Page 216 - swanns-way

a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour,
but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of
pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more
strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible
quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded,
wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in
pink flowers alone. Taking its place in the hedge, but as dif-
ferent from the rest as a young girl in holiday attire among
a crowd of dowdy women in everyday clothes, who are stay-
ing at home, equipped and ready for the ‘Month of Mary,’ of
which it seemed already to form a part, it shone and smiled
in its cool, rosy garments, a Catholic bush indeed, and alto-
gether delightful.
The hedge allowed us a glimpse, inside the park, of an
alley bordered with jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among
which the stocks held open their fresh plump purses, of a
pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather, while
on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted green, coil-
ing across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over
the flowers whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical
and prismatic fan of infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops.
Suddenly I stood still, unable to move, as happens when
something appears that requires not only our eyes to take
it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes
possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair,
reddish hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk,
and held a trowel in her hand, was looking at us, raising to-
wards us a face powdered with pinkish freckles. Her black
eyes gleamed, and as I did not at that time know, and indeed

216 Swann’s Way