In the morning he
was gone. But a week after he came again, to graft the vines.
All the morning and the afternoon he was among the vines, crouching
before them, cutting them back with his sharp, bright knife, amazingly
swift and sure, like a god. It filled me with a sort of panic to see him
crouched flexibly, like some strange animal god, doubled on his
haunches, before the young vines, and swiftly, vividly, without thought,
cut, cut, cut at the young budding shoots, which fell unheeded on to the
earth. Then again he strode with his curious half-goatlike movement
across the garden, to prepare the lime.
He mixed the messy stuff, cow-dung and lime and water and earth,
carefully with his hands, as if he understood that too. He was not a
worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world,
knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if
by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself.
Then again he strode over the earth, a gleaming piece of earth himself,
moving to the young vines. Quickly, with a few clean cuts of the knife,
he prepared the new shoot, which he had picked out of a handful which
lay beside him on the ground; he went finely to the quick of the plant,
inserted the graft, then bound it up, fast, hard.
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