DUSK

The last apples have been brought in. The store-room, which saw during the long, wide months such a coming and going of soft, perishable, summer stuff, is quiet now, filled with the more lasting bounty of the year. Another summer will have dawned long before the last of the company of honies, sweet pickles, and many-hued preserves is removed from the well-scrubbed shelves.

You must pick your way across the floor amidst the battalions of ruddy fruit and the piled sacks filled with good sound stuff all earthy-skinned from the kitchen garden. In the darkest corner great pale marrows are laid down to wait for the time when green-stuff is scarce. If you are quite still you can discover, just tinging the wholesome rankness of the enclosed odours, the faint scent of the bunched herbs hanging from the rafters.

The presence of so much hard-won treasure decently put by in the background enhances the house-sense. The feeling of the sheltering rooftree, grown so faint during the open months, begins to cast its spell once more over the homestead group. The white plaques of the laurustinus gleam from amongst the evergreens in the depleted front garden. The face of the house is bare save for the thicket of leafage foaming up against the lower window-sills, showing here and there a single blossom of watery blue.

It was bright and warm this morning, and you could hear the

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singing of bees amongst the lingering ivy-flowers. As the sun shone suddenly forth at its westering from under a heavy brow of cloud and caught a show of colour from the hedge, the unrusted green and yellow of the hornbeam, the full glow of winter berries, and the form of the little scarlet-vested bird fluting from its twig in the thicket, it seemed for a moment that the high, wide days were not long past: would soon return. Perhaps this year the winter deeps will fail you, the little span of dark days that used to seem so long will pass and you will not taste their sweetness. . . .

Smuffing up the rich organic air as you make your way to the turnip-field from the musty tool-shed, you know that faint and new, woven into the moving spaces - so lately filled with the essences of summer, soaked now with the heavy fragrance of her death - might be found the chill crude odour of sleeping buds.

But once out here in the field you are reassured. The afternoon has grown grey. You can almost touch the homely sky. Each day it draws the thick curtains of the darkness closer round the drowsy earth. Sunrise and sunset are almost linked above her slumbers. The modest sun rides gently up. Your eyes, alert and calm already with the day's work well begun, need miss none of the pageant of his rising. He takes the lower pathway across the sky and has turned before you are aware, whilst the business of noonday still holds you, and dropped towards his tempered evening splendour.

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Adventure is at an end for the year. The strain of the high,
glad days is over. You met their challenge. You went forth with
the summer. The long, long spans of light found you sleepless.
You missed no dawn. No scent of the long twilights went unmarked.
The hurried, shallow little nights, scarcely more than a deepened
gloaming, afforded you the barest pittance of repose. Earth faring
forth decked - flaming and insistent, burgeoning and blossoming -
tested you to the uttermost. Now is the time of return and the
sweetness of rest. She welcomes you gently. She makes no demands.
She almost seems, this low, quiet afternoon, to plead for forbear-
ance. She will be your quiet companion. . . . Presently, pausing
a moment from your quiet work, standing erect without raising your
eyes, resting your brow against the cool stillness, you are aware
of a deep tranquility . . . one of those gleaming spaces where all
the scattered things of life meet and die in one full beat that
presses forward . . . urged and confident . . . naked and wise like
some new-born thing.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Some sound will break. Something that will come out of the
darkening air and fill you with the joy of response. You raise
your head and look across the fields. There, just one field away,
creeping silently up the low hill-side, is the first winter dusk.
There is no mistaking her. She bears no likeness to the thin, un-
scented wind-swept twilights of spring. Nor are the aching summer

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gloamings nor the long ripe purplings of autumn her sisters. She comes, trailing, sweet and misty, gloomy and chill. She surprises you in your strength, while the zest of the day is hardly dimmed.

Slowly she glides on and up. She has reached the garden. She is seeking the house at the top of the hill. She is taking the winter indoors. She marks the end of the interim days, of evening odious with closed windows- "out doors" shut away and, as yet, no incense on the hearth. She has draped her mantle across the door-way. You know, as you follow her with your thoughts, that she will be driven from the warm kitchen by the harsh yellow beam of the unshaded lamplight.

You leave your task and follow her up the hillside. The house is rich with her presence. Her dark mantle, left in the doorway, is jewelled with a little hanging lamp.

Quietly you knock the soil from the rims of your boots. She will be waiting alone in the room at the end of the passage.

From the kitchen comes the rattle of cups and saucers. The parlour lamp stands ready on the bracket. In another moment you will be too late. You reach the door. It is ajar. No one has heard you.

..................

When the household came in tedious talk had a strange witchery. As you listened, responded, glowed, planned, felt your zestful way to another day's work, somewhere deep within you was woven the

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memory of the perfect indoor gift of yet another winter - a warm
silence - black-spun spaces tunnelling away into the fathomless
blossoming caverns of the wood-fire.