I
North of east, in the bottom, where the road drops from the High Moor,
is the village of Garth in Garthdale.
It crouches there with a crook of the dale behind and before it,
between half-shut doors of the west and south. Under the mystery and
terror of its solitude it crouches, like a beaten thing, cowering from
its topmost roof to the bowed back of its stone bridge.
It is the last village up Garthdale; a handful of gray houses, old
and small and humble. The high road casts them off and they turn their
backs to it in their fear and huddle together, humbly, down by the
beck. Their stone roofs and walls are naked and blackened by wind and
rain as if fire had passed over them.
They have the silence, the darkness and the secrecy of all ultimate
habitations.
North, where the high road begins to rise again, the Vicarage stands
all alone. It turns its face toward the village, old and gray and
humble as any house there, and looks on the road sideways, through the
small shy window of its gable end. It has a strip of garden in front
and on its farther side and a strip of orchard at the back. The garden
slopes down to the churchyard, and a lane, leading to the pastures,
runs between.
And all these things of stone, the village, the Vicarage, the church,
the churchyard and the gravestones of the dead are alike naked
and black, blackened as if fire had passed over them. And in their
grayness and their desolation they are one with each other and with
the network of low walls that links them to the last solitary farm on
the High Moor. And on the breast of the earth they show, one moment,
solid as if hewn out of her heart, and another, slender and wind-blown
as a tangle of gray thread on her green gown.