How simple and rustic, in comparison with
these, would seem the dog-roses which, in a few weeks' time, would be
climbing the same hillside path in the heat of the sun, dressed in the
smooth silk of their blushing pink bodices, which would be undone and
scattered by the first breath of wind.
But it was in vain that I lingered before the hawthorns, to breathe in, to
marshal! before my mind (which knew not what to make of it), to lose in
order to rediscover their invisible and unchanging odour, to absorb myself
in the rhythm which disposed their flowers here and there with the
light-heartedness of youth, and at intervals as unexpected as certain
intervals of music; they offered me an indefinite continuation of the same
charm, in an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me delve into it
any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play over a hundred
times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret. I turned
away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them with
renewed strength. My eyes followed up the slope which, outside the hedge,
rose steeply to the fields, a poppy that had strayed and been lost by its
fellows, or a few cornflowers that had fallen lazily behind, and decorated
the ground here and there with their flowers like the border of a
tapestry, in which may be seen at intervals hints of the rustic theme
which appears triumphant in the panel itself; infrequent still, spaced
apart as the scattered houses which warn us that we are approaching a
village, they betokened to me the vast expanse of waving corn beneath the
fleecy clouds, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting upon its slender
rigging and holding against the breeze its scarlet ensign, over the buoy
of rich black earth from which it sprang, made my heart beat as does a
wayfarer's when he perceives, upon some low-lying ground, an old and
broken boat which is being caulked and made seaworthy, and cries out,
although he has not yet caught sight of it, "The Sea!"
And then I returned to my hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands
before those masterpieces of painting which, one imagines, one will be
better able to 'take in' when one has looked away, for a moment, at
something else; but in vain did I shape my fingers into a frame, so as to
have nothing but the hawthorns before my eyes; the sentiment which they
aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free
itself, to float across and become one with the flowers.
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