Drip … dreep-dreep-dreep … drop, drop … dripeet, dripeeteet … drip-ipeet-ipeety! – went the tiny, silvern, interminable cadenza, so fine and clear and absolved that it was an ecstasy to hear – a keen ecstasy quite purged of any dross of excitement. Steadily the singing would go on for a bar or two, tone after perfect tone. Then like a rill that leaps under starlight it would scatter its drops in a spray of grace-notes. On it went, sometimes singing, sometimes speaking, modulating continually from one delicate, undreamed-of rhythm to another. And though it was a voice from childhood, Joanna had never truly heard it before. It was the still, small voice of a new birth, of a new life, of a new world. It was a new voice, but it was the oldest of all the voices. For it was the voice before creation, secure, unearthly, frail as filigree yet faithful as a star.

CHAPTER FOUR

I

She had slept, and in the train next day on her way to London she was still able to rest. Her body was weak but safe. After the alternation of sharp, riving pain and dull stupor which had been her existence for the last two days, this was almost happiness.

In the barn-like Waverley Station wherein the passengers seemed like so many strewn grains from the threshing, she had slipped clear of her trouble. She too was now but a grain, a speck, whereas last night her heart had filled the universe with its heavy and clamorous throbbing. In this restored proportion she had only her infinitesimal part in the whole, and it was enough. Behind her lay great misery: before her in London she knew that more awaited her. But she might make of this journey a quiet breathing space – a narrow oasis in which for an hour she could forget the choking desert.

Having no stomach yet for everyday victuals, she had bought herself a little, rare basketful of fruit. Here was a knot of grapes the colour of glacier water, here were two granadillas – passion-flower fruits with their tough rinds full of luscious, translucent globules, here were almonds to crunch, a white-fleshed apple into which to drive one’s teeth, a peach from which the velvet, scented skin came glibly away.

Leaning back idly in the corner of an empty compartment she watched the wheeling countryside. It was a poet’s May morning, one of those mornings when white, white clouds are piled up and gleaming, and the sunshine lies like snow along the hedges. Young lambs that might themselves have been snow leavings, were scattered upon the emerald grass. A faint, low haze of hyacinths hovered in the bare woods. In one small station, through which the train passed without stopping, the steep banks were rich with crocuses that had already been split and ravished – with crocuses that were flaming their lives out like passionate lamps.