Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/127

 street. It ran on feathered feet, pressing close against the enclosing walls, yet at the same time spreading from side to side, brushing the window-panes, rustling against the doors, and even including the shingled roofs in its enveloping advent. It came, too⁠—against the wind.⁠⁠…

It flew up close and passed me, very faintly singing, running down between the chalets and the church, very swift, very soft, neither man nor animal, neither woman, girl, nor child, turning the corner of the snowy road beyond the Curé’s house with a rushing, cantering motion, that made me think of a Body of water⁠—something of fluid and generous shape, too mighty to be confined in common forms. And, as it passed, it touched me⁠—touched me through all skin and flesh upon the naked nerves, loosening, relieving, setting free the congealed sources of life which the bise so long had mercilessly bound, so that magic currents, flowing and released, washed down all the secret byways of the spirit and flooded again with full tide into a thousand dried-up cisterns of the heart.

The thrill I experienced is quite incommunicable in words. I ran upstairs and opened all my windows wide, knowing that soon the Messenger would return with a million others⁠—only to find that already it had been there before me. Its taste was in the air, fragrant and alive; in my very mouth⁠—and all the currents of the inner life ran sweet again, and full. Nothing in the whole village was quite the same as it had been before. The deeply slumbering peasants, even behind their shuttered windows and barred doors; the Curé, the servants at the inn, the consumptive man opposite, the children in the house behind the church, the horde of tourists in the cara-