Читать книгу Mr Weston's Good Wine - T. F. Powys - Страница 8

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Mr. Weston, for a common tradesman—and the most princely of merchants is only that—possessed a fine and creative imagination. And, although entirely self-taught—for he had risen, as so many important people do, from nothing—he had read much, and had written too. He possessed in a very large degree a poet’s fancy, that will at any moment create out of the imagination a new world.

Mr. Weston had once written a prose poem that he had divided into many books, and was naturally surprised when he discovered that the very persons and places that he had but seen in fancy had a real existence in fact. The power of art is magnificent. It can change the dullest sense into the most glorious; it can people a new world in a moment of time; it can cause a sparkling fountain to flow in the driest desert to solace a thirsty traveller.

Standing upon the barren hill, Mr. Weston wished to see Folly Down as it was in the summer. He had only to wish, and the fancy with which he was gifted would complete the matter.

Mr. Weston now saw Folly Down in its gayer days; he created the summer anew as he looked down the valley. The hedges were white with sloe blossom, and the willow bushes were in flower; a few butterflies were abroad and the bumble bees. The blackthorn blossoms were shed; the new green of the hedges came, and the sweet scent of may blossom. The may faded, but in the meadows the deeper colour of the buttercups—those June brides—took the place of the maiden cowslips until the hay-mowers came, and then the white and red roses bloomed in the hedges. Midsummer, that time of rich sunshine, was soon gone; the meadows were yellow again with hawkweed, while in the rougher fields the ragwort grew in clumps, upon which the peacock butterflies fed until near drunken with honey.

Mr. Weston let the summer go. The scented seasons he had seen in his fancy fled away again and were gone.

Mr. Weston felt lonely. The same mood that he remembered having when he was writing his book came to him again. He climbed a tumulus in the gathering darkness, and regarded all the earth with a lonely pity.

A wind awoke from the sea that was but a mile or two away, and rushed and roared about him. Mr. Weston took off his hat, and the wind blew his white hair. He was evidently glad, as any city dweller would be, to be standing there.

‘There are some people,’ said Mr. Weston aloud, ‘who, I believe, envy my position in the city where I live, but they are wrong to do so, for I would willingly exchange all that I am with any simple child that lives and dies in these gentle valleys, and is then forgotten.’

Mr. Weston stretched out his hands over the village of Folly Down. He came down from the mound and returned to the car.

The afternoon dimness sometimes, in a surprising and sudden manner that catches a traveller unawares, changes into the darkness of night. The hills and the Folly Down trees, that a few moments ago could be clearly seen in the valley, now became but the dull, drowsy figures of a strange mystery—the abode of darkness and forgetfulness.

‘The ways of nature, in the country,’ said Mr. Weston, when he was safely seated in the car again, ‘are a little curious, and I should take it kindly, Michael, if you would explain the phenomenon of this sudden darkness, and how it may affect our customers?’

‘The darkness of a winter’s evening at Folly Down,’ replied Michael, ‘when heavy sombre clouds droop from the skies so that no stars can be seen, is a thing that pleases rather than troubles the natives, for it introduces to them an entirely new way of life that enters with the first lamp or, it may be, candle.

‘With the first lighting of a cottage candle a man becomes an entirely new being, and moves in a totally different world to that of daytime. He is now born into a world whose god is a rushlight, and a man’s last moments in this world generally come when the light is extinguished and he creeps into bed.

‘Every common appearance that during the day the vulgar sun has shown, becomes changed by candlelight. For now a thousand whimsical shapes, dim shades and shadows, come, that no daytime has ever seen or known. The bright sun of heaven that has made all things upon earth only too real is not now to be feared by the housewife as a telltale, for all is become magic and a pretty cheat. Dust upon a book or in a corner, a straw upon the floorcloth, show now only as objects of interest. The black stain that the smoke from the lamp has made upon the ceiling becomes colour and is not unlovely. The cheap wallpaper, though wrinkled and torn, has now a right to be so, and is not regarded with displeasure. Nothing after sunset need be looked at too closely, and everything pleases if regarded in a proper evening manner.

‘Man is drugged and charmed by this beneficent master whose name is darkness; he becomes more joyful, and, thank goodness, less like himself. With the first lighting of the lamp, love and hatred, the sole rulers of human life, take a new form and colour. Love becomes more fantastical in the darkness and malice less logical, and both the one and the other are more full of the strange matters that dreams are made of.

‘Duration itself has a mind to dance or stand on one leg, for a winter’s evening here is often felt to be a period of time as long as a lifetime, and is filled more fully than ever a lifetime can be with unlikely happenings. Even the soft mud of a road in late November, and the little clinging drops of misty rain that may be falling, change their aspect in the darkness and become different in character from what they were known to be in the daytime....’

Michael would have said more, only Mr. Weston interrupted him.

‘I never before knew you to talk so much as to forget business,’ he said. ‘You have, indeed, very ably explained the effect of the evening upon the people of Folly Down, but now I would like you to show them our advertisement in the skies.’

Michael climbed upon the car, upon which he arranged a curious network of wires, sustained in the air by two stout rods. As soon as he had managed the wires to his satisfaction, he connected them with the electric arrangements that lit the powerful head-lights which he now extinguished.

That done, he started an electric current that lit up the sky and wrote thereon, in bright and shining letters, ‘Mr. Weston’s Good Wine.’