Swann's Way
really, to go away just then, as he had some people staying in the
house, the line might equally belong to one of these guests. Not a
footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Somewhere in one of the
tall trees, making a stage in its height, an invisible bird, desperately
attempting to make the day seem shorter, was exploring with a long,
continuous note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it
received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of
silence and of immobility that, one would have said, it had arrested
for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more
quickly. The sunlight fell so implacably from a fixed sky that one was
naturally inclined to slip away out of the reach of its attentions, and
even the slumbering water, whose repose was perpetually being invaded by
the insects that swarmed above its surface, while it dreamed, no doubt,
of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified the uneasiness which the sight
of that floating cork had wrought in me, by appearing to draw it at
full speed across the silent reaches of a mirrored firmament; now almost
vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight, and
I had begun to ask myself whether, setting aside the longing and the
terror that I had of making her acquaintance, it was not actually my
duty to warn Mlle. Swann that the fish was biting--when I was obliged
to run after my father and grandfather, who were calling me, and were
surprised that I had not followed them along the little path, climbing
up hill towards the open fields, into which they had already turned. I
found the whole path throbbing with the fragrance of hawthorn-blossom.
The hedge resembled a series of chapels, whose walls were no longer
visible under the mountains of flowers that were heaped upon their
altars; while underneath, the sun cast a square of light upon the
ground, as though it had shone in upon them through a window; the scent
that swept out over me from them was as rich, and as circumscribed in
its range, as though I had been standing before the Lady-altar, and
the flowers, themselves adorned also, held out each its little bunch of
glittering stamens with an air of inattention, fine, radiating 'nerves'
in the flamboyant style of architecture, like those which, in church,
framed the stair to the rood-loft or closed the perpendicular tracery
of the windows, but here spread out into pools of fleshy white, like
strawberry-beds in spring. How simple and rustic, in comparison with
these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks' time, would be
climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the
smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and
scattered by the first breath of wind.
But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in,
to marshal before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose
in order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb
myself in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with
the light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as
certain intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation
of the same charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting
me delve into it any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play
over a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their
secret. I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return
to them with renewed strength. My eyes followed up the slope which,
outside the hedge, rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed
and been lost by its fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen
lazily behind, and decorated the ground here and there with their
flowers like the border of a tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals
hints of the rustic theme which appears triumphant in the panel itself;
infrequent still, spaced apart as the scattered houses which warn us
that we are approaching a village, they betokened to me the vast expanse
of waving corn beneath the fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single
poppy hoisting upon its slender rigging and holding against the breeze
its scarlet ensign, over the buoy of rich black earth from which it
sprang, made my heart beat as does a wayfarer's when he perceives, upon
some low-lying ground, an old and broken boat which is being caulked and
made seaworthy, and cries out, although he has not yet caught sight of
it, "The Sea!"
And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands
before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, one will
be better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at
something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as
to have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which
they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing
to free itself, to float across and become one with the flowers. They
themselves offered me no enlightenment, and I could not call upon any
other flowers to satisfy this mysterious longing. And then, inspiring
me with that rapture which we feel on seeing a work by our favourite
painter quite different from any of those that we already know, or,
better still, when some one has taken us and set us down in front of a
picture of which we have hitherto seen no more than a pencilled sketch,
or when a piece of music which we have heard played over on the piano
bursts out again in our ears with all the splendour and fullness of an
orchestra, my grandfather called me to him, and, pointing to the hedge
of Tansonville, said: "You are fond of hawthorns; just look at this pink
one; isn't it pretty?"
And it was indeed a hawthorn, but one whose flowers were pink, and
lovelier even than the white. It, too, was in holiday attire, for one of
those days which are the only true holidays, the holy days of religion,
because they are not appointed by any capricious accident, as secular
holidays are appointed, upon days which are not specially ordained for
such observances, which have nothing about them that is essentially
festal--but it was attired even more richly than the rest, for the
flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to
leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about
the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them 'in colour,'
and consequently of a superior quality, by the aesthetic standards of
Combray, to the 'plain,' if one was to judge by the scale of prices
at the 'stores' in the Square, or at Camus's, where the most expensive
biscuits were those whose sugar was pink. And for my own part I set a
higher value on cream cheese when it was pink, when I had been allowed
to tinge it with crushed strawberries. And these flowers had chosen
precisely the colour of some edible and delicious thing, or of some
exquisite addition to one's costume for a great festival, which colours,
inasmuch as they make plain the reason for their superiority, are those
whose beauty is most evident to the eyes of children, and for that
reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other
tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no
gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the
dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before
the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no
artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal
intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself
who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from
a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some
procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too
ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour.' High up on the branches,
like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets
of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on
the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler
in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of
pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly
than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the
hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to
blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking its place
in the hedge, but as different from the rest as a young girl in holiday
attire among a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes, who are staying
at home, equipped and ready for the 'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed
already to form a part, it shone and smiled in its cool, rosy garments,
a Catholic bush indeed, and altogether delightful.
The hedge allowed us a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered
with jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among which the stocks held open
their fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old
Spanish leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted
green, coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the
flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan
of infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops. Suddenly I stood still, unable
to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our
eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes
possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish
hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her
hand, was looking at us, raising towards us a face powdered with pinkish
freckles. Her black eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know,
and indeed have never since learned how to reduce to its objective
elements any strong impression, since I had not, as they say, enough
'power of observation' to isolate the sense of their colour, for a long
time afterwards, whenever I thought of her, the memory of those bright
eyes would at once present itself to me as a vivid azure, since her
complexion was fair; so much so that, perhaps, if her eyes had not been
quite so black--which was what struck one most forcibly on first meeting
her--I should not have been, as I was, especially enamoured of their
imagined blue.
I gazed at her, at first with that gaze which is not merely a messenger
from the eyes, but in whose window all the senses assemble and lean out,
petrified and anxious, that gaze which would fain reach, touch, capture,
bear off in triumph the body at which it is aimed, and the soul with the
body; then (so frightened was I lest at any moment my grandfather and
father, catching sight of the girl, might tear me away from her, by
making me run on in front of them) with another, an unconsciously
appealing look, whose object was to force her to pay attention to me, to
see, to know me. She cast a glance forwards and sideways, so as to take
stock of my grandfather and father, and doubtless the impression she
formed of them was that we were all absurd people, for she turned away
with an indifferent and contemptuous air, withdrew herself so as to
spare her face the indignity of remaining within their field of
vision; and while they, continuing to walk on without noticing her, had
overtaken and passed me, she allowed her eyes to wander, over the space
that lay between us, in my direction, without any particular expression,
without appearing to have seen me, but with an intensity, a half-hidden
smile which I was unable to interpret, according to the instruction I
had received in the ways of good breeding, save as a mark of infinite
disgust; and her hand, at the same time, sketched in the air an
indelicate gesture, for which, when it was addressed in public to a
person whom one did not know, the little dictionary of manners which