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At night we drove to St. Eleanor's, taking some of our spoil with us, and immediately adjourned to the kitchen, a large, unfinished place built of logs, with a clay floor and huge smoke-stained rafters. We sat by a large stove in the centre, and looked as if we had never known civilised life. Miss Kenjins and I sat on either side of the fireplace in broad-brimmed straw hats, Mrs.
This, then, is the only optimism that is worth the name; not the feeble optimism that brushes away the darker side of life impatiently and fretfully, but the optimism that dares to look boldly into the fiercest miseries of the human spirit, and to come back, as Perseus came, pale and smoke-stained, from the dim underworld, and say that there is yet hope brightening on the verge of the gloom.
Bradley Headstone and Charlie and Lizzie Hexam came in, and we then passed on, not wishing to attract attention. There was an old smoke-stained tree on the corner which I felt sorry for, as I do for every city tree.
The rich brown shadows on the smoke-stained walls and ceiling, the occasional starting into relief of the scutcheons of brilliant plumage, and the momentary glitter of the steel barrels, made a quaint background to this charming picture.
I saw slatternly women run in and out of the houses; I saw smoke-stained grimy children playing in the gutter. Above the poor, ill-kept houses a factory poured its black smoke into the air, and hummed behind its shuttered windows.
But what shocked and saddened one more than all the rest was the ruin that was visible everywhere; that charming village, only three days before so bright and smiling, with its pretty houses standing in their well-kept gardens, now razed, demolished, annihilated, nothing left of all its beauties save a few smoke-stained walls.
And one turned towards the smoke-stained houses, saying, "Blessed be the houses, because men dream therein." Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams. And another turned to a tree that stood by the Green Park railings, saying, "Take comfort, tree, for the fields shall come again."
Beyond the mines, ranged at different heights on the barren mountain slope, were huts much like the abandoned ones at "Little Devil" black caverns, smoke-stained and gaping, where stooping human beings moved in and out, maimed and broken like insects whose wings some brutal boy has pulled.
It is simply that we have realized pleasures greater than we could find in paved streets and under smoke-stained skies. We know what it is to smell the salt wind, to hear it whistling in the cords and the sails of our boats, to feel the warmth of the sun, to listen to the song of the birds, to watch the colouring of God's land here. I suppose we have the thing in our bloods; we can't leave it.
But his offer mortified me, made me conscious of my shabby appearance, the coarse, ill-fitting clothes, the effects of the fire still visible in rough and smoke-stained skin, the splotches of new skin on my lips, the face pink and tender. Altogether, the surroundings and I must have made a drab spectacle. Holding out his hand to say good-by, Halbert Donovan saw my shrinking embarrassment.
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