Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 8

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Christopher wrote to his mother once a week, but his week-ends at Melfont were far less frequent because of the cost of a third-class railway ticket. It had to be saved for penny by penny. It was as precious as the second-hand text-books that were bought in Charing Cross Road.

To Christopher that Wiltshire country had a strangeness, a mysterious austerity that somehow was associated with the memories of his solitary childhood, and memories of his mother, and of starlight nights and of blue days upon those upland fields and wild pastures. It was a country that was so open and yet so secret. Its skies seemed vaster than other skies, its valleys more green for contrast. Always it formed a kind of background to his consciousness, shepherd’s country, open to the wind, with those green barrows and grey stones scattered about it. It had landscapes that suggested ghosts, dim figures standing at gaze upon green and lonely hill tops, the spirits of wild men looking down upon the shadows of cloud and of tree. It seemed to associate itself in Christopher’s mind with the isolations of his own asceticism, with an apple eaten under a tree, or a glass of clear water, the clean floor of his mother’s cottage, flowers in an old brown jug, red peonies or roses or dahlias, his mother’s fresh white skin.

Directly he saw those rolling chalk hills he was conscious of a difference in himself and in them. The steaming stewpan that was London was left to simmer under its smoky sky, while these great rolling spaces sunned themselves as they had sunned themselves in the days of the Barrow men. Silbury—Avebury—Stonehenge. And the silvery light, and the blueness before rain, and the fields of buttercups, and the great, glooming beech woods. It was all so old, yet so new. Ages ago men had watched the sun top the horizon, a red or a gold sun. In London there were no sunrises. A window blind grew grey and you got up.

Lying amid the grasses on those uplands as a child, and listening to the wind making a murmuring about some old sarsen stone, Christopher had seemed to feel those other men lying in the grass beside him. He had pictured them as smallish, wild, dark men, rather like himself. And why not? Was it not possible that he was of the same blood as those Barrow men who had gone free upon these uplands when the place that was London had been a swamp?

He, too, was one of those indefatigable little men pounding away with a stone, or pecking at the chalk with a reindeer pick, or toiling with those others to raise the great sarsens. He loved the spacious sky and the wind in his face, and the flowers of that sweet, short turf, and the river valleys with green lips dripping with moisture.