Chapter 32 - Page 2

even
one's head) with its luxuriant masses, until, with the nettle, it
almost meets the pendent, pale-green branches of the old apple-
trees where apples, round and lustrous as bone, but as yet
unripe, are mellowing in the heat of the sun. Below, again, are
seen young raspberry-shoots, twining themselves around the
partially withered, leafless parent plant, and stretching their
tendrils towards the sunlight, with green, needle-shaped blades
of grass and young, dew-coated pods peering through last year's
leaves, and growing juicily green in the perennial shade, as
though they care nothing for the bright sunshine which is playing
on the leaves of the apple-trees above them. In this density
there is always moisture--always a smell of confined, perpetual
shade, of cobwebs, fallen apples (turning black where they roll
on the mouldy sod), raspberries, and earwigs of the kind which
impel one to reach hastily for more fruit when one has
inadvertently swallowed a member of that insect tribe with the
last berry. At every step one's movements keep flushing the
sparrows which always make their home in these depths, and one
hears their fussy chirping and the beating of their tiny,
fluttering wings against the stalks, and catches the low buzzing
of a bumble bee somewhere, and the sound of the gardener's
footsteps (it is half-daft Akim) on the path as he hums his
eternal sing-song to himself. Then one mutters under one's
breath, "No! Neither he nor any one else shall find me here!" yet
still one goes on stripping juicy berries from their conical
white pilasters, and cramming them into one's mouth. At length,
one's legs soaked to the knees as one repeats, over and over
again, some rubbish which keeps running
in one's head, and one's hands and nether limbs (despite the
protection of one's wet trousers) thoroughly stung with the
nettles, one comes to the conclusion that the sun's rays are
beating too straight upon one's head for eating to be any longer
desirable, and, sinking down into the tangle of greenery, one
remains there--looking and listening, and continuing in
mechanical fashion to strip off one or two of the finer berries
and swallow them.

At eleven o'clock--that is to say, when the ladies had taken
their morning tea and settled down to their occupations--I would
repair to the drawing-room. Near the first window, with its
unbleached linen blind lowered to exclude the sunshine, but
through the chink of which the sun kept throwing brilliant
circles of light which hurt the eye to look at them, there would
be standing a screen, with flies quietly parading the whiteness
of its covering. Behind it would be seated Mimi, shaking her head
in an irritable manner, and constantly