Doomsday by Warwick Deeping

Then the winter came, and Furze seemed to grow thinner and more hard. He went about his work with a deliberate and silent sombreness, like a beast coming out and going in, shaggy looking, austere, stodging through the mud and the muck of the byres, with rain upon his face, and the north wind in his eyes.

When the darkness shut him in, and the beasts had been milked and fed, and there was nothing more for him to do, he sat and thought many thoughts before the fire. Too much loneliness may mean too much thinking. Also,--his working bench had come back into the living-room, and he would patch boots and mend harness, and sharpen tools, and do some desultory carpentering. Or he would go out into the wood lodge and hang up a lantern and saw wood, laying log after log upon the sawing-stool, his head bent, his moving arm opening and shutting a patch of light upon the lodge wall. Sometimes a restlessness would possess him, and he would wander along the wet dark roads,--but there were motors here, rushing past in the darkness, splashing up mud, with the blinding arrogance of their great eyes. Once, when one of these cars drove him nearly into a ditch, he picked up a stone from a heap of road metal and threw it. He could not hear a car without feeling a dull anger glowing in him.