three o'clock in the morning
In front , the garden slopes down to the sea , surrounded by an architectural sea-wall ; and in this place I lived three weeks . It was the house of the poet Machen , whose name , when I saw it , I remembered very well , and he had married a very beautiful young girl of eighteen , obviously Spanish , who lay on the bed in the large bright bedroom to the right of the loggia , on her left exposed breast being a baby with an india-rubber comforter in its mouth , both mother and child wonderfully preserved , she still quite lovely , white brow under low curves of black hair . The poet , strange to say , had not died with them , but sat in the sitting-room behind the bedroom in a long loose silky-grey jacket , at his desk -- actually writing a poem ! writing , I could see , furiously fast , the place all littered with the written leaves -- at three o'clock in the morning , when , as I knew , the cloud overtook this end of Cornwall , and stopped him , and put his head to rest on the desk ; and the poor little wife must have got sleepy , waiting for it to come , perhaps sleepless for many long nights before , and gone to bed , he perhaps promising to follow in a minute to die with her , but bent upon finishing that poem , and writing feverishly on , running a race with the cloud , thinking , no doubt , ` just two couplets more , ' till the thing came , and put his head to rest on the desk , poor carle : and I do not know that I ever encountered aught so complimentary to my race as this dead poet Machen , and his race with the cloud : for it is clear now that the better kind of those poet men did not write to please the vague inferior tribes who might read them , but to deliver themselves of the divine warmth that thronged in their bosom ; and if all the readers were dead , still they would have written ; and for God to read they wrote . At any rate , I was so pleased with these poor people , that I stayed with them three weeks , sleeping under blankets on a couch in the drawing-room , a place full of lovely pictures and faded flowers , like all the house : for I would not touch the young mother to remove her . And finding on Machen 's desk a big note-book with soft covers , dappled red and yellow , not yet written in , I took it , and a pencil , and in the little turret-nook wrote day after day for hours this account of what has happened , nearly as far as it has now gone . And I think that I may continue to write it , for I find in it a strange consolation , and companionship .