Solitary Summer (9781405511742) by Von Arnim Elizabeth

Author:Von Arnim, Elizabeth [VON ARNIM, ELIZABETH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405511742
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2011-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

July 15th—Yesterday, as it was a cool and windy afternoon and not as pleasant in my garden as it has lately been, I thought I would go into the village and see how my friends the farm hands were getting on. Philanthropy is intermittent with me as with most people, only they do not say so, and seizes me like a cold in the head whenever the weather is chilly. On warm days my bump of benevolence melts away entirely, and grows bigger in proportion as the thermometer descends. When the wind is in the east it is quite a decent size, and about January, in a north-easterly snowstorm, it is plainly visible to the most casual observer. For a few weeks from then to the end of February I can hold up my head and look our parson in the face, but during the summer, if I see him coming my mode of progression in getting out of the way is described with perfect accuracy by the verb “to slink.”

The village consists of one street running parallel to the outer buildings of the farm, and the cottages are one-storied, each with rooms for four families—two in front, looking on to the wall of the farmyard, which is the fashionable side, and two at the back, looking on to nothing more exhilarating than their own pigstyes. Each family has one room and a larder sort of place, and shares the kitchen with the family on the opposite side of the entrance; but the women prefer doing their cooking at the grate in their own room rather than expose the contents of their pots to the ill-natured comments of a neighbour. On the fashionable side there is a little fenced-in garden for every family, where fowls walk about pensively and meditate beneath the scarlet-runners (for all the world like me in my garden), and hollyhocks tower above the drying linen, and fuel, stolen from our woods, is stacked for winter use; but on the other side you walk straight out of the door on to manure heaps and pigs.

The street did not look very inviting yesterday, with a lowering sky above, and the wind blowing dust and bits of straw and paper into my face and preventing me from seeing what I knew to be there, a consoling glimpse of green fields and fir woods down at the other end; but I had not been for a long while—we have had such a lovely summer—and something inside me had kept on saying aggressively all the morning, “Elizabeth, don’t you know you are due in the village? Why don’t you go then? When are you going? Don’t you know you ought to go? Don’t you feel you must? Elizabeth, pull yourself together and go” Strange effect of a grey sky and a cool wind! For I protest that if it had been warm and sunny my conscience would not have bothered about me at all. We had a short fight over it,

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