Tatterdemalion by John Galsworthy — Read

Not very long ago, during a sojourn in a part of the West country never yet visited by me, I went out one fine but rather cold March morning for a long ramble. I was in one of those disillusioned moods that come to writers, bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of confidence, a prey to that recurrent despair, the struggle with which makes the profession of the pen -- as a friend once said to me -- "a manly one. " "Yes" -- I was thinking, for all that the air was so brisk, and the sun so bright -- "nothing comes to me nowadays, no flashes of light, none of those suddenly shaped visions that bring cheer and warmth to a poor devil's heart, and set his brain and pen to driving on. A bad, bad business! " And my eyes, wandering over the dip and rise, the woods, the moor, the rocks of that fine countryside, took in the loveliness thereof with the profound discontent of one who, seeing beauty, feels that he cannot render it. The high lane-banks had just been pollarded, one could see right down over the fields and gorse and bare woods tinged with that rosy brown of beech and birch twigs, and the dusty saffron of the larches. And suddenly my glance was arrested by something vivid, a sort of black and white excitement in the air. "Aha! " I thought, "a magpie. Two! Three! Good! Is it an omen? " The birds had risen at the bottom of a field, their twining, fluttering voyage -- most decorative of all bird flights -- was soon lost in the wood beyond, but something it had left behind in my heart; I felt more hopeful, less inclined to think about the failure of my spirit, better able to give myself up to this new country I was passing through. Over the next rise in the very winding lane I heard the sound of brisk church bells, and not three hundred yards beyond came to a village green, where knots of men dressed in the dark clothes, light ties, and bowler hats of village festivity, and of women smartened up beyond belief, were gathered, chattering, round the yard of an old, grey, square-towered church.

"What's going on? " I thought. "It's not Sunday, not the birthday of a Potentate, and surely they don't keep Saint days in this manner. It must be a wedding. Yes -- there's a favour! Let's go in and see! " And, passing the expectant groups, I entered the church and made my way up the aisle. There was already a fair sprinkling of folk all turned round towards the door, and the usual licensed buzz and whisper of a wedding congregation. The church, as seems usual in remote parishes, had been built all those centuries ago to hold a population in accordance with the expectations of its tenet, "Be fruitful and multiply. " But the whole population could have been seated in a quarter of its space. It was lofty and unwarmed save by excitement, and the smell of bear's-grease. There was certainly more animation than I had ever seen or savoured in a truly rural district.