all the upland was full of little horses, little ponies of the upland. they looked with curious and interested eyes at man, but none of them had known his command. when men passed them riding they saw that there was some alliance between men and their brothers, and they asked news of it. then they bent their heads down again soberly, to graze on the new pasture, and the wind blew through their manes and their tails; they were happy beasts, thinking of nothing, and knowing nothing but themselves, yet in their movements and the look of their eyes one could see what the skies were round them, and what the world—they were so much a part of it all.
in the hollows of the forest there were not many birds, not nearly as many as one had heard in the weald, but one great hawk circled up in spirals against the wind. the wind was blowing splendidly through an air quite blue and clear for many miles, and growing clearer as the afternoon advanced in gladness. it was a sea wind that had been a gale the day before, but during the night everything had changed in south england, and the principal date of the year was passed, the date which is the true[218] beginning of the year. the mist of the morning had scudded before thick atlantic weather; by noon it was lifted into clouds, by mid-afternoon those clouds were large, heralding clouds of spring against an unbounded capacity of sky. there was no longer any struggle between them and the gale; they went together in procession over the country and towards the east.
the ridges of the land, like great waves, rolled in also from the westward; they were clearer and they were sharper with every hour, until at last the points of white chalk pits upon hills a day’s ride away showed clearly under the sunlight, and a man could see the trees even upon the horizon line.
the water that one passed in the long ride seemed to grow clearer, and the woods to have more echoes. then, whatever in the mind turned to memory, as the mind of all men does in spring when they have done with their own springtime, turned to memory transformed and was full of visions; and whatever of the mind turned to the future, as most of the mind must do in men of any age when the vigour of the almighty is abroad, looked at it through a veil which was magical.
it seemed as though under the growing sunlight the change that had come, the touch, the spell, was a thing appreciable in moments of time and growing as one watched. you would have said that all the forest was wakening. the flowers you would have said, and especially the daffodils, had just broken[219] from the bud, and evergreens that had been in leaf all winter you would have said had somehow put on a new green. the movement of the wind in the branches of the beeches did not seem to move them but to find a movement responding to its own, and the colour of those branches against the blue sky and touched by the sun as it grew low was full of vivid promise. if it be not too much to ascribe a mood to all inanimate and animate things, there was a mood about one which was a complete forgetfulness of decay, a sort of trampling upon it, a rising out of it, and a using of it into life: a using of it up into life.
over three ridges of land to the southward lay the sea. when the sea is in movement before a clear wind that is not a storm, and under a clear, sharp sky, its movement may be perceived for miles and miles. no one can see the waves, but the distant belt is shot with a pattern which one feels so far as the eye commands it, and that belt is alive, and it is a moving thing. moreover, the high sea downs, the great chalk lifts of that shore of the world, are different on such days from what they are upon any others, and receive life from the sea that made them. all that world upon that morning you would have said was not only receiving gifts from the sea, but was itself apparently born from the sea, lived by the air of it, and had been engendered in the depths of it before ever men were on earth.
and of the sea also were the little horses.
[220]when the spring took them they would suddenly gallop forward without any purpose beyond their wanton pleasure, and arch their necks towards the ground, and bound as a wave bounds; or they would go together, first one starting, then a comrade, then half a dozen of the herd, with a short but easy gait which exactly recalled the movement of salt water under the call of the wind: the movement of salt water where the deeps are, following and following and following, before it rises to break upon the shallows, or to turn back on its course along the eddies of hidden streams.
anyone seeing the little horses was ready to believe that they had come from the channel and not from the land at all, but that divine mares had bred them which moved over the tops of the waves, and that their sires flew invisibly along with the south-west wind. the heather bent a little beneath their rapid raids, and when they swerved, halted, and lifted up their heads to let the breeze blow out their manes, then they became, even more thoroughly than before, things of the channel and of the bowling air. they were full of gladness.
the little horses did not know that they were owned by men; and if now and then men gave them food in the cold weather, or now and then saw to the housing of them, or now and then marked them with a mark, a short, forgotten pain, all these things they took like any other brief and passing[221] accidents of fate. it was not man that had made their home, nor man that ordered the things they saw and used. they had not in anything about them that look which animals have when they have learned that man is of all things upon earth the fullest of sorrow, nor that which beasts have, when they have seen in man, without understanding it, what a principal poet has called “the hideous secret of his mirth”—though “hideous” is an unfair word, for the secret sorrow of man is closely allied with something divine in his destiny. such beasts as are continually the companions of our souls and of whom another poet has said that they are “subject and dear to man,” take from him invariably something of his foreknowledge of death. and you may see in the patient oxen of the mountains and even in the herded sheep of the downs something of man’s burden as they take their lives along. but most you will see what price is paid by those who accompany us when you watch dogs and find that, apart from the body, they can suffer, as we can suffer, and sometimes suffer to the death. so dogs that have known men know loneliness also, and make, as men make, for distant lights at night, and are not happy without living homes. two things only they have not, which are speech and laughter. and those animals which men deal with continually come also into an easy or an uneasy subservience to him, and you may note their hesitation where there is an unaccustomed duty, and you may note their[222] beginnings of panic when men are not there to decide some difficult thing for them.
these little horses of which i write had as yet known none of these things, and anyone who looked at them closely could see what it was that the saints meant by “innocence in nature.” there was no evil in them at all, and the good that was in them was a simple good, of the earth and of the place in which they lived. there, away northward, it was the downs; eastward and westward, the forest; southward, under the sunlight, the sea. that was all the little horses knew; and the man who in such a place and at that moment in the springtime could remember nothing more was very much more blessed than any other of his kind. but later he must remember acheron; and what he will bear beyond acheron—the consequence of things done.
not so the little horses.
