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One day early in April Maggie went for a little walk by herself along the lane that led to Marsden Wood. Marsden Wood was the most sinister of all the woods; there had once been a murder there, but even had there not, the grim bleakness of the trees and bushes, the absence of all clear paths through its tangles and thickets made it a sinister place.
As fast as they advanced through the gaps, the heat of the crater dissipated them into thin air, and though they advanced always, they got nowhere. It was a scene of vast bleakness and desolation, stern, forbidding, fascinating. We gazed down upon a place of fire and earthquake. The tie-ribs of earth lay bare before us.
The bleakness of the cold north winter was in his heart and life was barren as the eastern meadows.
In the winter bleakness a hunger for colour came over people, like the Laplander's craving for fats and sugar. Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting, shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice. The crude reds and greens and blues of that coloured glass held us there.
The houses stood very near the roadway, with scarcely ever a grass plot or single shade tree before them. In midsummer the sun beat furiously upon them; in winter they stood in all their bleakness full-square to the blasts that drove across the river.
"Oh h!" said the farmer; "you think an open fire would take away the bleakness?" "Certainly. The room would be changed instantly, and mother's face would look young and rosy again. The blue-black of this sheet-iron stove makes the room look blue-black." "Open fires don't give near as much heat," said her father, meditatively.
The day was bleak, and something of this external bleakness was reflected in the look which he raised to the ivy draped dormer-windows in the hooded roof. Small greyish clouds were scudding low above the western horizon, and the sorrel waste of broomsedge was rolling high as a sea.
The summits of the Norwegian Fjelds have only the charm of wildness and bleakness. I doubt whether any mountains of equal height exhibit less grandeur in their upper regions.
They swerved through Tonbridge Junction, glistening sootily under a drizzle of rain, and dived into the yawning tunnel of River Hill as though into refuge from the bleakness of the open country. Two fellow-travellers with Rivière were discussing the gloomy outlook of a threatened railway strike which rumbled through the daily papers like distant thunder. Fragment of talk came to his ears:
It was one of those afternoons which intrude on the bleakness of winter with a false but none the less agreeable intimation that Spring is on its way. The sidewalks were wet underfoot, and the gutters ran with thawed snow. The sun shone exhilaratingly from a sky the color of a hedge-sparrow's egg. "Doesn't everything smell lovely, Freddie," said Jill, "after our prison-life!" "Topping!"
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