Her Pleasure In Everything Makes
Everything Interesting, And In Displaying Her Feeling Without
Art Or Disguise She Succeeds In Giving What We May Call A
Literary Expression To Personal Charm - That Quality Which Is
Almost Untranslatable Into Written Words.
Many women possess
it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential
oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use
of.
Furthermore, women when they write are as a rule even more
conventional than men, more artificial and out of and away
from themselves.
I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I
have gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own
satisfaction. Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an
hour pleasantly with a book I have found myself picking up
"Our Village" from among many others, some waiting for a first
perusal, and I wanted to know why this was so - to find out, if
not to invent, some reason for my liking which would not make
me ashamed.
At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there
was no such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the
"Crown," "Cricketers," "Bird-in-the-Hand," and "George and
Dragon," only one, was said to provide accommodation for
travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we
were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or
dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one
in. Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross
and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there. It was a
wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was
not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but
first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of
newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue
and kindle, "to warm the flue and make the fire burn," she
explained.
On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on
through woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and
arrived in the afternoon at Silchester, where we had resolved
to put up for the night. By a happy chance we found a
pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant people
in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to
loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt
the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide
prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many
miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance
and crowned with their beechen rings and groves. Of Roman
Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in
the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter
Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in
the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile
from the village and common.
It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine
very brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet
weather, and that brilliance and the warmth in it served to
bring a butterfly out of hiding; then another; then a third;
red admirals all; and they were seen through all the prayers,
and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the sermon preached by
the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the translucent
glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their
life after so long a period of suspension. But the glass was
between them and their world of blue heavens and woods and
meadow flowers; then I thought that after the service I would
make an attempt to get them out; but soon reflected that to
release them it would be necessary to capture them first, and
that that could not be done without a ladder and butterfly
net. Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before me
there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and
bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these
five all remained to take part in that ceremony of eating
bread and drinking wine in remembrance of an event supposed to
be of importance to their souls, here and hereafter. It
saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in their prison,
beating their red wings against the coloured glass - to leave
them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were
worshipping a little god of their own little imaginations, who
did not create and does not regard the swallow and dove and
white egret and bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my
god and whose will as they understood it was nothing to me.
It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the
butterflies in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls
grown over with ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to
think that in another two thousand years there will be no
archaeologist and no soul in Silchester, or anywhere else in
Britain, or in the world, who would take the trouble to dig up
the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would
care what had become of their pitiful little souls - their
immortal part.
Chapter Seven: Roman Calleva
An afternoon in the late November of 1903. Frost, gales, and
abundant rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their
yellow leaves. But the rain is over now, the sky once more a
pure lucid blue above me - all around me, in fact, since I am
standing high on the top of the ancient stupendous earthwork,
grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly and thorn and
hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar. It is
marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I
only hear the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall,
and the robin, for one spied me here and has come to keep me
company.
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