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(19)

and vanished. She had locked the door; she had gone. It was
beyond the work of one woman, she said. They never sent. They
never wrote. There were things up there rotting in the drawers -
it was a shame to leave things so, she said. The place was gone
to rack and ruin.
     Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent
its sudden glare into the drawing room or bedroom, over bed and
wall, looked with contentment at the thistle and the swallow, the
rat and the straw, severely when the night was dark, caressed them lovingly
in the soft nights of spring.
     As for the spirits, who in sleep had left their bodies, and
dreamed of some communion, had dreamed that grasping the hand of
a sharer, they might complete, down on the beach alone, in the
presence of sea and sky, that pattern that vision, that beginning
which sought fulfilment, either they had been woken by that
prodigious cannonading which made the wine glasses tinkle in the
cupboards, or the snout protruding, the stain bleeding, had so
gravely damaged the picture that they had fled. They had dashed
the mirror to the ground. They saw nothing now. They stumbled
and strove, blindly pulling one foot out of the mud, blindly
stamping the other in. Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed
itself, and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the
swallow build in the drawing room, and the thistle thrust aside
the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the
arm chairs. Let the broken glass and china lie out on the lawn
and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.

 


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