TIME PASSES4

So with the house empty and the doors locked andthe mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advancedguards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bareboards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroomor drawing-room that wholly resisted them but onlyhangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the barelegs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tar-nished, cracked. What people had shed and left — apair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts andcoats in wardrobes — those alone kept the humanshape and in the emptiness indicated how once theywere filled and animated; how once hands were busywith hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glasshad held a face; had held a world hollowed out inwhich a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened,in came children rushing and tumbling; and went outagain. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flowerreflected in water, its clear image on the wall opposite.Only the shadows of the trees, flourishing in the wind,made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment dark-ened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds,flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bed-room floor.

So loveliness reigned and stillness, and togethermade the shape of loveliness itself, a form from whichlife had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far dis-tant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quicklythat the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbedof its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and still-ness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among theshrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of151

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