10. Treasure, 1914
LOOKING BACK ON those days, perhaps the most peculiar and haunting instance of this occurred in the opening months of the Great War. Our Squire (he of the skidding motor-car) had taken it into his head to excavate the barrow that lies closest to Ulverton, an impressive mound perched on the rim of the high scarp that falls so gently and lovingly into the Fogbourne’s crystal course. How I was roped in to this amateur species of archaeological investigation does not matter here, but it was certainly not all port and cajolery on the part of the Manor.
Ever since my arrival I had felt a restlessness. Grief had settled to a dull and monotonous sense of longing — how tedious this human inability to accept a state of affairs, and plunge into life! I would catch myself, during the first hot days of July, calling out for the punkah-wallah, or searching for the bell to bring Abdul with lemonade on his silver tray; in the severe thunderstorms of that summer I would wonder why the rainfall was so hushed, only to remember that I had but English thatch upon the roof, that took the battering without more than an old gent’s mumble of complaint. Come the dawn, and I would wake up startled and address my wife in confused tones. Why was it so blessedly cool? Had Ali (the club-footed one) set my shoes out for the morning? Where were the windows — those three familiar shuttered rectangles of wan grey stripes that, by noon, blazed like Blake’s tiger — a fierce chaos of hot light we had dared to frame?
But alas, my wife was not there to answer. Up to the window, then, and draw the curtains: there the soft grey stone of an English church, the elms and the beech, the old gentle roofs, and beyond these, etched by the morning, shrilled by the lark, the high curved brows of our English downland.
As observed earlier, my first winter was deficient in the snow I had clothed my homecoming with, while the first weeks of spring were dreary with day after day of rain. In Chittagong it had, with a baleful simplicity, either blazed or poured: the consolation lay in that very certainty, where the ground at your feet puffed into clouds or splashed one’s puttees brown. Days and days of rain during the monsoon season — that was in the order of things. Weeks and weeks of blaze in the dry season — that was decreed in tablets of stone, no doubt the property of the Devil. Inside, in either season, all was shuttered gloom.
In England, all is shifting sands. The weather is mild and muddling. It is not a climate one can hammer a post into, or pin like a butterfly. Because I had expected the spring of the poets — yellow flowers underfoot and blue sky above, et cetera — it rained and rained. The month of March was bedraggled, not crisp. Ah, but then the blossom! Surely that would not disappoint! The cottage has a fine little orchard, with a venerable crab-apple whose delicately tinted flowers I awaited with all the anticipation of a little boy for his birthday; two William pear; a mossed Cox; and that queen of fruits, the damson (three of her). As for the humble whitethorn — how I had dreamed of seeing the lines of lace spread as if by maids for bleaching on the soft green hills, or woven about a small meadow, in which the wild daffodils, the violets, the cuckoo-flowers and the simple daisies are strung by glittering cobwebs each soft morning, that the most jaded and withered soul feels the sap rise, and the presence of the ineffable Oneness breathe all about him!