Easter was late that
year--or it has to be for the purpose of my story--and David was
fortunate in the weather and the temperature. If West Glamorganshire
had looked richly, grandiosely beautiful in full summer, it had an
exquisite, if quite different charm in early spring, in April. The
great trees were spangled with emerald leaf-buds; the cherries, tame
and wild, the black-thorn, the plums and pears in orchards and on
old, old, grey walls, were in full blossom of virgin white. The
apple trees in course of time showed pink buds. The gardens
were full of wall-flowers--the inhabited country smelt of
wall-flowers--purple flags, narcissi, hyacinths. The woodland was
exquisitely strewn with primroses. In the glades rose innumerable
spears of purple half-opened bluebells; the eye ranged over an
anemone-dotted sward in this direction; over clusters of smalt-blue
dog violets in another. Ladies'-smocks and cowslips made every
meadow delicious; and the banks of the lowland streams were
gorgeously gilded with king-cups. The mountains on fine days were
blue and purple in the far distance; pale green and grey in the
foreground. Under the April showers and sun-shafts they became
tragic, enchanted, horrific, paradisiac. Even the mining towns were
bearable--in the spring sunshine. If man had left no effort untried
to pile hideosity on hideosity, flat ugliness on nauseous squalor,
he had not been able to affect the arch of the heavens in its lucid
blue, all smokes and vapours driven away by the spring winds; he had
not been able to neutralize the vast views visible from the miners'
sordid, one-storeyed dwellings, the panorama of hill and plain, of
glistening water, towering peaks, and larch forests of emerald green
amid the blue-Scotch pines and the black-green yews.
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