Читать книгу Christmas Eve - Robert Browning - Страница 1

Out of the little chapel I burst

     Into the fresh night-air again.

Five minutes full, I waited first

     In the doorway, to escape the rain

That drove in gusts down the common's centre

     At the edge of which the chapel stands,

Before I plucked up heart to enter.

     Heaven knows how many sorts of hands

Reached past me, groping for the latch

Of the inner door that hung on catch

More obstinate the more they fumbled,

     Till, giving way at last with a scold

Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled

     One sheep more to the rest in fold,

And left me irresolute, standing sentry

In the sheepfold's lath-and-plaster entry,

Six feet long by three feet wide,

Partitioned off from the vast inside—

     I blocked up half of it at least.

No remedy; the rain kept driving.

     They eyed me much as some wild beast,

That congregation, still arriving,

Some of them by the main road, white

A long way past me into the night,

Skirting the common, then diverging;

Not a few suddenly emerging

From the common's self thro' the paling-gaps

—They house in the gravel-pits perhaps,

Where the road stops short with its safeguard border

Of lamps, as tired of such disorder;—

But the most turned in yet more abruptly

     From a certain squalid knot of alleys,

Where the town's bad blood once slept corruptly,

     Which now the little chapel rallies

And leads into day again,—its priestliness

Lending itself to hide their beastliness

So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason),

And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on

Those neophytes too much in lack of it,

     That, where you cross the common as I did,

     And meet the party thus presided,

"Mount Zion" with Love-lane at the back of it,

They front you as little disconcerted

As, bound for the hills, her fate averted,

And her wicked people made to mind him,

Lot might have marched with Gomorrah

behind him.