And the plot? Well, that was not yet visible; but the forces behind it would be sex, religion, and the dead.
5
October turned into November. At first some belated chrysanthemums, penstemmons, and gentians, kept the flag of the border gallantly flying; then Rudge cut it down to the bare wood of stalks a few inches high, which showed between them the brown of the earth.
Out in the country, for a time, a pink and gold spray of wild briar garlanded here and there the thorny withered hedges; and then their only ornament became the red breast of an occasional robin, his plump body balanced on his thin hairy legs, which were like the stalks of the tiny Cheshire pinks that one sees in rock gardens.
Everywhere the earth was becoming depalliated and self-coloured; and on one of her walks Teresa came upon a pathetic heap of feathers.
In autumn the oriflamme of the spectrum had been red; now it was blue—a corrugated iron roof, for instance. And soon the whole land was wintry and blue; a blue not of vegetation but of light, light, which lay in hollows like patches of blue-bells, which glinted along the wet surface of the high road, turning it into an azure river upon which lay, like yellow fritillaries, the golden dung dropped by calves led to market; and through the golden birches the view, too, lay delicate and blue.
Then black and white days would come, when the sun looked like the moon, and a group of trees like a sketch in charcoal of a distant city.
There was nothing new at Plasencia: Dick still sulked at meals; the Doña’s face was cold and set; Concha was distraite and went a great deal to London; Parker complained of the Rudges; only Jollypot and ’Snice went their ways in an apparently unclouded serenity.
Teresa was absorbed by a weekly parcel of books from the London Library; charming mediæval books in that pretty state of decomposition when literature is turning into history and has become self-coloured, the words serving the double purpose of telling a tale and of illuminating it with small brightly coloured pictures, like the toys in the pack of Claudel’s Saint Nicholas:—
Il suffit que j’y fasse un trou et j’y vois des choses vivantes et toutes petites