My heart leapt into my mouth, I was conscious of
becoming bloodlessly pale, and on tip-toe of exquisite caution I stole
up to the open door--peeped in--and it was she standing on the counter
of a jeweller's shop, her back turned to me, with head bent low over a
tray of jewels in her hands, which she was rummaging for something. I
went _'Hoh!'_ for I could not help it, and all that day, till sunset, we
were very dear friends, for I could not part from her, we walking
together by vor-alpen, wood, and shore all the way to Ouchy, she just
like a creature crazy that day with the bliss of living, rolling in
grasses and perilous flowery declines, stamping her foot defiantly at
me, arrogant queen that she is, and then running like mad for me to
catch her, with laughter, _abandon_, carolling railleries, and the
levity of the wild ass's colt on the hills, entangling her loose-flung
hair with Bacchic tendril and blossom, and drinking, in the passage
through Cully, more wine, I thought, than was good: and the flaming
darts of lightning that shot and shocked me that day, and the inner
secret gleams and revelations of Beauty which I had, and the pangs of
white-hot honey that tortured my soul and body, and were too much for
me, and made me sick, oh Heaven, what tongue could express all that deep
world of things? And at Ouchy with a backward wave of my arm I silently
motioned her from me, for I was dumb, and weak, and I left her there:
and all that long night her power was upon me, for she is stronger than
gravitation, which may be evaded, and than all the forces of life
combined, and the sun and the moon and the earth are nothing compared
with her; and when she was gone from me I was like a fish in the air, or
like a bird in the deep, for she is my element of life, made for me to
breathe in, and I drown without her: so that for many hours I lay on
that grassy hill leading to the burial-ground outside Ouchy that night,
like a man sore wounded, biting the grass.
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