Chapter 33 Chapter Five A Journey Through the Wasteland

There are those days of the year when the heat and heat of many a cozy cottage is unbearable, when a cool breeze is a great pleasure; cracks appear in the dirt in the yard, and clever children put These cracks are called earthquakes; the spokes of the wheels of wagons and wagons are all loose;This year's August 31st, Thursday, is one such day. In Mrs. Yeobright's yard the softer big-leaved plants were limp by ten o'clock in the morning, the rhubarb had bowed by eleven o'clock, and even the tough kale had wilted by noon. About eleven o'clock on this very morning Mrs. Yeobright went out across the moor to her son's house, doing what she could with Clem, Eustacia reconciles.She hoped to cover most of the distance before the sun was at its hottest, but as soon as she set out she found it impossible.The sun had stamped its stamp on the whole moor, and even the purple heather, after days of dry wind, had a tan in the heat.Every valley is filled with the smell of the fire in the kiln. Those ditches in winter have become pedestrian paths in summer. Next also experienced a barbecue.

The walk to Eldworth was easy for Mrs Yeobright in the cool, crisp weather, but in the heat of the day, for a woman over fifty, The distance turned out to be an unbearable burden; after three miles she wished she had hired Fareway's car in the first place, at least she'd been able to cover that distance.But from where she was now, going to Clem's house was as far as going home again.So she walked on, the air around her moving silently and lazily pressing down on the ground.She looked up at the sky and saw that the royal blue hue of the sky in spring and early summer had been replaced by a metallic purple.

Sometimes, where she passed, myriads of short-lived insects were passing their time in frantic flight in worlds of their own, some in the air, some on the hot ground and bushes, some in a The warm, sticky water of a near-dry pond.All the shallow puddles were left with only a piece of steaming mud, in which countless maggot-shaped creatures could be faintly seen rolling and wriggling joyfully.Being a philosophic woman who sometimes sat under umbrellas and watched them with such joy, she had a definite hope for her visit which brought a kind of Relieved, in this hopeful thought, she allowed her thoughts to dwell on whatever insignificant things she saw.

Mrs. Yeobright had never been to her son's house before, and therefore had no idea of ​​its exact location.She tried to follow one uphill path after another, only to find that they all led her astray.When returning from the original road, she saw a man working in the distance.She walked towards him and asked him the way. The laborer showed her the way, and added, Do you see that thorn-cutter, madam, just over the path? Mrs. Yeobright looked round, and at last said she saw it. Yes, if you follow him, you won't get lost.He's going in the same direction as you, ma'am. She followed the man pointed out to her.Dressed in tawny, he was as indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape as a green caterpillar gnawing on a green leaf.He walked at a quicker pace than Mrs Yeobright; but as he paused a moment before each raspberry bush, Mrs Yeobright kept an equal distance from him, Don't be pulled away by him.When she came to every place the man had stopped, she found five or six long limp brambles lying upside down on the side of the path by the bushes, which he had cut while he stopped there.Evidently these thorns were intended for the binding of thorns, which he was to collect on his way back.

This man, silent and absorbed in his work, seemed to be an insignificant person in life, like a small insect.He looked as if he were only a small creature clinging to the heath, constantly gnawing at the surface of the moor with his daily labors, like a clothes moth nibbling a coat, absorbed in nothing but ferns, brambles, I don't know what else there is in the world but firewood, heather, moss, and lichen. The wicker-cutter was so engrossed in his walk and work that he never looked back; at last all she could see were his leather leggings and protective gloves, which she saw as a guide for her way. moving signpost up.Suddenly, the way he walked made her interested in the man himself; she had seen this way of walking somewhere before; and it made her understand who this person was, just like Yashima [Note: "The Bible.A character in the book of Samuel (2), loyal to King David. ]'s figure was instantly recognized by the king's watchman on the vast plain.He walks exactly as my husband used to walk, she said; and then it dawned on her that the man who was cutting the thorns was her son.

She just couldn't bring herself to accept this strange reality.She had been told that Clem used to chop brambles, but she had thought he did it only in his spare time, as a healthy pastime; but now she had seen it and knew that he It's just a thorny man wearing the ordinary clothes of a laborer. From his actions, it can be seen that what he is thinking about is only the thoughts of a laborer.In the haste of thinking a dozen ways of getting him and Eustacia out of this life, she followed him with a beating heart, and saw him come into her house. On one side of Clem's house there was a mound, and on top of the mound a cloak of fir trees soared into the sky, and from a distance the dense foliage seemed like a black spot in the sky above the mound.By the time they got here Mrs Yeobright was sadly disturbed, exhausted, and ill.She went up to the mound, and sat down in the shade of the canopy of the trees, to catch her breath, and wonder how she might break the barrier between her and Eustacia without irritating him, who was an apparent Lazy woman who actually has far stronger and more active inner feelings than her.

The trees under which she was sitting looked so traumatized, rough and wild that Mrs. Yeobright, forgetting her exhausted situation for a moment, began to grasp them.In this clump of nine trees there was scarcely a single branch which had not been cracked and twisted by the harsh weather, so that they all bowed their heads and succumbed to the ravages of the heavens whenever they raged.Some branches are withered and cracked, as if struck by lightning, and there are still black spots on the sides of the branches that seem to have been burned. Falling piles of fruit balls.The place is known as the Devil's Blowpipe, and one only needs to come here on a March or November evening to see that the name is apt.In this hot afternoon, there is not a breath of wind, but the trees are still whimpering and whimpering, and it is hard to believe that these noises can be caused by the movement of air.

She sat here for about twenty minutes or longer, and finally made up her mind to go down to her son's door, her courage completely gone by her own weakness.If it had been anyone else instead of a mother, it seemed a little humiliating that she, the older of the two women, should take the initiative in breaking the deadlock in the relationship.Mrs. Yeobright, however, had thought of all this, and was only thinking of how her visit might seem to Eustacia not a subservience, but a wiser course of action. From her vantage point the exhausted woman could see the roofs of the house below, the gardens, and the entire courtyard of the small dwelling.At this time, just as she stood up, she saw another man approaching the courtyard gate.He behaved peculiarly and hesitantly, not like a visitor on business or an invitation.He observed the movement in the house very carefully, then walked around in a circle, scanning the situation outside the garden, as if a person came to Shakespeare's hometown, Mary.Stuart's Imprisonment [Note: The Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587 for plotting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England. ], or Ugmont Castle [Note: A manor fiefdom, where the right wing of the British army was stationed during the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. ] will show the same behavior after.After walking like this for a while, he came to the gate of the courtyard again and walked in.Mrs. Yeobright, who had thought only of seeing her son and his wife, was troubled by what she saw.But after thinking about it, she felt that the presence of an acquaintance would greatly reduce the embarrassment of her first appearance. By chatting with them, she would feel less awkward with them.So she walked down from the hill, walked to the gate of the courtyard, and looked into the hot courtyard.

There was a cat sleeping on the gravel path in the yard, and it seemed that the bed, the rug, the rug, were intolerable to him.The leaves of the hollyhock flower hang like half-closed umbrellas from the branches. The juice in the branches is almost slowly evaporated, and the smooth surface of the leaves shines like metal mirrors.A small apple tree, a kind of precocious, grows in the yard facing the gate, and because the soil is poor, it is the only one that grows vigorously in the yard; on the pile of apples that fell under the tree, there are many wasps sucking the juice, Some were drunk from eating too much juice, and kept rolling around there, and others were crawling in and out of the small holes in the apples they ate before they were drunk.At the gate stood Clem's wicker scythe, and the last bundle of wattle she had seen him gather; evidently he had left it there when he entered the house.