rapidly on in her Italian that I could not understand, looking meanwhile
into my face, because the story roused her somewhat. Yet not a feature
moved. Her eyes remained candid and open and unconscious as the skies.
Only a sharp will in them now and then seemed to gleam at me, as if to
dominate me.
Her shuttle had caught in a dead chicory plant, and spun no more. She
did not notice. I stooped and broke off the twigs. There was a glint of
blue on them yet. Seeing what I was doing, she merely withdrew a few
inches from the plant. Her bobbin hung free.
She went on with her tale, looking at me wonderfully. She seemed like
the Creation, like the beginning of the world, the first morning. Her
eyes were like the first morning of the world, so ageless.
Her thread broke. She seemed to take no notice, but mechanically picked
up the shuttle, wound up a length of worsted, connected the ends from
her wool strand, set the bobbin spinning again, and went on talking, in
her half-intimate, half-unconscious fashion, as if she were talking to
her own world in me.
So she stood in the sunshine on the little platform, old and yet like
the morning, erect and solitary, sun-coloured, sun-discoloured, whilst I
at her elbow, like a piece of night and moonshine, stood smiling into
her eyes, afraid lest she should deny me existence.
Which she did. She had stopped talking, did not look at me any more, but
went on with her spinning, the brown shuttle twisting gaily. So she
stood, belonging to the sunshine and the weather, taking no more notice
of me than of the dark-stained caper-bush which hung from the wall above
her head, whilst I, waiting at her side, was like the moon in the
daytime sky, overshone, obliterated, in spite of my black clothes.
'How long has it taken you to do that much?' I asked.
She waited a minute, glanced at her bobbin.
'This much? I don't know. A day or two.'
'But you do it quickly.'
She looked at me, as if suspiciously and derisively. Then, quite
suddenly, she started forward and went across the terrace to the great
blue-and-white checked cloth that was drying on the wall. I hesitated.
She had cut off her consciousness from me. So I turned and ran away,
taking the steps two at a time, to get away from her. In a moment I was
between the walls, climbing upwards, hidden.
The schoolmistress had told me I should find snowdrops behind San
Tommaso. If she had not asserted such confident knowledge I should have
doubted her translation of _perce-neige_. She meant Christmas roses all
the while.
However, I went looking for snowdrops. The walls broke down suddenly,
and I was out in a grassy olive orchard, following a track beside pieces
of fallen overgrown masonry. So I came to skirt the brink of a steep
little gorge, at the bottom of which a stream was rushing down its steep
slant to the lake. Here I stood to look for my snowdrops. The grassy,
rocky bank went down steep from my feet. I heard water tittle-tattling
away in deep shadow below. There were pale flecks in the dimness, but
these, I knew, were primroses. So I scrambled down.
Looking up, out of the heavy shadow that lay in the cleft, I could see,
right in the sky, grey rocks shining transcendent in the pure empyrean.
'Are they so far up?' I thought. I did not dare to say, 'Am I so far
down?' But I was uneasy. Nevertheless it was a lovely place, in the cold
shadow, complete; when one forgot the shining rocks far above, it was a
complete, shadowless world of shadow. Primroses were everywhere in nests
of pale bloom upon the dark, steep face of the cleft, and tongues of
fern hanging out, and here and there under the rods and twigs of bushes
were tufts of wrecked Christmas roses, nearly over, but still, in the
coldest corners, the lovely buds like handfuls of snow. There had been
such crowded sumptuous tufts of Christmas roses everywhere in the
stream-gullies, during the shadow of winter, that these few remaining
flowers were hardly noticeable.
I gathered instead the primroses, that smelled of earth and of the
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