the images of ships come back to my mind : intricate wires, the compulsion -of -piston-rods, and beat of engines ; wind lashing the surface of water ; beams from the lighthouses ; men at the wheel ; the pointing of the .compass ; -Orion high over the south.
I sat down to my books. By chance I was reading of the, profits of navigation ; changes in the mode of trans- port, and the distant reaction of these changes upon the lives of common men. Seventy years ago the inventions of Bessemer and Mushet made possible the long-lived steel rail and ship. Steel was to iron as centuries ago iron was to bronze : a more flexible, more enduring medium ; a thing nearer in strength and lyrical power to the directing brain of man. Steel rails cheapened the cost of transport. In Africa the slave driver found no more use for his convoy. The railway carried the burdens of ten thousand slaves. The American plains were brought nearer to the sea, and Danzig corn merchants lost a primacy which their fishermen had lost centuries. earlier.
I read of other devices : the compound engine ; the surface condenser and economies of fire and water. Ships could take more weight and bulk of cargo ; capital could find more choice of reward. Yet I noticed that these new devices only led to increase of covetousness. The power of Europe, organized yet still anarchical, was still blind, and men had neither the wisdom nor the courage to neglect a source of private gain. The succession of changes had been too quick for reflection ; everywhere merciless and corrupt hands had -snatched the goodwill of the commonwealth. I turned over the records of those times : feasting, and the amassing of riches ; the gilding of palaces ; monuments of phmder ; storehouses over- filled ; the mind hardened in pride, and the heart lifted up in vain-glory (" In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldaeans slain ").
. While I was reading this history, and thinking still of journeys and horizons, the years swung round from the past to the future, as the field of vision swings when the ship has left the lock-gates and made towards the river estuary. Yet if I thought of the future, I found neither hope nor fear ; only a whiteness undifferentiated. I turned again, not without sorrow, to the present. Sud- denly, I saw this whiteness of the future broken into colour by the acts of common men at their work : the planting of trees, sawing of wood and shaping of stone: I took pleasure in the multiplicity of these acts ; in the very numbers of the races and of the nations. I counted trade upon trade, city after city: I measured this stir and purpose against the slow, tidal life-in-sleep of the plants. I followed the crowded roads to their end ; and at their ending, at their ending ? A quiet harbour ; a sea strange to me ; night, vast and starless, overhanging the sea. Yet, unless my eyes cheated me, a cloud of wings followed the ships as they put out from this harbour.
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