Page 202 - swanns-way

annoyed, and cruel, repeated: ‘Have you friends, then, in
that neighbourhood, that you know Balbec so well?’
In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of
Legrandin struggled to the extreme limits of its tenderness,
vagueness, candour, and distraction; then feeling, no doubt,
that there was nothing left for it now but to answer, he said
to us: ‘I have friends all the world over, wherever there are
companies of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have
come together to offer a common supplication, with pathet-
ic obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon
them.’
‘That is not quite what I meant,’ interrupted my father,
obstinate as a tree and merciless as the sky. ‘I asked you, in
case anything should happen to my mother-in-law and she
wanted to feel that she was not all alone down there, at the
ends of the earth, whether you knew any of the people.’
‘There as elsewhere, I know everyone and I know no one,’
replied Legrandin, who was by no means ready yet to sur-
render; ‘places I know well, people very slightly. But, down
there, the places themselves seem to me just like people, rare
and wonderful people, of a delicate quality which would
have been corrupted and ruined by the gift of life. Perhaps it
is a castle which you encounter upon the cliff’s edge; stand-
ing there by the roadside, where it has halted to contemplate
its sorrows before an evening sky, still rosy, through which
a golden moon is climbing; while the fishing-boats, home-
ward bound, creasing the watered silk of the Channel, hoist
its pennant at their mastheads and carry its colours. Or per-
haps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if

202 Swann’s Way