Bleak March in Epping Forest - Page 2

touching with
miraculous healing a landscape erst dead and shrouded in grey. This
transitory gleam of light gladdened us mightily at the time, but it made
the after-sky seem all the darker.

So through the steep and tortuous village to High Beech, and then
leaving the road we wandered in among big trees and down slopes ankle
deep with rustling leaves towards Chingford again. Here was pleasanter
walking than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the threat of
an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen leaves. Once again
while we were here the drifting haze of the sky became thinner, and the
smooth green-grey beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly
illuminated. But only for a moment, and thereafter the sky became not
simply unsympathetic but ominous. And the misery of the wind grew apace.

Presently we wandered into that sinister corner of the Forest where the
beech trees have grown so closely together that they have had perforce
to lift their branches vertically. Divested of leaves, the bare grey
limbs of these seem strangely restless. These trees, reaching so
eagerly upward, have an odd resemblance to the weird figures of horror
in which William Blake delighted--arms, hands, hair, all stretch
intensely to the zenith. They seem to be straining away from the spot to
which they are rooted. It is a Laocoon grouping, a wordless concentrated
struggle for the sunlight, and disagreeably impressive. The trippers
longed to talk and were tongue-tied; they looked now and then over their
shoulders. They were glad when the eerie influence was passed, though
they traversed a morass to get away from it.

Then across an open place, dismal with the dun hulls of lost cows and
the clatter of their bells, over a brook full of dead leaves and edged
with rusty clay, through a briery thicket that would fain have detained
us, and so to a pathway of succulent green, that oozed black under our
feet. Here some poor lost wayfarer has blazed his way with rustic seats,
now rheumatic and fungus-eaten. And here, too, the wind, which had
sought us howling, found us at last, and stung us sharply with a shower
of congealing raindrops. This grew to a steady downfall as the open
towards Chingford station was approached at last, after devious winding
in the Forest. Then, coming upon the edge of the wood and seeing the
lone station against the grey sky, we broke into a shout and began
running. But it is dismal running on imperfectly frozen clay, in rain
and a gusty wind. We slipped and floundered, and one of us wept sore
that she should never see her home again. And worse, the only train
sleeping in the station was awakened by our cries, and, with an eldritch
shriek at the unseasonable presence of trippers, fled