He went to the looking-glass hanging over her dressing-table and began to comb his beard, then, looking once more out of the window, watched two men pass by, leading a horse along the road to be roughed at the blacksmith’s, a slow business, for one of the men had to throw down sacks every few yards for it to step on, wherever the blizzard had whirled away the snow and left a polished slide of ice.
At a few minutes before nine he sat down to the breakfast table and took the cup of tea that his daughter poured out for him; then, hearing a shout, both Anne and he turned to the window and caught sight of a red muffler flying in the wind, and a thrown snowball, but when the children had passed, running on their way to school, all was silence, for Mr. Dunnock had turned to read a circular which the postman had brought that morning.
“Evangelicals! Evangelicals!” he muttered angrily, for he was a ritualist; a last flicker of the Oxford Movement had filled his life with poetry. Then he pushed away the newspaper, and, taking some bread for the birds, he rose from the breakfast table and went to the front door.
The world outside was dazzling, and the snow lay piled up deep before the sill. Mr. Dunnock peered out, not daring to step in the snow in his carpet slippers. He listened: not a sound; he looked and marked the roofs which yesterday were but the edges of a row of tiles, to-day as thick as thatch—like Christmas cards. “And here’s a robin,” he said, “waiting for me to throw him some of the bread.” He threw a piece which was lost in the snow. “A wedding-cake! How strange it is to reflect that Anne is older now than her mother when I married her! Yes, the world is become a wedding-cake. Something very strange has happened, and who knows what will be the end of it? for it has begun to snow again, and the rare flakes drift slowly to the ground like feathers from the angels’ wings. Are they moulting up there? Or has Satan got among them like a black cat which has climbed through the wire netting into the dove loft?”
Mr. Dunnock fetched a piece of cardboard from his study to serve as a table for the birds, and dropped it a few feet away on to the snow, then, crumbling the bread in his fingers, he threw the birds their breakfast. Some of the crumbs fell on each side into the snow and were lost.
“Here they come,” he said to himself, for bright eyes had been watching him from every tree and bush.
The birds fluttered nearer, eyeing the crumbs spread out for them, and then looking sideways at the tall, bearded man standing in the doorway. Their fear was speedily forgotten, for the clergyman made it his habit to feed them every morning, and soon the cardboard table was covered with sparrows, robins, blackbirds, and thrushes, all of them flashing their wings, bickering and scrambling for the finest crumbs like a flock of bantams. And having been successful, one would often fly off with a piece in his bill, which he wished to devour in solitude.
Anne Dunnock remained at the breakfast table, for she had only just finished the kipper on her plate. “The labourers will not go to work in the fields on such a day as this,” she said to herself. “And not a woman will venture out except me, for women’s boots are generally leaky, and their skirts flap wet against their calves. With a frost like this there should be skating, but the snow will have spoilt the ice, even if it were swept.” She finished a piece of toast and rose from the table to clear away the breakfast. The loaf was a pitiful object, only a shell of crust, with all of the inside scooped out.
“Another loaf gone,” she said to herself. “We always have stale crusts, yet I am sure the birds would eat them as readily as they do the crumb, and crusts are so nasty in bread-and-butter pudding.”
Mr. Dunnock continued watching the birds, and the draught from the open front door made his daughter shiver. “Birds! Birds! I should like to wear a bird in my hat.”