The Flame

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

"And would you not like to go back there?"

"Yes, I shall return, perhaps."

"When?"

"I do not know yet. But I do wish to see once more my mother and Sofia. I long to see them very much, Foscarina."

"And why do you not go to them, then? What holds you here?"

He took the hand that hung idly at her side, and they continued to walk thus. As the oblique rays of the sun lighted the right cheek of each, they saw their united shadows preceding them on the grass.

"When you were speaking of the hills of Umbria just now," said La Foscarina, "perhaps you were thinking of the hills of your own part of the country. That figure of the pruned olive tree was not new to me. I remember you speaking to me once before of the pruning of trees. In no other form of his labor can the farmer gain a deeper sense of the mute life that is in a tree. When he stands before a pear, an apple, or a peach tree with the pruning-knife and shears that may increase their fertility and strength, but which could nevertheless as easily cause their death, the spirit of divination surges within him, from the wisdom he has acquired from his long communings with the earth and the sky. The tree is at its most delicate moment, when its senses are awakened, and the sap is flowing to the buds that swell and swell, and are just ready to open. And man, with his pitiless knife, must regulate the mysterious movement of the sap. The tree is there intact, ignorant of Hesiod and of Virgil, in labor with its flowering and its fruit; and every branch in the air is as full of life as is the arm of the man that wields the knife. Which is the branch that must be cut off? Will the sap heal the cut? You told me about your orchard once—I remember it. You said that all the cuts should be turned toward the north, so then the sun should not see them."

She spoke as she had spoken in that far-off evening in November, when the young man had arrived at her house, breathless from the tempest of wind, after he had borne the hero in his arms.

He smiled, and let himself be led by that dear hand. He inhaled the fragrance of that flowery branch in which was a suggestion of bitterness.

"It is true," he said. "And Laimo would prepare the ointment of Saint Fiacre in the mortar, and Sofia would bring him the strong linen to bandage the larger wounds, after they had been cleansed."