Читать книгу Susan Spray онлайн

40 страница из 108

Susan had never heard her mother speak like this. She had often spoken of common things in a whining, complaining voice, but never before had she so definitely stated her grief. Susan was lying on the outside of the bed, and she slipped down from it, into the cold damp air of an autumn morning that was oozing in like water through the cracks and rifts of the little room. She stood up in her shift, shivering with cold. Her mother said:

"Make haste, or he'll waken," meaning her father, who lay snoring in the other bed.

Susan pulled her gown on over her head, and her mother opened the door for her to go out.

There was a thick mist everywhere, and the trees and hedges showed through it like ghosts. It was damp, and it smelled of earth and turnips. Susan ran through it with her hands out before her, as if she were pushing it away. She ran to warm herself, because the cold was terrible, eating her. And yet it was not the dead cold of winter, that is hard and hollow, like an iron rod, but the living cold of an October dawn, which is moist and quickening, the womb of the morning. She could feel its moisture on her skin and hair, distilled in little pearls, the same pearls that quivered on the grass and nettles and the stripping hedges. She seemed to become a fellow of the grass and nettles and hedges, sharing their adornment of mist and dew, and suddenly she felt a deep contentment rising in her heart that she should be out here alone with the mist and the morning, before even the farm people were about. Surely now when the world was empty and washed like this, the Lord must walk in it, as He used to walk in Eden long ago. Then, He chose the cool of the evening, but she felt now that the cool of the morning was best.