He liked the very smell of the soil as he wandered along; cool,
soft whiffs of evening met him at bends of the road which disclosed very
little more--unless it might be a band of straight-stemmed woodland,
keeping, a little, the red glow from the west, or (as he went further)
an old house, shingled all over, grey and slightly collapsing, which
looked down at him from a steep bank, at the top of wooden steps. He was
already refreshed; he had tasted the breath of nature, measured his long
grind in New York, without a vacation, with the repetition of the daily
movement up and down the long, straight, maddening city, like a bucket
in a well or a shuttle in a loom.
He lit his cigar in the office of the hotel--a small room on the right
of the door, where a "register," meagrely inscribed, led a terribly
public life on the little bare desk, and got its pages dogs'-eared
before they were covered. Local worthies, of a vague identity, used to
lounge there, as Ransom perceived the next day, by the hour. They tipped
back their chairs against the wall, seldom spoke, and might have been
supposed, with their converging vision, to be watching something out of
the window, if there had been anything at Marmion to watch. Sometimes
one of them got up and went to the desk, on which he leaned his elbows,
hunching a pair of sloping shoulders to an uncollared neck. For the
fiftieth time he perused the fly-blown page of the recording volume,
where the names followed each other with such jumps of date.
Pages:
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172