When I came near it that sunset splendour did not pass off and it was
indeed like no earthly village; then people came out from the houses to
gaze at me, and they too were like people glorified with the sunset
light and their faces shone as they advanced hurriedly to meet me,
pointing with their hands and talking and laughing excitedly as if my
arrival among them had been an event of great importance. In a moment
they surrounded and crowded round me, and sitting still among them
looking from radiant face to face I at length found my speech and
exclaimed, "O how beautiful!"
Then a girl pressed forward from among the others, and putting up her
hand she placed it on my temple, the fingers resting on my forehead;
and gazing with a strange earnestness in my eyes she said: "Beautiful? -
only that! Do you see nothing more?"
I answered, looking back into her eyes: "Yes - I think there is
something more but I don't know what it is. Does it come from you - your
eyes - your voice, all this that is passing in my mind?"
"What is passing in your mind?" she asked.
"I don't know. Thoughts - perhaps memories: hundreds, thousands - they
come and go like lightning so that I can't arrest them - not even one!"
She laughed, and the laugh was like her eyes and her voice and the
touch of her hand on my temples.
Was it sad or glad? I don't know, but it was the most beautiful sound I
had ever heard, yet it seemed familiar and stirred me in the strangest
way.
"Let me think," I said.
"Yes, think!" they all together cried laughingly; and then instantly
when I cast my eyes down there was a perfect stillness as if they were
all holding their breath and watching me.
That sudden strange stillness startled me: I lifted my eyes and they
were gone - the radiant beautiful people who had surrounded and
interrogated me, and with them their shining golden village, had all
vanished. There was no village, no deep green lanes and pink and white
clouds of apple blossoms, and it was not May, it was late October and I
was lying in bed in Exeter seeing through the window the red and grey
roofs and chimneys and pale misty white sky.
XV
THE VANISHING CURTSEY
'Tis impossible not to regret the dying out of the ancient, quaintly-
pretty custom of curtseying in rural England; yet we cannot but see the
inevitableness of it, when we consider the earthward drop of the body -
the bird-like gesture pretty to see in the cottage child, not so
spontaneous nor pretty in the grown girl, and not pretty nor quaint,
but rather grotesque (as we think now) in the middle-aged or elderly
person - and that there is no longer a corresponding self-abasement and
worshipping attitude in the village mind.
