I watched this dubious host from the hill-top until it vanished in the eye of the sun; and then, fairly beaten at last by the razor-edged north wind, turned and went back to the village. It was winter again, in very truth; and there was little sense or profit in blinking it. I would strike my flag now, as I had struck it often before. And the flag with me was the little staging of fernery that still concealed the yawning blackness of my study hearth. I pulled it all down and stowed it away; and by and by, when the ash logs were sizzling and glowing, and the sparks were volleying up the flue, and a living warmth pervading the room, I plucked up new heart and courage:
‘No mirth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member;
No warmth, no shine—’
It was all as false now as it must ever have been. And as for butterflies and bees, what but a sick fancy could crave for such delicacies out of season?
DECEMBER
I
We sat on the churchyard wall, the Reverend and I, debating many things.
It was one of those silent, gloomy afternoons that would be cold but for their exceeding stillness. A heavy grey pall of sky lowered overhead. A multitude of noisy sparrows was going to bed in the thicket of ilex and yew, denoting that the time was nearing sunset, although not a tinge of sunset colour showed in the shrouded west. The same impulse, it seemed, had brought us both out of doors, which, elementally, was nothing more than a sudden realisation of the impossibility of remaining within. In the whole year’s round, perhaps, there come only two or three days like this. You become the prey of a conviction that something cataclysmic is going to happen. There is a sense of the world slowing down in its age-long, giddy race through the pathless ether; a feeling that its momentum is almost spent, and that any instant it may come to a final stop, to be followed by the Last Trump and dissolution of all things. The mute house seems alive about you, and full of a sort of terror and foreboding. You are seized with an apprehension that the ceilings and roof are falling in; and, hurrying forth, a like doubt comes upon you as to the stability of the sky: it looks so overburdened and unsafe. In this easeless, impotent frame of mind, I came up into the churchyard as being the most reassuring place I could think of, and found the Reverend wandering there for a like reason and in much the same mood.
‘Wind and dirty weather coming,’ said he, ‘the sort of times to make people think of home and fireside, the need for human peace on earth, and good-will towards men—the very weather for me.’
As we sat on the wall, silent awhile, the bells in far-off Stavisham began their chime, every note drifting over to us sharp and clear through the miles of torpid air.
‘Winter coming,’ he went on; ‘the winter we all need once a year to knit us closer together. Listen to Saint Barnabas practising his Christmas carillons!—forging his link in the chain of bell-ringing that in a week or two will stretch all round the world. It is my time coming, my own time. For did you ever think how little eyesight matters at Christmas? Blindness is nothing to a man then. Christmas is all glad sound; warm heart-beats; faithful words. And, please God, when the day dawns, there shall not be a cottage-nest in Windlecombe that does not overflow with these.’