"Gaskell, Elizabeth C - The Life Of Charlotte Bronte - vol 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Elizabeth C)

glimpses into the interior as a passer-by obtains, reveal a rough
abundance of the means of living, and diligent and active habits
in the women. But the voices of the people are hard, and their
tones discordant, promising little of the musical taste that
distinguishes the district, and which has already furnished a
Carrodus to the musical world. The names over the shops (of which
the one just given is a sample) seem strange even to an inhabitant
of the neighbouring county, and have a peculiar smack and flavour
of the place.

The town of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to
Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveller
journeys upwards to the grey round hills that seem to bound his
journey in a westerly direction. First come some villas; just
sufficiently retired from the road to show that they can scarcely
belong to any one liable to be summoned in a hurry, at the call of
suffering or danger, from his comfortable fire-side; the lawyer,
the doctor, and the clergyman, live at hand, and hardly in the
suburbs, with a screen of shrubs for concealment.

In a town one does not look for vivid colouring; what there may be
of this is furnished by the wares in the shops, not by foliage or
atmospheric effects; but in the country some brilliancy and
vividness seems to be instinctively expected, and there is
consequently a slight feeling of disappointment at the grey
neutral tint of every object, near or far off, on the way from
Keighley to Haworth. The distance is about four miles; and, as I
have said, what with villas, great worsted factories, rows of
workmen's houses, with here and there an old-fashioned farmhouse
and outbuildings, it can hardly be called "country" any part of
the way. For two miles the road passes over tolerably level
ground, distant hills on the left, a "beck" flowing through
meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain
points, to the factories built on its banks. The air is dim and
lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of
business. The soil in the valley (or "bottom," to use the local
term) is rich; but, as the road begins to ascend, the vegetation
becomes poorer; it does not flourish, it merely exists; and,
instead of trees, there are only bushes and shrubs about the
dwellings. Stone dykes are everywhere used in place of hedges;
and what crops there are, on the patches of arable land, consist
of pale, hungry-looking, grey green oats. Right before the
traveller on this road rises Haworth village; he can see it for
two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a
pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors,
rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is
built at the very summit of the long narrow street. All round the
horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the
scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of
similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors--grand,