“It was a royal day in June: lofty blue heavens, a light breeze, transfiguration in the air. The gardens blossomed within their red palings and the daws cried merrily around the high church steeple. It was a day when one suddenly stands still in the blue shade, looks over the crosses in the churchyard grass, and finds that even death is gentle.”
“Hm, hm!”
“Well, so I ate a light dinner and adventured out along the road into the wide land of summer leafage. I have never in my life seen so much white bloom: hedge, sloe, apple, pear, cherry. I recall too a linden avenue—the gravel was quite yellow with the rain of blossoms—and the branches murmured solemnly.”
Axelson twisted himself over on his back again.
“Excuse me, my dear brother, but did you meet anything?”
“Everything and nothing, old friend. Without meeting a living soul I had got out into a landscape of billowy grain fields and meadows with islets of splendid old oaks. I walked along a blossoming ditch side and sat down on a mossy stone close to a fence that ran around one of the knolls of oak. It began to draw on a bit towards evening. The light had not yet the garish colors of sunset; it was merely a thought more golden than before. And in the low, warm light the green of the fields took on a full-toned richness, a vehement intensity, which I shall never forget. One speaks more often of an intense blue, but green too can take on such a tone toward evening.
“I don’t know how long I had sat absorbed in all this, when for some reason or other I turned around and on the other side of the half-dilapidated fence discovered a young lady dressed in white who was sitting on the same slope with me. She had let the book she had been reading sink down on her knees and was gazing similarly out into the wondrous living sea of color.
“At first I was almost taken aback at not being absolutely alone with my emotion, which was so overpowering. But I soon came to myself. Very good, thought I, at any rate there are at this moment no more than two persons in the world, she and I. And—can you imagine it?—I, who am ordinarily so shy and embarrassed in ladies’ society, began a conversation: ‘Here we are sitting, we two, as staffage for the loveliest picture in the world.’ Words glided off my tongue of themselves with a sort of gentle irresistibility which I have never felt before or since. Perhaps my words fitted in in some way with what she had just read in her book. She nodded with a slight smile: ‘Yes, it’s wonderfully lovely.’ I leaned against the fence. ‘How insignificant is all that happens in life compared to such a moment of afternoon as this?’ I said. ‘Even fate seems old and dusty, dusty with stage dust.’
“This was the introduction to a long conversation, at the beginning very lively—a conversation about everything and nothing, of various colors, of flowers and perfumes, of the flight of the swallows that wheeled above our heads.”
Axelson pricked up his ears.