The Heart of England/Chapter 42
CHAPTER XLII
FISHING BOATS
The tide moves the river northward, towards me, under the bridge on which I stand. On both sides it is lined for a little way by houses: on the east in a flat, straight front, on the west in irregular rocky masses. Those on the east are coldly stained with light from the western sky; those opposite are vaguely shadowed and have an airiness and gloom—not a light yet appearing—as of the other side of Lethe. The river is of noble breadth.
Against the eastern houses rise up the masses of seven fishing boats in a row, with only such movement as makes the shadow run into the brown and gold, or the gold and brown into the shadow of the sails slowly, like the unfolding of poppies: and under their sides the shadows are profound as if they trailed black velvet mantles that hid the water. For, away from the boats, the unrippled surface of the motionlessly gliding river is of that lugubrious silver that seems to be, not water, but some trick of light upon mere air, such as is seen above summer meadows in the heat.
And over all is bent a pale, soft, empurpled sky, and in it a crescent moon.
Up the river came two fishing boats, sleeping, their motion the only proof of the tide—no man visible on board—no voices—and their sails of a colour as if they had been steeped in the early hues of the now vanished sunset, and yet in their folds so dark that they seem to be bringing with them the night as a cargo from those cloudy black woods in the south. Beyond the large curve of those woods the shining horn of the river reaches the unseen sea. The spirit of the sea comes up on the broad silent water.
The two small, solemn boats still glide in sleep; the others dream at the quay.
Southward, the dark wood sends out the narcotic night as a gift over the land, sowing the seeds of it from the wings of the slow sea birds, from the two incoming boats, silently; and now they have fallen upon good soil in the seven boats on the quay, in the masses of houses, in the arches of the bridge and in the hearts of men, and all things drink oblivion. As I turn away there is a sound of shrill, passionless voices that may be the souls of the oblivious travelling to content somewhere in the rich purple night.