Swanns Way | Page 7

passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the
heavens, her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which
with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn,
covered, if she were walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon
them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying
traces of an involuntary tear.
My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that
Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good
night lasted for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the
moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the
sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels
of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me
a moment of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night
that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible,
so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet
have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door
to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once again,"
but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the
concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in
coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father,
who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try
to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all,
which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my
asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the
threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of
tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her
loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an
act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of
her real presence, and with it the power to sleep. But those evenings on
which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed

compared to those on which we had guests to dinner, and therefore she
did not come at all. Our 'guests' were practically limited to M. Swann,
who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person
who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly
dinner (but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family
did not care to receive his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited.
On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house beneath the big
chestnut-tree and round the iron table, we heard, from the far end of the
garden, not the large and noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as
he approached with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any
member of the household who had put it out of action by coming in
'without ringing,' but the double peal--timid, oval, gilded--of the
visitors' bell, everyone would at once exclaim "A visitor! Who in the
world can it be?" but they knew quite well that it could only be M.
Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud voice, to set an example, in a
tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural, would tell the
others not to whisper so; that nothing could be more unpleasant for a
stranger coming in, who would be led to think that people were saying
things about him which he was not meant to hear; and then my
grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find an
excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilise to
remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or two,
so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother might run
her hand through her boy's hair, after the barber had smoothed it down,
to make it stick out properly round his head.
And there we would all stay, hanging on the words which would fall
from my grandmother's lips when she brought us back her report of the
enemy, as though there had been some uncertainty among a vast
number of possible invaders, and then, soon after, my grandfather
would say: "I can hear Swann's voice." And, indeed, one could tell him
only by his voice, for it was difficult to make out his face with its
arched nose and green eyes, under a high forehead fringed with fair,
almost red hair, dressed in the Bressant style, because in the garden we
used as little light as possible, so