The Wind Flies Over the House
Later, that day, she went from the house. It was a strange evening. Two
different weathers seemed to have met over the Polchester streets. First
there was the deep serene beauty of the May day, pale blue faintly fading
into the palest yellow, the world lying like an enchanted spirit asleep
within a glass bell, reflecting the light from the shining surface that
enfolded it. In this light houses, grass, cobbles lay as though stained by
a painter's brush, bright colours like the dazzling pigment of a wooden
toy, glittering under the shining sky.
This was a normal enough evening for the Polchester May, but across it,
shivering it into fragments, broke a stormy and blustering wind, a wind
that belonged to stormy January days, cold and violent, with the hint of
rain in its murmuring voice. It tore through the town, sometimes carrying
hurried and, as it seemed, terrified clouds with it; for a while the May
light would be hidden, the air would be chill, a few drops like flashes of
glass would fall, gleaming against the bright colours--then suddenly the
sky would be again unchallenged blue, there would be no cloud on the
horizon, only the pavements would glitter as though reflecting a glassy
dome. Sometimes it would be more than one cloud that the wind would carry
on its track--a company of clouds; they would appear suddenly above the
horizon, like white-faced giants peering over the world's rim, then in a
huddled confusion they would gather together, then start their flight,
separating, joining, merging, dwindling and expanding, swallowing up the
blue, threatening to encompass the pale saffron of the lower sky, then
vanishing with incredible swiftness, leaving warmth and colour in their
train.
Amy Brandon did not see the enchanted town. She heard, as she left the
house, the clocks striking half-past six. Some regular subconscious self,
working with its accustomed daily duty, murmured to her that to-night her
husband was dining at the Conservative Club and Joan was staying on to
supper at the Sampsons' after the opening tennis party of the season. No
one would need her--as so often in the past no one had needed her. But it
was her unconscious self that whispered this to her; in the wild stream
into whose current during these last strange months she had flung herself
she was carried along she knew not, she cared not, whither.
Enough for her that she was free now to encompass her desire, the only
dominating, devastating desire that she had ever known in all her dead,
well-ordered life. But it was not even with so active a consciousness as
this that she thought this out. She thought out nothing save that she must
see Morris, be with Morris, catch from Morris that sense of appeasement
from the torture of hunger unsatisfied that never now left her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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