Читать книгу The Passionate Year - James Hilton - Страница 17

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On Fridays he had an early morning form before breakfast and then was completely free until four o'clock in the afternoon, so that if the weather were sufficiently enticing he could fill the basket on his bicycle 'with books and go cycling along the sweet-smelling sunlit lanes. Millstead was just on the edge of the fen district; in one direction the flat lands stretched illimitably to a horizon unbroken as the sea's edge; a stern and lonely country, with nothing to catch the eye save here and there the glint of dyke-water amongst tall reeds and afar off some desert church-tower stiff and stark as the mast of a ship on an empty sea. Speed did not agree with the general Common-Room consensus of opinion that the scenery round Millstead was tame and unattractive; secretly to him the whole district was rich with wild and passionate beauty, and sometimes on these delectable Fridays he would cycle for miles along the flat fen roads with the wind behind him, and return in the afternoon by crawling romantic-looking branch-line trains which always managed to remind him of wild animals, so completely had the civilised thing been submerged in the atmosphere of what it had sought to civilise.

But that was only on one side of Millstead. On the other side, and beyond the rook-infested trees that were as ramparts to the south-west wind, the lanes curved into the folds of tiny hills and lifted themselves for a space on to the ridge of glossy heaths and took sudden twists into the secrecies of red-roofed tree-hidden hamlets. And amidst this country, winding its delicate way beneath arches of overhanging greenery, ran the river Wade.

One Friday morning Speed cycled out to Parminters, a village about three miles out of Millstead. Here there was a low hill (not more than a couple of hundred feet), carpeted with springy turf and overlooking innumerable coils of the glistening stream. At midday on a May morning there was something indescribably restful, drowsy almost, in the scene; the hill dropped by a sudden series of grassy terraces into the meadows, and there was quite a quarter of a mile of lush grass land between the foot of the slope and the river bank. It was an entrancing spectacle, one to watch rather than to see; the silken droop of the meadows, the waves of alternate shadow and sunlight passing over the long grasses, the dark patches on the landscape which drifted eastwards with the clouds. The sun, when it pierced their white edges and came sailing into the blue, was full of warmth and beauty, warmth that awakened myriads of insects to a drowsy buzzing contentment and beauty that lay like a soft veil spread across the world. Speed, with a bundle of four alpha geography essays in his pocket (he had, after all, decided that he was competent to teach commercial geography to the lower forms), lay down amongst the deep grass and lit a pipe.

He marked a few of the essays and then, smoking comfortably, settled to a contented gaze across the valley. It was then, not until he had been there some while, though, that he saw amidst the tall grasses of the meadows a splash of blue in the midst of the deep green. It is strange that at first he did not recognise her. He saw only a girl in a pale-blue dress stooping to pick grasses. She was hatless and golden-haired, and in one hand she bore a bunch of something purple, some kind of long grass whose name he did not know. He watched her at first exactly as he might have watched some perfect theatrical spectacle, with just that kind of detached admiration and rich impersonal enchantment. The pose of her as she stooped, the flaunt of the grasses in her hand, the movement of her head as she tossed back her laughing hair, the winding yellow path she trampled across the meadows: all these things he watched and strangely admired.

He lay watching for a long while, still without guessing who she was, till the sun went in behind a cloud and he felt drowsy. He closed his eyes and leaned back cushioned amongst the turf.