Page 92 - swanns-way

among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite ‘gone’ at
the top, separated in a paler scheme, above the dark trunks,
the yellowing upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated
by the sharp though sidelong rays of an invisible sun. All
these things and, still more than these, the treasures which
had come to the church from personages who to me were
almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought,
it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and
the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry
and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go for-
ward into the church when we were making our way to
our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic
sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tan-
gible proofs of the little people’s supernatural passage—all
these things made of the church for me something entirely
different from the rest of the town; a building which oc-
cupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name
of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries
with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel,
seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not
merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from
which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding
the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thick-
ness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the
heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks
of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was
furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there
the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which
pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters

92 Swann’s Way