A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor Read Free Book Online Page B

sailing ship and ploughman, the falling aeronaut is insignificant. So compelling is the identity of picture and reality that all along my path numberless dawdling afternoons in museums were being summoned back to life and set in motion. Every pace confirmed them. Each scene conjured up its echo. The masts and quays and gables of a river port, the backyard with a besom leaning against a brick wall, the chequer-board floors of churches—there they all were, the entire range of Dutch themes, ending in taverns where I expected to find boors carousing, and found them; and in every case, like magic, the painter’s name would simultaneously impinge. The willows, the roofs and the bell-towers, the cows grazing self-consciously in the foreground meadows—there was no need to ask whose easels they were waiting for as they munched.
    These vague broodings brought me—somewhere between Tiel and Nijmegen, it must have been—to the foot of one of those vertiginous belfries which are so transparent in the distance and so solid close to. I was inside it and up half-a-dozen ladders in a minute and gazing down through the cobwebbed louvres. The whole kingdom was revealed. The two great rivers loitered across it with their scatterings of ships and their barge-processions and their tributaries. There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow-bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms andanswering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half-concealed among a ruffle of woods. The snow had melted here, or fallen more lightly: blue and green and pewter and russet and silver composed the enormous vista of turf and flood and sky. There was a low line of hills to the east, and everywhere the shine of intruding water and even a faint glimmer, faraway to the north, of the Zuyder Zee. Filled with strange light, the peaceful and harmonious land slid away to infinity under a rush of clouds.
    In the bottom chamber, as I left, an octet of clogged bell-ringers was assembling and spitting on their palms before grasping the sallies, and the clangour of their scales and changes, muted to a soft melancholy by the distance, followed me for the next few miles of nightfall and sharpening chill.
    * * *
    It was dark long before I reached the quays of Nijmegen. Then, for the first time for days, I found myself walking up a slant and down again. Lanes of steps climbed from the crowding ships along the waterfront; between the lamplight and the dark, tall towers and zigzag façades impended. The quayside lamps strung themselves into the distance beside the dark flow of the Waal and upstream a great iron bridge sailed northwards and away for miles beyond the river. I had supper and after filling in my journal I searched the waterfront for a sailors’ doss-house and ended up in a room over a blacksmith’s.
    I knew it was my last night in Holland and I was astonished how quickly I had crossed it. My heels might have been winged. I was astonished, too, at the impressive, clear beauty of the country and its variety, the amazing light and the sway of its healing and collusive charm. No wonder it had produced so many painters! And the Dutch themselves? Although we were reciprocally tongue-tied, the contact was not quite as slight as these pages must suggest. On foot, unlike other forms of travel, it is impossible to beout of touch; and our exchanges were enough, during this brief journey, to leave a deposit of liking and admiration which has lasted ever since.
    Sleep fell so fast and empty of dreams that when I woke at six next morning the night seemed to have rushed by in a few minutes. It was the blacksmith’s hammer just under the floor boards which had roused me. I lay as though in a trance, listening to the stop-gap bounces as they alternated with resonant horseshoe notes on the beak of the anvil and when the