Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/14

2 faint outlines of great white-winged angels: beyond, a chasm of clearer purer light; and beyond, God.

Now everything changes. My next recollection of a certain fixed occasion brings with it an acquaintance, often strangely minute and distinct, of myself and of the life that was around me. Thus:—

From standing with some wistfulness in the twilight road, I turn slowly away, shoulders rounded, collar awry, hands deep in my pockets: slouch to the right, along the second side (at right angles to the road) of the wall, and there stop—thinking.

A white duck hurries waddling, filled with anxiousness, across the grass farther on, and paddles her bill in the edge of the stream. And I walk with big strides till I am parallel to her: reach the wooden bridge (duck the while paddling her bill in the stream's border of watery mud):—give one look at a hole in the bank from which trickles the thick inky, sluggish drain-fluid; and enter the porch.

No one in the kitchen. The clock tick-tacking with big silent swing: the plates, with their ruddy flickering fire-light, in rows: the lamp not lit yet.

Then I hear a motion as of some one shoving a jar on to a shelf in the pantry: cross quickly through the kitchen: down the red-tiled passage (up come two or three loose tiles with a collapsed fall), catching a semi-earthy smell from under the cellar door (some one's in the pantry: Anne, I think): run upstairs two steps at a time: turn down the dark passage: reach the ladder foot: climb up: shove open the door: enter the dim garret: go on to the window: look out over the graveyard, and then turn and begin to take in, half-unconsciously, the red-painted lines on the card over the washing-stand:  'I love them that love, and those that seek early shall find .'

At that I turn again: go back to the window, and, with a knee on the white-painted window-sill, look out into the twilight sky, in which I see vaguely the tall dark wild rook-trees with their black broad tops, the many gravestones, and the small church to the right.

Then:

 'Ber-tie!'