Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 5

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When we came back from Mass, up from the village by the rue du Château and through the park and the garden, the yesterday's papers were arrived from Paris.

I delayed down in the parterres, it was so beautiful. There had been rain, and the sunshine was golden and thick on all the wet sweet things, the earth of the paths, the box edges, the clipped yews, the grass of the lawns, the roses and heliotrope and petunias in the stately garden beds.

There is a certain smell in old formal gardens, that seems to me always to mean France. It is like the stab of an arrow. I feel it, swiftly, in my heart, and stop and hold my breath, and say, "This is France."

The news in the papers was strange.

We thought we would go to the village, to the Place, and feel what the village felt.

We went along the terrace and around between the south tower and the moat to the entrance court, and across the moat bridge, where the watch-dogs were chained one on either side, to the green court, and out of the big wrought-iron, vine-covered gates, to the Place aux Armes.

All the village was there in its Sunday dress, under the lime trees.

The swallows were flying, high about the Dungeon Tower and low across the big old grassy cobbles of the Place. They were crying their strange little cry. I thought, "They are calling for storm." And yet the sky was blue and gold behind the Dungeon Tower.

We went to get the papers in the little dark shop that smells of spices and beeswax and shoe leather.

I asked: What did Monsieur Créty think of the chances of war?

He shrugged his old shoulders, and said he had some fine fresh chocolate and nougat out from Paris.

We went back and read the papers and ate the chocolates and nougat on the terrace.

A host of little white butterflies kept clouding over the terrace steps, between the pots of roses and heliotrope.

There was a great brief thunderstorm while we were at lunch, and then the sun came out.

We motored through the wet sunshiny country, softly dipped and softly lifted, blue-green forest and wide ripe harvest fields, blue and purple and crimson beet fields, long low brown and rust-red towns with square church towers, Sunday people out in the doorways, and swallows always flying low and crying.

We had tea in Soissons, at Maurizi's, and went to the cathedral, where the offices were over, and to the pastrycook's, Monsieur Pigot's, to buy some cherry tarts.

Home by the long straight road between the poplars.

It was so cold suddenly that one imagined autumn. There was a wind come up, and some yellow leaves were flying with it.

After dinner we had a fire lighted in the tiled room. The heat brought out all the sweetness of the roses in the blue bowls, and the flames sent lovely lights and shadows to play along the old stone walls.

I do not think I would be afraid if it were not for my dreams.

Every night I have dreamed of galloping horses and thunder—or cannon, I don't know which—and of blood, dripping and dripping down the château stairs. I see the blood in red pools on the worn old grey stones of the stairs, and in black stains on the new carpet. Some of the nights I have stayed up, walking the floor of my room that I might not sleep and dream so horribly.