She had passed through the dusk. And therefore the air was silent save
for one soft hiss that fell. And therefore the tongues about him had
ceased their babble. Darkness was falling.
Darkness falls from the air.
A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host
around him. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse
with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?
He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the
colonnade, beating the stone softly with his stick to hide his revery
from the students whom he had left: and allowed his mind to summon back
to itself the age of Dowland and Byrd and Nash.
Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the
breaking east. What was their languid grace but the softness of
chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that
mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart. And he tasted
in the language of memory ambered wines, dying fallings of sweet airs,
the proud pavan, and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in
Covent Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the
pox-fouled wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding
to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again.
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