Page 505 - swanns-way

gorget an even more crimson face, from which seemed to
burst forth torrents of fire, timidity and zeal, who, as he
pierced the Aubusson tapestries that screened the door of
the room in which the music was being given with his im-
petuous, vigilant, desperate gaze, appeared, with a soldierly
impassibility or a supernatural faith—an allegory of alar-
ums, incarnation of alertness, commemoration of a riot—to
be looking out, angel or sentinel, from the tower of dun-
geon or cathedral, for the approach of the enemy or for the
hour of Judgment. Swann had now only to enter the con-
cert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by
an usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as
though tendering to him the keys of a conquered city. But
he thought of the house in which at that very moment he
might have been, if Odette had but permitted, and the re-
membered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a door-mat
wrung his heart.
He speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness
of the human male when, on the other side of the tapestry
curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of
the guests. But even this ugliness of faces, which of course
were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new and
uncanny, now that their features,—instead of being to him
symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or
that man, who until then had represented merely so many
pleasures to be sought after, boredoms to be avoided, or
courtesies to be acknowledged—were at rest, measurable
by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their
curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom

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