Page 236 - sons-and-lovers

his sketch-book, it was she who pondered longest over the
last picture. Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her
dark eyes alight like water that shakes with a stream of gold
in the dark, she would ask:
‘Why do I like this so?’
Always something in his breast shrank from these close,
intimate, dazzled looks of hers.
‘Why DO you?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. It seems so true.’
‘It’s because—it’s because there is scarcely any shadow
in it; it’s more shimmery, as if I’d painted the shimmer-
ing protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the
stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this
shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust.
The shimmer is inside really.’
And she, with her little finger in her mouth, would
ponder these sayings. They gave her a feeling of life again,
and vivified things which had meant nothing to her. She
managed to find some meaning in his struggling, abstract
speeches. And they were the medium through which she
came distinctly at her beloved objects.
Another day she sat at sunset whilst he was painting
some pine-trees which caught the red glare from the west.
He had been quiet.
‘There you are!’ he said suddenly. ‘I wanted that. Now,
look at them and tell me, are they pine trunks or are they
red coals, standing-up pieces of fire in that darkness? There’s
God’s burning bush for you, that burned not away.’
Miriam looked, and was frightened. But the pine trunks