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(7)

flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans
and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had
shed and left - a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded
skirts and coats in wardrobes - those alone kept the human shape
and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and
animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how
once the looking glass had held a face, leaning, looking; had
held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed,
the door opened, in came children; rushing and tumbling; went
out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower
reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only
the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance
on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light
reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter
across the bedroom floor.
      So loveliness reigned and stillness reigned, and together made
the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted;
solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train
window, vanishing so quiclkly that the pool, pale in the evening,
is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Stillness &
.loveliness1clasped hands in the bedroom; among the shrouded jugs and sheeted
chairs, even the prying of the wind, the soft nose of the clammy
sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating and reiterating their
questions - "Will you fade? Will you perish?" scarcely disturbed
.*this peace, this indifference, this air of integrity, as if the
where there is no compromise, truth were there undraped2,

 


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