Читать книгу The Annes онлайн

32 страница из 78

Richard Latham lived in a shady street not much disturbed by traffic. Several other streets ran in the same direction, leading more directly to wherever any one would be likely to go, so Latham Street was not greatly disturbed by footfalls, either. The street had been lately rechristened; Cleavedge was beginning to be aware of its celebrity.

In the beautifully proportioned living room of a house that entertained too few guests to require a drawing room the poet passed his days. It was a room built around with bookshelves uncrowded by furniture; its warm-tinted, drabbish walls hung with fine pictures and lighted by lovely gleams of colour in the pottery that occasionally broke the long stretches of the dull oiled wood of the bookcase tops. It was a man’s room, without curtains, or anything meaningless; a room of perfect beauty, inexpressibly soothing. It possessed a sort of visible silence, the silence of the woods; it was a place in which to think and to feel, rather than to act. At one end stood the piano which alone suggested sound, but to one who had heard Richard Latham play it emphasized the harmony.