3
King’s Chapel at Evensong. The coloured windows faded gradually out: only a twilight blue was left beneath the roof: and that died too. Then, only the double rows of candle-flames gave light, pointing and floating above the immemorial shadows of the floor and the shadows of benches and the shadowed faces of old men and youths. Hushed prayer echoed; and the long rolling organ-waves rose and fell, half-drowning the singing and setting it free again. All was muffled, flickering, submerged deep under cloudy water. Jennifer sat there motionless, wistful-eyed and unconscious, neither kneeling nor standing with others, but leaning rigidly back with eyes fixed and brilliant.
And afterwards came the emerging into a strange town swallowed up in mist. White surprising faces glimmered and vanished under the lamps. The buildings loomed formlessly in the dense sky, picked out by dimly-lit windows, and forlorn lanterns in the gateways. The life of Cambridge was thickly enshrouded; but under the folds you felt it stir more buoyantly than ever, with sudden laughter and talk dropping from the windows, weighing oddly in the air: as if the town were encouraging her children to sleep by drawing the curtain; while they, very lively at bedtime, went on playing behind it.
4
The lecture room window-pane was full of treetops—a whirl and sweep of black twigs on the sky. The room swam and shone in a faint translucent flood; and a bird called on three wild enquiring notes. These skies of February twilights had primroses in them, and floods; and with the primroses, a thought of green.
The small creakings, breathings and shufflings of the lecture room went on. The men: rows of heads of young looking hair; bored restless shoulders hunched beneath their gowns; sprawling grey flannel legs. The women: attentive rather anxious faces under their injudicious hats; well-behaved backs; hands writing, writing. Clods, all of them, stones, worse than senseless things.
The lecturer thought smoothly aloud, not caring who besides himself listened to him.
It was a situation meet for one of those paragraphic poems beginning
“The solemn greybeard lecturer drones on;”
and after a few more lines of subtly satirical description some dots and a fresh start: