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#a city of bells
ashknife · 1 year
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It doesn't matter what century it is or what county they're in, small-town people have opinions, and God help you if you don't agree.
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misscrawfords · 1 year
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Honestly, I wish it were my destiny to open a bookshop in an old house with bay windows near a cathedral.
It literally sounds perfect.
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clarythericebot · 11 months
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A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge (Book Review)
3.75 / 5. I started this book with the knowledge of Elizabeth Goudge being a great romance writer in the back of my head. And she IS a great romance writer--but the book goes deeper than that. (Actually, this might have convinced me that my favorite romance novels are things that focus on something larger than the romance.)
We have two protagonists. The first is Jocelyn--a serious young man newly lame from the war, trying to figure out what to do with his life with the help of his saintly grandfather. The second is Henrietta, a child who the saintly grandfather has adopted, vivid and contemplative and still heartbroken over the loss of her friend, Ferranti (a melancholic writer who many believe to have committed suicide after he disappeared).
The large, overarching plot centers around Jocelyn figuring out what happened to Ferranti. However, it's also a book full of mini-adventures that build up to that. There's the love story--Jocelyn falling in love with the vivacious Felicity Summers, a visiting actress who's also superbly curious in the mystery.  There's him opening up a bookshop, to his family's disapproval. There's Felicity reckoning with the power of her own charisma. There's Henrietta discovering her own artistic talent. And beneath all this sweet whimsy is a profound meditation on art and faith and hope that I deeply, deeply appreciated.
Also, the end was startlingly progressive? This being written in the 1930's (and the story set at the end of the 19th century), I expected to encounter sexism or attitudes I wouldn't be too happy about, but the conclusion (especially between the love interests!) was so heartwarming and so surprising I had to confirm what date this was published again. I won't reveal too much, but I stan a romantic lead that is practical and humble and true.
I'll leave with one of my favorite quotes: She laid down an exquisite carved ivory spinning-wheel on her lap and looked at her own hands, small brown shapely hands, and for the first time she was aware of them in connection with her dreams. A consciousness of power welled up in her. One day she too would make something and it should be beautiful. She would make it out of her two selves, her pixy self and her sober self. The one should give form to the magic of the other.
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teabooksandsweets · 1 year
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A City of Bells
Chapter III — Part I
The morning after Jocelyn’s arrival dawned blue and lovely.
Grandfather and Grandmother were the only ones who talked during the early stages of breakfast. Jocelyn, who came down a little late, was silent from fatigue and the necessity of catching up, and the tongues of Hugh Anthony and Henrietta were fully employed in dealing with porridge, bacon and egg, milk and water, toast and marmalade.
What, asked Grandfather of Grandmother as the meal drew to an end, was to be done with the dear children this afternoon? The choirboys were on holiday, it was Sarah’s afternoon out and Grandfather had a Chapter meeting … In the suggestive pause that followed Jocelyn said nothing  … Though in search of a profession he did not feel much drawn to that of nursery governess.
Henrietta bolted a mouthful and, following a rule of life implanted in her by Matron, wiped her mouth before she spoke. “I should like,” she said, “to go with Uncle Jocelyn to the house with the green door.”
“Why?” asked Hugh Anthony with unwiped mouth.
“Because I dreamed I did. I dreamed that I couldn’t get the door open, but Uncle Jocelyn opened it with a big golden key.”
“What did you do inside the house?” asked Hugh Anthony.
“I didn’t do anything,” said Henrietta, “because I woke up before I got inside. But I dreamed all sorts of other things first. There was a tall, thin man who piped, and who looked like Mr. Ferranti, and dancing children in coloured cloaks and houses with red roofs.”
“What do these children have for supper, dear?” said Grandfather to Grandmother.
“Milk and biscuits, dear,” said Grandmother rather sharply, for she disliked interference with her domestic arrangements.
“Before we go to the house we’ll show Uncle Jocelyn the sweet-shop,” said Hugh Anthony.
Jocelyn, yielding to fate, squared his shoulders and accepted the responsibilities of resident nursery governess. At half-past two that afternoon, he declared bravely, he would be ready.
Their breakfast finished, Henrietta and Hugh Anthony asked to get down and raced upstairs to get ready for morning school with Miss Lavender. They put on their brown strap shoes, attached the immense sailor hats that were then fashionable for the young to the backs of their heads with the help of elastic under the chin, and slung their satchels over their shoulders. Their grandparents, watching through the dining-room window, saw them go jauntily down the garden path and smiled affectionately. Hugh Anthony wore a dark blue sailor suit and Henrietta a rose-pink smock and they looked very nice if perhaps not as studious as could be wished.
The garden door slammed behind them and they were out in the Close. A blossoming tree that leaned over the garden wall dropped petals on their heads, the sun shone and they were happy. They walked along the pavement hand in hand, being careful to put their feet down in the centre of each paving-stone and not on the cracks, and at every sixth step they gave a little jump. This not walking on the cracks of the paving-stones was part of the ritual of the walk to school and was always observed with great solemnity.
Then they passed under the archway that separated the Close from the Cathedral Green and planted themselves in front of the clock on the north wall of the Cathedral to watch it strike nine. This also was part of the ritual.
It was a wonderful clock. A great bell hung between the life-size figures of two gentlemen sitting down. They had bushy hair and square caps on their heads, and held sticks in their hands, and for most of the day they sat perfectly still gazing at each other with every appearance of acute boredom. But at each hour they suddenly came to agitated life and made savage onslaughts on the bell. They struck it with their sticks and kicked it with their feet and made a great deal of noise indeed. Henrietta and Hugh Anthony adored these two gentlemen and it was one of the griefs of their life that owing to other engagements they could not be present every time they came to life. When they were grown up, they had decided, they would always be present, for to watch that clock was a life’s work in itself.
But nine o’clock was good and lasted a long time. Nine kicks and nine blows and a glorious great boom at each. They stood perfectly still, their mouths ajar and their heads thrown back, listening and watching as though they had never seen the thing before.
When it was over they sighed, walked on a little way and descended the steps to the Cathedral Green, where they stopped again to look up at the west front. It did not look to-day as though it were built of stone. The blue air and golden sunlight of the misty spring day seemed to have soaked into it and dissolved its hardness of colour and outline, so that it seemed an apparition that might at any moment vanish. The rows of sculptured figures were not statues to-day, they were ghosts, an army of spirits stepping silently through the veil of mist hanging between earth and heaven.
“I do wish He’d laugh,” said Henrietta, looking up at the Christ Child. “If I could reach I’d pinch His toes and then I’m sure He’d laugh.”
“Don’t be so silly,” said Hugh Anthony. “He’s only stone. Come on. Run.”
Having taken as long as they possibly could to get from home to the west front they then took to their heels and raced each other across the Green to Miss Lavender’s house, arriving in a most impressive state of perspiring eagerness for learning that Miss Lavender found very touching.
A half-circle of old houses stood round the Green, back to back with the houses in the Market Place, and Miss Lavender had lodgings in one of them. She was very poor, so poor that she could never tell anyone just how poor she was, and it had been Grandfather’s idea that she should eke out her tiny income by teaching Henrietta and Hugh Anthony. She had never done any teaching before, except Sunday-school teaching, and she had no idea how much she ought to be paid for it, so Grandfather was able to pay her too much without her knowing.
Her parlour was on the first floor, a little room looking straight out into the branches of the elm-trees that pressed close up to the window. There were two wooden desks for her pupils, a table with a globe on it, behind which Miss Lavender sat, a bookcase full of books, one shabby arm-chair, photos of Miss Lavender’s relations on the mantelpiece and a picture of “The Soul’s Awakening” over the tiny sideboard. That was all there was, except the canary and the cat.
Miss Lavender herself was tall and thin, with grey hair and a kind, meek face. She always wore grey alpaca, and steel-rimmed glasses, and her beautiful voice was never raised either in reproof or anger.
Her method of education was very much ahead of her time, for she employed the modern method of self-government and allowed her pupils to study whatever subject they felt most drawn to at the moment. But in employing this method she was not actuated by a study of child psychology but by a desire for peace and quiet. As she suffered from headaches, and it was quite impossible to induce Hugh Anthony to do what he did not want to do without a frightful row, she was obliged to let him do what he did want to do, and the same in a lesser degree with Henrietta.
The result was not too unsatisfactory, for they were neither of them lazy and, let loose in the field of learning, Hugh Anthony with his inquiring mind and Henrietta with her contemplative one, they made each of them for the food that suited them best and munched away like a couple of young heifers, one devouring buttercups and the other daisies.
“I shall do geography,” announced Hugh Anthony that morning, when they had hung their sailor hats on the pegs in the hall and clattered up the stairs to Miss Lavender’s room. He loved geography, for the questions that could be asked about it were endless. Why were some people black in the face, for instance, and others yellow and others white, and why was there snow at the North Pole, and was it hotter in India than it was in England, and if so why? Miss Lavender, when asked, never had the slightest idea, but she had a very good geography book provided by Grandfather and Hugh Anthony was able to find these things out for himself to his entire satisfaction.
“I shall do literature,” said Henrietta. She did not like geography, for she had had enough of the capes of England at the orphanage to last her a lifetime, and her explorations were all made in that realm of knowledge rather vaguely described by Miss Lavender as “English literature.” This included reading, writing, dictation, learning by heart “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,” and looking out of the window.
Henrietta loved words, both the shape and the sound of them. She had not yet discovered her own powers as a picture-maker—for Miss Lavender did not attempt to teach painting—but she had discovered through words the symbolism of sound and shape and their relationship, just as in her dreams she had learnt to link colour and movement with music. “Silver” was a word that she especially loved. She thought it was the loveliest of words because it was so cool. If it gave her pleasure to hear Mr. Gotobed say “damn,” as though the word were a fine, strong fist crashed down on a hard table, it gave her even more pleasure to hear Miss Lavender say “silver,” for she immediately thought of fountains playing and a long, cool drink on a hot day. It was a satisfactory word to write too, with its capital S flowing like a river, its I tall as a silver spear and the v like an arrow-head upside down. Yellow was another good word because of that glorious capital Y that was like a man standing on a mountain-top at dawn praying to God, with his arms stretched out, his figure black against a sky the colour of buttercups … All her life yellow was her favourite colour and the one that symbolized the divine to her.
From the delight of forming letters into words Henrietta went on to the intoxication of forming words into sentences and here her instinct was unerring. She seemed to know just what words to choose and how to arrange them so that they sounded like a bar of music and not like the tea-things falling downstairs. Miss Lavender, unaware how early a feeling for poetry awakes in children, was astonished at Henrietta’s sensitive ear. She had, a few days ago, read them Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” She had thought it far above their heads, but the larks were just in the middle of their spring ecstasy and Henrietta had demanded “something about larks,” and Miss Lavender had not at the moment been able to lay her hand upon any literary lark except Shelley’s. She was astonished, as she read, at the hush that fell upon her schoolroom. Henrietta never moved and even Hugh Anthony, who was carving a portrait of the Dean on his desk with a penknife, neglected his activities to listen, leaving the Dean whiskered on one side and not on the other.
“That’s nice,” said Henrietta when the poem was finished. “That’s lots nicer than ‘Be good, sweet maid,’ or ‘How doth the little.’”
“But you didn’t understand it, dear, did you?” asked Miss Lavender.
Hugh Anthony, who had gone back to the Dean’s whiskers, did not reply, but Henrietta said, “It sounded good. It jumped up and up like the lark and it sang all the time.”
“Well!” said Miss Lavender. “Dear me!”
And now, this spring morning, Hugh Anthony being provided with a chapter on coal and why it behaved in such a peculiar way when set alight to, Henrietta was presented by Miss Lavender with Verses for the Little Ones.
She flung it into the corner of the room.
“Henrietta!” exclaimed Miss Lavender in horror.
“I don’t like it,” said Henrietta. “I’m not little and I want that lark man.”
“Not if you behave like that,” said Miss Lavender, and began to shake nervously, for occasionally, mercifully very occasionally, Henrietta could be extremely naughty.
Henrietta saw Miss Lavender shaking and she was sorry, for she was not one of those demon children who enjoy tormenting … She liked power as much as anyone else, but Grandfather had already taught her that in this world you may lay violent hands upon no personality but your own; other people’s, if you dare to touch them at all, must be handled with a touch as light as a butterfly’s … So she picked up Verses for the Little Ones and apologized for her disgraceful conduct. “Though I’m not going to read it,” she ended firmly.
Miss Lavender gave in and produced Shelley.
There was silence in the schoolroom, Hugh Anthony engrossed in coal, Henrietta in turning the pages of Shelley and Miss Lavender in the knitting that she was able to take up when the dear children were good.
The light in the room was a green light, for outside the windows the elm-trees were covered with new leaves and the sunlight had to filter through a green mist before it reached them … Leaves … The thought of them was in the minds of both children, for Hugh Anthony was discovering to his astonishment that buried forests turn into coal and Henrietta was thinking that the pages of Shelley as she turned them rustled like autumn leaves.
“Leaves.” The words suddenly danced up at her from the page and caught her eye.
“O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence stricken multitudes!”
Suddenly she remembered that autumn day when she had run across the Green to look for Ferranti and the leaves were falling and drifting and bowling over the grass in golden battalions.
“Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean.”
She did not quite understand that, but she had a vision of the sky as it had been that day, with torn wisps of cloud sailing along behind the Cathedral towers, leaf-shaped clouds that blew before the wind just as the leaves did. She read on eagerly, uncomprehending but pouncing eagerly on beautiful individual sentences. “And saw in sleep old palaces and towers” … “And flowers so sweet the sense faints picturing them.” … Yes, she too could dream of beautiful things and picture them to herself when she woke up … And here were the leaves again.
“Drive my dead thoughts over the universe, Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth; And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth, Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind.”
“Miss Lavender,” said Hugh Anthony suddenly. “Is it really true that the flame that comes out of coal is the sunshine that got shut up in the leaves of the forests that were buried?”
“If it says so in that book,” said Miss Lavender guardedly.
“It does say so.”
“Then it’s true,” said Miss Lavender, “because your dear Grandfather bought that book and he would never buy a book that made incorrect statements.”
Hugh Anthony thought hard, and his thinking powers were considerable. “Then when the flames come out of the coal the sunlight that was buried comes alive again.”
“Yes,” said Miss Lavender, and remembering that Easter was only just past hastened to improve the occasion. “A new birth,” she said slowly and reverently, her knitting in mid-air with the heel half turned, “a resurrection.”
Henrietta puzzled over the last verse of the poem with knitted brows, saying it over and over so that she had it by heart. “Do all things that have gone away come back again?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Miss Lavender.
“Why?” asked Hugh Anthony.
“Because it’s a law of life.”
“Why?”
“Because God ordained that it should be.”
“Why?”
“It is not for us to question the will of God.”
“Why not?”
“Hugh Anthony, I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
Henrietta arose and fell upon him. They rolled over and over together on the floor. They upset an inkpot and frightened the cat and gave the canary, who was elderly, a heart attack. By the time Miss Lavender had quieted the cat and the canary and got the ink out of the carpet with milk and lemon it was, to her great relief, time for the dear children to go home.
When they had gone she wondered for the hundredth time if teaching the young was really her vocation and what, if anything, the dear children had learnt that morning.
They had, as it happened, learnt a good deal. The fact of resurrection had been brought home to them, some facts about coal were now a part of their mental equipment and Henrietta had memorized some words of a great poem … It was the latter attainment that later turned out of great importance to them all.
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upmala · 5 months
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delicate angels of solemnity, 2023
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horse-immorality · 5 days
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Imogen's Laudna voice that she only uses with Laudna that is so soft and careful and delicate reblog if you agree
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forsapphics · 3 months
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Carol (2015) — dir. Todd Haynes // Snapshots (2018) — dir. Melanie Mayron // Lez Bomb (2018) — dir. Jenna Laurenzo // Let It Snow (2019) — dir. Luke Snellin // Season of Love (2019) — dir. Christin Baker // City of Trees (2019) — dir. Alexandra Swarens // A New York Christmas Wedding (2020) — dir. Otoja Abit // Happiest Season (2020) — dir. Clea DuVall // The Christmas Lottery (2020) — dir. Tamika Miller // Every Time a Bell Rings (2021) — dir. Maclain Nelson // Christmas at the Ranch (2021) — dir. Christin Baker // Under the Christmas Tree (2021) — dir. Lisa Rose Snow // Looking for Her (2022) — dir. Alexandra Swarens // Friends & Family Christmas (2023) — dir. Anne Wheeler
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finncakes · 10 months
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hound of ill omen
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fearnesbells · 25 days
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on the ECCC panel when marisha said “it certainly lives in laudna (and marisha’s) head rent free that [imogen] looked at her and said ‘i hate that she’s watching.’ we haven’t had a chance to talk about it!”
WHUH OH!
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middimidoris · 25 days
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I am sobbing over this dog and the cast. The most wholesome moment.
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refiectionsafterjane · 2 months
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why can’t i do anything but rot in bed
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ashknife · 1 year
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Goudge sure does like to tell the audience everything that's going on and even a few things that will happen later...and it works. A City of Bells is a masterclass on how to effectively write from the third-person omniscient perspective.
The neat thing about this book so far is that every major character has at least one real-life analogue that I've met. It also really nails the small-town aesthetic. The gossip ring, how everybody knows everything about everyone else, and the community-level generosity are still things that happen. What a cozy novel!
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misscrawfords · 1 year
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I've fallen so in love with this book that I had to get my own copy!
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clarythericebot · 11 months
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co-parenting???????
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teabooksandsweets · 1 year
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A City of Bells
Chapter I — Part III
Jocelyn realized with something of a shock that the train was standing still in a perfectly ordinary station. Machines holding matches and chocolates faced him, and a beery porter was obligingly withdrawing his bag from beneath his legs. He had for a moment seen the real Torminster, the spiritual thing that the love of man for a certain spot of earth had created through long centuries, but now he was back again in the outward seeming of the place. Torminster, he supposed, would have dustbins like other towns, and a horrible network of drains beneath it, and tax collectors and public-houses. It might even look ugly in a March east wind and smell abominably stuffy on an August night, but these unpleasant things would now never matter much to him, for he would feel towards Torminster as one feels towards a human being when one has, if only once, seen the soul flickering in the eyes.
“Take the bus,” Grandfather had said and Jocelyn accordingly took it. The Torminster bus, once experienced, was never forgotten. In shape and colour it was like a pumpkin and its designer had apparently derived inspiration from the immortal conveyance that took Cinderella to the ball. It was pulled by two stout bay horses and driven by Mr. Gotobed, a corpulent gentleman clothed in bottle-green with a wonderful top-hat poised adroitly on the back of the head. His face was red, his whiskers pronounced and his language rich … He and the Dean together were the outstanding figures of Torminster.
“Get in, sir,” he said genially to Jocelyn. “I was ordered for you by the reverend gentleman. Fine day. Come on with that luggage, ’Erb. One gentleman for the Close and four buff orpingtons for The Green Dragon.”
Jocelyn was established on one of the two wooden seats that ran the length of the bus, with the buff orpingtons complaining of their lot and straining agitated necks through the slats of the crate on the seat opposite him.
“All aboard?” continued Mr. Gotobed, as though they were bound for the North Pole. “’Eave up the gentleman’s bag, ’Erb; we can’t sit ’ere all night while you calculate ’ow many drinks you’ve ’ad since Christmas.”
’Erb heaved up the bag and slammed the door while Mr. Gotobed climbed to the box, flourished his whip, laid it across the backs of the horses, told ’Erb what he thought of his ancestry and set the pumpkin in violent motion.
The outcry of the buff orpingtons was now drowned, for the wheels of the bus were solid and the streets of Torminster in many places cobbled. Jolting through it, and shut away from the subdued hum of its life by the walls of the bus, Torminster once more seemed to Jocelyn to lack everyday reality. The soft, moist air was the atmosphere of dreams and the old houses that lined the streets seemed to be leaning forward a little, as though drowsily nodding. The bus made such a noise that the few vehicles that passed them went by unheard and the handful of passers-by, though their lips moved and their feet trod the quiet pavements, were silent as the dead. Down the side of the sloping High Street, as they climbed up it, a little stream came hurrying down to meet them and Jocelyn gazed at it enchanted. Its water was clear and sparkling as crystal and it must have come down from the hills that surrounded Torminster. The bus stopped for a brief, respectful moment, to let the Archdeacon’s plum-pudding dog cross the street, and he could hear the stream’s ripple and gurgle … What bliss, he thought, to keep a shop in Torminster and do business to the sound of running water and the chiming of bells.
The High Street ended abruptly and they were in the Market Place, a wide, open square surrounded by tall old houses with shops below them. There was no one in the Market Place, except one old gentleman and two cats, and the peace of this centre of industrial life was complete. In the centre was a holy well that had been there before either the city or the Cathedral had come into being. A high parapet had been built round it, with a canopy overhead, and if you wanted to look inside the well you had to mount a flight of steps. The water, that welled up no one knew how far down in the earth, was always inky black and when you leaned over to look in you could see your own face looking back at you. Sometimes it stirred with a mysterious movement and then the sunlight that pierced through the carved canopy touched it with shifting, broken points of light like stars. There were always pigeons wheeling round the holy well, the reflection of their wings passing over it like light. There were pigeons there now, and it seemed to Jocelyn that their wings splintered the veiled sunshine into falling showers.
The bus clattered round the Market Place and stopped with a flourish in front of The Green Dragon. It was a small hotel and public-house combined, its old woodwork glistening with new paint and its windows shining with prosperity. The dragon, his scales painted emerald green, and scarlet fire belching from his nostrils, pranced upon an azure ground over the porch. Here it seemed that they would wait a long time, for Mr. Gotobed, after the exhaustion of carrying in the buff orpingtons, stopped inside to refresh himself.
Jocelyn got out and strolled a little way up the pavement, and then stopped stock still and stared. The most important moments of a lifetime seem always to arrive out of the blue and it was here that Jocelyn, his thoughts objectively busy with this Hans Andersen city, experienced a subjective moment that startled him like a thunderclap.
Between the tall Green Dragon and the equally tall bakery two doors off was wedged a little house only two stories high. Its walls were plastered and pale pink in colour and its gabled roof was tiled with wavy tiles and ornamented with cushions of green moss. There were two gables, with a small window in each, and under them was a green door with two white, worn steps leading up to it. A large bow-window was to the right of the door and a smaller one to the left. There was something particularly attractive attractive about the bow-window. It reflected the light in every pane, so that it looked alive and dancing, and it bulged in a way that suggested that the room behind was crammed so full of treasures that they were trying to press their way out. But yet it was in reality quite empty, for Jocelyn could see the bare floor and the walls papered with a pattern of rose-sprigs. Behind the house he thought that there must be a garden, for the top of a tall apple-tree was just visible behind the wavy roof.
The house affected him oddly. He was first vividly conscious of it and then overwhelmingly conscious of himself. His own personality seemed enriched by it and he felt less painfully aware of his own shortcomings, less afraid of the business of living that lay in front of him. He had felt like this once before, at the beginning of an important friendship.
“Why is that house empty?” he asked Mr. Gotobed, when that worthy returned to his duties wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Because the gentleman what ’ad it ’as gone away and no one else ain’t taken it, sir,” explained Mr. Gotobed patiently.
“But why has no one taken it?”
“No drains,” said Mr. Gotobed briefly, and climbed to his box.
Jocelyn was now the only passenger left in the bus and they completed the circuit of the Market Place and turned to their right up a steep street at a smart pace. Then they turned to their right a second time and passed under a stone archway into the Close.
Instantly it seemed that they had come to the very centre of peace. In the town beyond the archway there had been the peacefulness of laziness, but here there was the peace of an ordered life that had continued for so long in exactly the same way that its activity had become effortless. Outside in the town new methods of buying and selling might conceivably be drowsily adopted, or some slight modernization of the lighting system might take place after a year’s slow discussion of the same, but inside in the Close the word “new” was unknown. Modernity had not so far touched it and even to admit the fear that it might do so seemed sacrilege.
Jocelyn, as the bus rolled along, looked across a space of green grass, elm-bordered, to the grey mass of the Cathedral. Its towers rose four-square against the sky and the wide expanse of the west front, rising like a precipice, was crowded with sculptured figures. They stood in their ranks, rising higher and higher, kings and queens and saints and angels, remote and still. About them the rooks were beating slowly and over their heads the bells were ringing for five o’clock evensong. Behind the Cathedral rose a wooded hill, brilliantly green now with its spring leaves, the Tor from which the city took its name.
“What a place!” ejaculated Jocelyn, and held on to the seat in delighted excitement. To his left, on the opposite side of the road to the Cathedral, was another, smaller mass of grey masonry, the Deanery, and in front of him was a second archway.
Once through it they were in a discreet road bordered on each side with gracious old houses standing back in walled gardens. Here dwelt the Canons of the Cathedral with their respective wives and families, and the few elderly ladies of respectable antecedents, blameless life and orthodox belief who were considered worthy to be on intimate terms with them.
The bus stopped with a jolt at Number Two the Close and Jocelyn got out in front of a blue door in a wall so high that only a grey roof and the tops of some trees could be seen above the wallflowers that grew on top of it. He felt the thrill of excitement inseparable from a walled house and garden; for a house behind railings has no secrets, but a home behind walls holds one knows not what. He opened the door and went in, and Mr. Gotobed, following him with his bag, banged it shut. There was something irrevocable in its clanging and Jocelyn felt that the old life was now dead indeed. Something new was beginning for him and this lovely garden was its starting point.
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dakotaking · 7 months
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They wish they had this
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