I was too tired with the journey to go round the garden that day; I put it off till to-morrow. Next day I was not equal to going out at all, and the third day I did not get up.
The colours gradually faded from the hillsides; the woods grew a purply-brown; the white mists were later and later in rising from the river in the valley below me. All day long I lay in bed watching the sun move from east to west across the mountains, while near at hand tomtits and finches, jays and magpies, cheeky robins and green and crimson woodpeckers flitted about in the bare trees just outside my windows.
One little wren used regularly to pay me a morning call on the window-ledge; often she flew right into the room. I liked to think she came to ask how I was. Once I opened my eyes to find a robin perched on the rail at the bottom of the bed, eyeing me inquiringly. The little wild things on these hills seem so friendly.
As soon as twilight fell the owls woke up the adjoining wood, and called to other owls across the ravine.
These were the only sounds to break the silence.
It is when you are ill, more than at any other time, that you realise the human difference between town and country. You can live all your life, and then be ill and die, in London, and the people next door—even those in the same building—may know nothing about it.
I knew of a girl living in a block of small flats occupied by women workers, and trying to make a living by journalism, who lay dead in her room for a week, and then was only discovered by the caretaker because her rent was overdue. No one had missed her, though there were women going up and down stairs and in and out of the rooms, all around her. The isolation of the solitary woman in a crowded city can be something awful.
It isn’t that town dwellers at heart are more selfish than country folks; it is their mode of life that is to blame.
London claims so much of one’s time and energy for the doing of “most important” work, and the pursuit of machine-made pleasure, till next to nothing is left for the greatest of all work and the greatest of all pleasure—merely being kind.