Page 89 - swanns-way

old porch by which we went in, black, and full of holes as
a cullender, was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed at
the sides (as also was the holy water stoup to which it led us)
just as if the gentle grazing touch of the cloaks of peasant-
women going into the church, and of their fingers dipping
into the water, had managed by agelong repetition to ac-
quire a destructive force, to impress itself on the stone, to
carve ruts in it like those made by cart-wheels upon stone
gate-posts against which they are driven every day. Its me-
morial stones, beneath which the noble dust of the Abbots
of Combray, who were buried there, furnished the choir
with a sort of spiritual pavement, were themselves no longer
hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened and sweet-
ened them, and had made them melt like honey and flow
beyond their proper margins, either surging out in a milky,
frothing wave, washing from its place a florid gothic capital,
drowning the white violets of the marble floor; or else reab-
sorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed
Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the
arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together
two letters of some word of which the rest were dispropor-
tionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant as
on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull
outside you might be certain of fine weather in church. One
of them was filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure,
like the king on a playing-card, who lived up there beneath
his canopy of stone, between earth and heaven; and in the
blue light of its slanting shadow, on weekdays sometimes, at
noon, when there was no service (at one of those rare mo-

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