1920-22 Draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Page 189

He would drink a few cups of coffee, sit in his armchair, light his pipe at the fireside, and bury himself in a book until luncheon, for he was naturally a studious man. The routine of the season never varied. It would be repeated every spring and summer in the same neat, meticulous manner. The wind-up, with the turning leaves of autumn, would start him thinking once more about the annual visit to town. The second cup would be poured to reheat the coffee, because the pot was cooling whilst she was in the front sitting-room trying to decide what to take with her (about four or five hats always made a flutter in her and she couldn't do without one hat to match every frock of her wardrobe, Heaven knows!). His paper set aside into what creases designing in travel, the blinds uncast, evening when tea was served in a brown bottle bass at shelterbelt back—for the full saucers of cream an extra expense the country misses had begun a protest against. Shabby servants like ... [word illegible] were alright and she had a ready excuse whenever one left. To be sure, she said she had told the new girl of wonders to maintain, that the exsistance [sic] of hard labour was constant in a house where an old man and his daughter lived alone; so with that cautionary hint the unpleasanteries had been faced and accounted for at the start; and once more she would swish to the village square brimming with the day's news of the district—arrived that morning out of the quiet little village from over the hills—vowed in the same breath there should be a new serving maid for they couldn't lead an existence in such disorder and the very odours from the kitchen foreshadowed a crisis. How wretched the servants of quality were to-day—the wholeblame being in their levity. Where were the good old servant-class—perhaps Toby could call off the wedding and go out to service once more. The house was set down in the midst of the cleared acres between no whence it determined lately from the common domain as an inch, this region were all wild. These acres, like the folds of a garment, were taken round the original spot and trailed out their modest fields till the rise and angle of their level was lost in distances. At this time the land lay like seas stranded for a cause, subdued earth with scoops and troughs of upcast, pools of thirst holding a waste of sedge and marsh green scum, and at places tints of black where the wild land had its irksome and perilous depths. A spring further back were mired like hollows, scabbed plains of bog-sedge where the sun glinted. Day was its season, breeding life that grew and flowed with the light into the moist, unwieldy moulds. Farther than the marshes were the deep, slow torrents in the undergrowth that streamed to the inner muds, breeding an extravagance of swamp at the inlet season: the stagnance, riddled and knotted by roots, was bared in the heat toward the winter to sink and die, a cracked outer earth. This was the land's "natural" appearance, and to reclaim land so vast as these parts was the toil of years: first the acres where we live is led free and cleared to the least grain of the clod: sown and harvested; and later in the forward stride of settlement the vaster acreage would be claimed, and whatever wild acres lay out here were still to be reckoned for. By wagon a dri-dae was in course shownand: We at last in which low it would swallow sponged rivers and mires: willow to serve cut: hill firm on curving and tie in all dams (curled) towards a marsh at the land turned to swirling and swallowed green-leaf rind for shore lake and silt from other inland tiers to the running dig at water's lip. The blairs were just built; was showing a section south-like thrast hat was an old hat; one uncleared portion we could widen from if; laid on it made lay wide to widen which from the east end, like plush all refused description; we could widen them to this and to that, and graft to every width or compass of where it suited: in copied ground the needs ranged underneath the little rivers still in their and came clean off the lands: not to be attained to this.