Читать книгу Neighbourhood: A year's life in and about an English village онлайн

10 страница из 39

I have shut the heavy old house-door, and got back to my table by the workroom fire. The thaw has come in earnest now. I can hear the drip of the melting rime in the garden, far and near. The warm west wind is beginning to sigh down the chimney. The logs simmer and glow, but not with the greedy brightness of frost-bound nights.

It is on these long winter evenings that Solitude comes into her kingdom. Men are not all made alike, nor is solitude with all a voluntary condition, at least a self-imposed necessity, as it is with me—a something that I must fashion out of my own will and abnegation, weave about me as the tunnel-spider weaves her lair. In this ancient house the walls are thick, yet not so thick but that an ear-strain will just trip the echo of far-off laughter. If I but drew that curtain and set the door ajar, I could catch a murmur of voices like the sound of bee-hives in summer dark; and a dozen strides along the stone-flagged passage would yield me what I may not take for hours to come—tried and meet companionship, the flint-and-steel play of bandied jest, my own to hold, if I can, in brisk exchange of nerving, heartening thought. But these things in their season. Mine now it is to dip the grey goose-quill, to gird up for the long tramp over the foolscap-country before me—that trackless white desert where I must lay a trail to be followed, whether by many or few or none, or with what pleasure or weariness, I may never certainly know. For the writer is like a sower, that is ever sowing and passing on. He can seldom do more than take a hurried, fleeting shoulder-glimpse at the harvest behind him, nor see who reaps, if haply it be reaped at all.