senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My
skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if
it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical
contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the
enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my
soul shrank.
I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the
marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to
distil me into itself.
Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the
upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark
and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From
behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great,
pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the
olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade
of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving
mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.
Then I noticed that a big, blue-checked cloth was spread on the parapet
before me, over the parapet of heaven. I wondered why it hung there.
Turning round, on the other side of the terrace, under a caper-bush that
hung like a blood-stain from the grey wall above her, stood a little
grey woman whose fingers were busy. Like the grey church, she made me
feel as if I were not in existence. I was wandering by the parapet of
heaven, looking down. But she stood back against the solid wall, under
the caper-bush, unobserved and unobserving. She was like a fragment of
earth, she was a living stone of the terrace, sun-bleached. She took no
notice of me, who was hesitating looking down at the earth beneath. She
stood back under the sun-bleached solid wall, like a stone rolled down
and stayed in a crevice.
Her head was tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like dirty
snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning. I
wondered so much, that I could not cross towards her. She was grey, and
her apron, and her dress, and her kerchief, and her hands and her face
were all sun-bleached and sun-stained, greyey, bluey, browny, like
stones and half-coloured leaves, sunny in their colourlessness. In my
black coat, I felt myself wrong, false, an outsider.
She was spinning, spontaneously, like a little wind. Under her arm she
held a distaff of dark, ripe wood, just a straight stick with a clutch
at the end, like a grasp of brown fingers full of a fluff of blackish,
rusty fleece, held up near her shoulder. And her fingers were plucking
spontaneously at the strands of wool drawn down from it. And hanging
near her feet, spinning round upon a black thread, spinning busily, like
a thing in a gay wind, was her shuttle, her bobbin wound fat with the
coarse, blackish worsted she was making.
All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the
fleece, drawing it down to a fairly uniform thickness: brown, old,
natural fingers that worked as in a sleep, the thumb having a long grey
nail; and from moment to moment there was a quick, downward rub, between
thumb and forefinger, of the thread that hung in front of her apron, the
heavy bobbin spun more briskly, and she felt again at the fleece as she
drew it down, and she gave a twist to the thread that issued, and the
bobbin spun swiftly.
Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were
dear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a
sun-worn stone.
'You are spinning,' I said to her.
Her eyes glanced over me, making no effort of attention.
'Yes,' she said.
She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger standing near. I was a bit of
the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and sustained
like an old stone upon the hillside. She stood short and sturdy, looking
for the most part straight in front, unseeing, but glancing from time to
time, with a little, unconscious attention, at the thread. She was
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>