Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 6

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The papers make things look better; we think it cannot be, cannot possibly be.

But I am always afraid, because of my dreams. My dreams have been very bad all night.

I was in the potager most of the morning, working hard.

In the afternoon some neighbors came to tea. They came from quite far, motoring across the forests, and none of them had known the house.

I loved showing them the old place that is not mine, the colours that are faded and worn till they have become beautiful, the things that by much belonging together are fallen into harmony.

I do not believe that the people of these old houses can love them quite as hopelessly as strangers do.

There is a certain special peculiar château smell, that trails down long galleries, and lingers on the stairs, that lurks in far corners of the rooms, and abides in all the cupboards, and behind the tapestries, and in the big carved chests, that clings to wood and waxed floors and stone, and stirs along the heavy sombre walls, and that means France, like the smell of old gardens of box and yew. It stabs one—always the arrowy perfume—and makes one feel France with an odd intensity. From a far way off one would be homesick remembering it.

We had Monsieur Pigot's tarts for tea, and sat for a long time about the dining-room table, talking of how afraid we had been of war, yesterday.

We went up into the Dungeon Tower and down into the souterrains, and then all along the rampart walls.

I love the way the little town crowds up close to the ramparts, the cobbled grass-grown streets, the roofs all softened and coloured by ages and weathers.

A child laughed down in the street; a woman called to it; there was a scamper of little feet, and the two of them were laughing together.

Off beyond the roofs we could see the blonde of the ripe grain fields, and the purple of the forests.

I had so intensely a sense of its all being for the last time. I said to Manon, "It can't last, it is too beautiful."