Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/296

 Sorrell closed the ledger, put it away in a drawer and locked it. He pocketed the key. His fingers played with a pen, a favourite pen that he had used for the last nine years. It was almost a part of his hand, a graving tool with which he had scored in the lines of an indelible success. But his eyes were looking through the window between the folds of the green and white curtains, and in those eyes of his shone an inward vision, something personal that was suddenly awake to a world that was intensely and poignantly impersonal.

He found himself in the garden, standing under the very old pear tree that grew close to the thorn hedge, its grey and twisted trunk rising in a spiral to the spreading of the boughs. The fruit buds were swelling, and their colour was a wonderful pale gold. A blue tit, hunting for insects, flew away towards the orchard, and Sorrell heard its quaint creaking note contrasting with the flute song of a blackbird.

Spring! The silver-gold buds of the pear tree entranced him. How delicate and beautiful they were, almost more beautiful than the flowers that would open from them! Buds of promise ending in the fruit of fulfilment, but not every bud would mature into a fruit. His eyes wandered towards other trees, and to the eyes of his new awareness the whole world was a lacework of buds; lilacs and chestnuts tinted green, but the lilacs more green than the chestnuts; the elm boughs purple against the April blue; beeches bronze to gold; the oaks still dim and unburnished. A thrush was singing on the top of a beech tree.

What a world of buds and of song!

He looked over the hedge into the inn garden, and saw golden daffodils and white crocus in bloom together in a wild patch of grass under the old trees. Never had he felt so conscious of colour, of all that mystery of life which man the money-maker has no time to see. Nor had he realized, somehow, that the sone of a thrush can be translated into so many human variants. "Why worry,—why worry? Will you do it, will you do it? Joy,—joy! I'm a spirit; I'm a spirit." Sorrell felt awed.

"How one forgets to look at things! Scuffling in the mud—most of us. Makes one marvel."

Reborn in him was the-dim appreciation of the fact that it is good for man that he should marvel, yes, and marvel