Page 225 - swanns-way

unite us; I would imagine that the same breath had passed
by her also, that there was some message from her in what it
was whispering to me, without my being able to understand
it, and I would catch and kiss it as it passed. On my left was a
village called Champieu (Campus Pagani, according to the
Curé). On my right I could see across the cornfields the two
crocketed, rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, them-
selves as tapering, scaly, plated, honeycombed, yellowed,
and roughened as two ears of wheat.
At regular intervals, among the inimitable ornamenta-
tion of their leaves, which can be mistaken for those of no
other fruit-tree, the apple-trees were exposing their broad
petals of white satin, or hanging in shy bunches their un-
opened, blushing buds. It was while going the ‘Méséglise
way’ that I first noticed the circular shadow which apple-
trees cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable
threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slant-
ingly downwards from beneath their leaves, and which I
would see my father slash through with his stick without
ever making them swerve from their straight path.
Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would
creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggest-
ing an actress who does not have to ‘come on’ for a while,
and so goes ‘in front’ in her ordinary clothes to watch the
rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the back-
ground, not wishing to attract attention to herself. I was
glad to find her image reproduced in books and paintings,
though these works of art were very different—at least in my
earlier years, before Bloch had attuned my eyes and mind

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