Blue Voyage

IV

Zring, went the Irish girl’s bed curtains again, and tschunk went the electric switch on the wall, leaving dark the reticulated grill over the upper berth; and then the bunk creaked, and creaked sea-sawingly; as the Irish girl got into it, and creaked as she corkscrewed her Irish body down the ship-folded bedclothes; and an elbow thumped the matchboard partition close to Demarest’s ear, and then grazingly bruised it again, and then a padded round knee bumped, and the elbow again more softly knocked … Who’s there, i’ the name of the devil?… Is it you, strumpet? Knock again. Knock at the door, or come in without knocking. Is it you, darling? In the dark? where? Listen to the wind moaning, humming through the ventilators. Listen to the sea, the vast sound of sea, pouring down into the infinite, cataract of the world. What are we? We are silences drowned in an abyss of sound. The ship is sinking. The world is sinking. God is sinking. What difference, therefore, does it make who you are? Don’t pause to knock, but approach swiftly through the night of sound and water, step serenely from thrum to thrum of the ship’s engines, from heartbeat to heartbeat of the terraqueous god. Is it you, with the candle in your hand, you in a nightgown? Ah Psyche with the regions which! You with a pocket flashlight? In, in brief candle! We’ll fear not for scandal. But diddle and dandle. And fondle and fry. Seven bells; the ship, sleepwalking, tintinnabulates like a gipsy. The shipboy, hearing bells below him, looking down at the dark ship, and dark decks, and dark sea, and the dark bow lowering into a wide dim wash of white, and the dark waves coming white-maned and flattening in white — the shipboy sleepily strikes once the small sea bell, and the bird of sad sound flies on short quick wings into the infinite misery … MISERY … Misery is consciousness. Misery is death. Misery is birth. Misery is creation. Rain is falling in Portobello Road, the evening is winter, the cobbled mud is inferno, and the cold rain slowly falls in large, fat flakes, larghe falde, snowflakes falling into slime and grease. The man, shuffling, undersized, leans pushing the barrow, on which lies the two-year-old boy under rags of sacking, unmoving, turning only his large eyes full of pain. The woman hobbles beside the barrow, weeping, pressing the back of a blue hand against her cheek, turning her shrunken face to one side and downward as she whines. The man is silent, pushing the barrow rapidly; the woman trots. Rain falls into the boy’s eyes. They are hurrying home … The man is thinking, while the dirty water runs under his cap and down his face, he is used to it, he doesn’t mind the cold trickle among his hair and down his neck — but this other thing he is not used to, he wants to shout out something horrible about it, shaking his fist, except that he is too tired and can’t find the words. Let me dictate for you a course of action which will satisfy this longing. Begin by shouting at your woman—“For Christ’s sake shut your jaw and stop your bloody whining. Stop it, or I’ll knock your damn teeth out.” Continue by striking her once in the back of the neck, so that she stumbles and falls into a puddle, moaning, and kneels there, moaning, as if unable to move. Grab her arm, twist it, and wrench the slattern to her feet. Hit her again, this time in the face, your fingers open — the slap will warm your hand. Shout at her, so that all the people in Portobello Road will hear. “What’s the matter — are you drunk? I’ll black your eye for you if you don’t get a move on you.” Think again. Think of nothing but misery, of Portobello Road endless and eternal, of yourself and your slut and your paralyzed boy walking there in the winter rain forever. Do you require speech? Would it do you good to abuse her, to call her a draggle-tailed, snaggle-toothed, swaggle-bellied, broken-gaited ronyon? Enumerate her physical defects. A wart over her left eye; a wart on her right eyelid; a wart (with hairs on it) on the chin; a pendulous wart, like a little pink cauliflower, coral-hued and corrupt, between the lean breasts; and a sore on the right thigh. Scars on the legs, bluish or coppery. Puncture wounds on the inner surface of the left arm, below the joint: five, and red. Five corresponding puncture wounds on your own left arm. Blest be the marriage betwixt earth and heaven! Now, — in the open sore of space, — the mortal son and the daughter immoral, make of the world their trysting place. Ten positives in succession, the hollow steel needle pricking and sliding under the taut skin, and into the swollen vein, the glass tube steadily filling with poisoned blood as the little steel piston withdraws. The blessed spirochete. Swarms. The blood boiling with hook-nosed spirochetes. MISERY. Horror, the maggot, hatches and quarries in the very pulse of love. Rain is falling in Portobello Road, hissing in the paraffin flares that light the barrows and crowds, illuminating the bestial faces and dirty hands. Barrows heaped with kippers. Rotten cabbages, rain-soaked. Collar buttons and woolen stockings. Terracotta Venuses. Winkles. Toy balloons. Detumescent pigs singing like cicadas on a hot night in New Jersey. The man, undersized, leans pushing the barrow on which the boy lies unmoving, turning an apathetic eye toward the smoky flares. The woman trots, moaning. Announce your grief. Stand at the corner where the crowd is densest, and shout it to them pitilessly—“You think you are miserable, do you! Well, look at me, look at us! Syphilis, that’s what we got, syphilis!” … This was where Goya lived: in Portobello Road. The man pushing the barrow was Goya. The woman, trotting and whining, with averted eyes, was Goya. Goya was the paralyzed boy lying numb and cold under wet-glazed rags. Goya sold maggoty kippers from a torchlit barrow: he inflated the singing pig, over and over again. Nga-a-a-a-a, sang the pig, Goya holding it up by the spigot on its back before the circle of dirty-faced children … Goya drew a pig on a wall … The five-year-old hairdresser’s son … saw, graved on a silver tray … the lion: and sunsets were begun … Goya smelt the bull-fight blood: The pupil of the Carmelite … Gave his hands to a goldsmith, learned: to gild an aureole aright … Goya saw the Puzzel’s eyes: … sang in the street: (with a guitar) and climbed the balcony; but Keats (under the halyards) wrote “Bright Star” … Goya saw the Great Slut pick The chirping human puppets up. And laugh, with pendulous mountain lip, And drown them in a coffee cup; Or squeeze their little juices out In arid hands, insensitive, To make them gibber … Goya went Among the catacombs to live … He saw gross Ronyans of the air, harelipped and goitered, raped in flight By hairless pimps, umbrella-winged: Tumult above Madrid at night … He HEARD the SECONDS IN his CLOCK CRACK like SEEDS, DIVULGE and POUR aBYSmal FILTH of NOthingNESS BETWEEN the PENdulum AND the FLOOR: Torrents of dead veins, rotted cells, Tonsils decayed, and fingernails: Dead hair, dead fur, dead claws, dead skin. Nostrils and lids; and cauls and veils; And EYES that still, in death, remained (Unlidded and unlashed) AWARE of the foul CORE, and, fouler yet, The REGION WORM that RAVINS There … STENCH flowed out of the second’s TICK. And Goya swam with it through SPACE, Sweating the fetor from his limbs. And stared upon the UNFEATURED FACE That did not see, and sheltered NAUGHT, but WAS and IS. The second gone, Goya returned, and drew the FACE; And scrawled beneath it, “This I have known” … And drew four slatterns, in an attic, Heavy, with heads on arms, asleep: And underscribed it. “Let them slumber! Who, if they woke, could only weep” … MISERY. Say it savagely, biting the paltry and feeble words, and overaccenting the metronomic rhythm, the same flaccid-syllabled rhythm as that of King Caligula. Say it savagely, with eyes closed, lying rigid in the berth, the right foot crossed over the left, flexing and reflexing against the coarse sheet. Explore the first cabin in your pajamas, find the passenger list and the number of Cynthia’s cabin, and putting your absurd chin (in which the bones are slowly being rotted by pyorrhea) over the window sill, recite in the darkness … not this, not this, but something exquisite, something young. Awakening up he took her hollow lute, tumultous; and in chords that tenderest be He played an ancient ditty, long since mute, in Provence called “LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI.” The boy stood on the burning deck. Eating peanuts by the peck … Cynthia! are you awake?… Yes! Who is it?… Saint William of Yonkers. Listen! I will tell you all about my childhood — everything. You will see how pathetic it was. You will see what long, lonely, lugubrious life I have led. The Irish girl, separated from me by one inch of painted wood, is trying to attract my attention, knocking with her sweet little elbow against the wall. Last night I replied, tentatively. Tonight, so great in your heavenly influence upon me, so permeated is my gross body by your beauty, that I pay no attention. Are you listening?… Yes, darling … I am a man full of pity and gentleness! My face is the face of one grown gently wise with suffering — ah, with what years of untold suffering! I have been misunderstood — I have blundered — I have sinned — Oh, I have sinned; but I have paid the price. My father was cruel. When I was five, he burnt off my left hand because I had been striking matches … I begged in the streets, having no money to buy the necessary books; for even as a little child I had a passion for knowledge and beauty. A Chinaman gave me a quarter, and I bought … what was it I bought? Nick Carter in Colorado. The Arabian Nights. Almost Fourteen. Fiske’s Cosmic Philosophy. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Espronceda’s El Diablo Mundo. The Icelandic Voluspa. An Essay on the Trallian School. A Variorum edition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, in eighteen volumes. A Variorum edition of Thank You Kindly Sir She Said, in two hundred volumes. Are you still listening, Cynthia?… Yes, beloved … I adore you, Cynthia. I have been a fool — I have lost you — but I adore you, and I will adore you forever. Your physical defects — do I not know them? A nostril just a suspicion too “painfle.” A voice exquisite, light, Shelleyan — but lacking in those deep-throated qualities, voluptuous and resonant, with which I love a woman, now and again, to turn challengingly upon me. Breasts a little too low and large; a gait a shade too self-conscious; a bearing rather too much in the tradition of the “expensive slouch.” But these are immaterial — forgive me for mentioning them. I adore them, I do not desire to touch them, nor to touch you. My feeling for you is wholly sublimated: I can trace in it no physical desire. I should fear and distrust any impulse to bring your tall body into contact with mine. I should like only to live with you in some strange, rarefied world — cold, clear, translunar and spacious; a world of which you know the secret, and I do not; a world of the subtle and the fragile, of the crepuscular and the vitreous, of suggestions dim but precise, of love inexpressive and thought unconcealed. An imparadised Amalfi, marble terraces of orange groves and camellias, rising out of the violet of the sea and ascending into the violet of the empyrean? No? Too much like marzipan? Let us, then, leave the world as it is; but make of it, by knowing all its secrets, our terrestrial heaven … Are you listening, Cynthia?… Listening, smutsfink … Tomorrow I will write out for you the history of my childhood. All sorts of exquisite things will be in it — delicate perceptions, gentlenesses of feeling, of which you would not have supposed a mere male to be capable. I have always been kind to birds, dogs, children, cats and mice. Particularly mice. Once I found a swift, imprisoned in a house. I saw it flapping against the window as I passed, flapping against the curtains. The house was empty, deserted. I walked miles to get the key, wondering how I would capture the poor thing when I returned. It wasn’t necessary — I opened the window and he flew out. He had fallen down the chimney.… This, and many others … I would narrate them humorously, of course — but you would detect the gentleness and pity … A kitten — I climbed a telegraph pole, when I was eight, to rescue a kitten, which had got all the way to the top and was afraid to come down. I had stationed my brother and another boy on the roof of the chicken coop — they were to hold out a towel between them, into which I was to drop the kitten. Unfortunately, Tom (he’s a darling, Tom — you’d like him!) let go of his end. Still, the kitten wasn’t hurt … A dog, I saved once from drowning at Keswick … Blind men I have led across the street … Old women I have helped in and out of trains — several thousand … The woman who fainted in the Grand Central Station — I helped to carry her into the waiting room — how extraordinarily white she was. Beggars. Hurdy-gurdy men. The tramp in the ditch, who said, “You might as well be cheerful, especially if you’re miserable!”—and went on singing … Yes. All the unhappy world — the overworked, the starving, the starved for love, the deserted and lonely — MISERY … Like the vampire I have been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; like the lobster, I do not bark, and know the secrets of the sea. I am shy, I am sensitive, I am impressionable. How many lovely things, how many horrible things, I remember! This you would love in me if you loved nothing else: this treasure house, this golden thesaurus, of my memory. If only I had succeeded in showing this to you before you fell in love! You would have been astonished — perhaps … Perhaps perhaps perhaps perhaps … On the other hand, you might have thought me not sufficiently masculine?… A sentimental introverted weakling, with that tendency to sudden cruelty which all the injured manifest. But my trick of unexpected reticence, my impassivity of appearance, my proneness to fatigue and indifference, the rapidity with which I tire of people — no matter whether they be angels or devils — these characteristics give an air of masculinity which might have deceived you? Are you listening, Cynthia?… Listening, mud-puppy … My absurd chin is on your window sill in the dark, but I am like Fama, and my feet are not at all on this deck, as you might imagine, but way down upon the Sewanee River, far, far away. I am like Daisy Dacey — England and the United States rolled into one. To see all is to be all. But it is above all my childhood that I should like to put into your lap — my romantic and beautiful childhood, my suffering and pitiful childhood. I was disliked and distrusted. I was cruelly beaten. I was humiliated. My pride and will were broken before I had come to my seventh year. I was in a state of continual terror. I sneaked in and out of the house, mouselike and secretive, my only purpose to attract as little attention as possible. My favorite story — would you believe it? — this is very touching — was the story of the ugly duckling. This held out a ray of hope for me — I would revenge myself — someday — someday — by turning into a swan. I read this story over and over, memorizing every detail, and as I read it I searched in my soul for signs of the wonder that was to come. How was this to be? What gifts had the good fairies given me, that I might someday astonish and confound my cruel father, my forgetful mother? It could not be strength, for I was weak, and I was constantly ill. It could not be courage, for I hardly ever forgot what it was to be afraid. It could not be beauty, for beauty was not a prerogative of boys. Could it, perhaps, be wisdom? This was conceivable — it was only by my teachers that I was ever given encouragement. I remember how I was overcome, how I blushed, when one day Miss Baring said aloud in the classroom (there was a drawing of Julius Caesar on the blackboard behind her head), “William will some day be successful. He is intelligent, and he works.” Successful! What a blaze of glory, what a bursting of stars of light, was in that word. Like sky rockets on Christmas Eve! Like Roman candles vomiting their colored balls of fire and slow streams of fading sparks! So perhaps it was in this way that I began to associate knowledge with success; or mental skill of some kind. I began by copying the drawing of Julius Caesar — I showed my drawing to Miss Baring, and this too she praised … Eight bells … Changing the watch. With heavy boots, with oilskins, with a black oilskin hat, he climbs the ladder to the crow’s nest. A fine rain falling on his face and hands. All clear, Bill?… A light two points off the port bow … Right. Getting a little sea up. Thickening a bit, too … Smith is in bed at sea. Faubion, the Fleshpot, is in bed. The Welsh Rarebit is in bed — whose? Vivien Hay-Lawrence is in bed. The Major is in bed. Solomon Moses Caligula Silberstein is in bed. Cynthia is in bed. Mrs. Battiloro is in bed. The pianist lies awake, thinking of his wife and daughter in Blackpool. The Chief Steward is having a game of bridge in his stateroom, whisky is on the table. All the others lie horizontal, above and below the water line, like chrysalids, like corpses in coffins. The clairvoyant? He, too; but his sleep is troubled by vatic dreams. He sees each chrysalid being secretly attacked by ants, the larva destroyed, the psyche released. Ah psyche from the regions which. MISERY. Last night as I lay on my pillow — last night as I lay on my bed — last night as I lay on my pillow — I dreamed that my bonnie was dead … You know the story of Strindberg and the mouse? He was terrified by an electric influence, an evil stream, which everywhere pursued and persecuted him. It came through walls, aiming at his heart. He hid his head in the pillow, but the malevolent stream came up through the bed. He ran out into the hall and lay down by the banisters — but a mouse trotted up close to him and looked into his face: and he fled screaming. I am Strindberg. I look at his photograph and a feeling of self-love and self-pity, a profound narcissistic compassion and tenderness, comes over me. Those harassed and noble temples, the tortured deep-seeing eyes, the magnificent head, the small mouth, which is the mouth of the child and of the adder!.. I am wise, I am weak, I am persecuted; I am unlucky, I am beautiful, I am strong. Der Gekreuzigte. I love my own body. When I was a youth, I used to stand naked before a tall glass, or walk gracefully toward it, transported by the beauty I saw, the exquisitely flexing muscles of abdomen and calf and thigh, the suave Greek brow, the candid eyes. Ah, the profile of the body, with the ribs arched, the lean hollow curve of the belly! The lightly hung and powerful arms, the hands large, fair and strong as those of the David! This is what is now rejected and despised. Therefore it is not beautiful. It is obscene, gross, despicable. It is a whited sepulcher; a mass of secret corruption, of filthy juices and clots of half-destroyed food; an infirmary sicklied o’er with the pale cast of consciousness. I have always been one in whose consciousness illusion and disilluson flashed simultaneously. My hand remains still, because it releases even before it has grasped. Are you listening, Moon? Are you listening, chaste Nymph? I am on the first-class deck beside you, wearing pearl-gray spats, carrying gloves and a silver-topped cane of malacca, a gardenia in my buttonhole. There is no obstacle between us, you are not in love with another man, you have all this time been secretly in love with me. I am your social equal (indeed your superior) and my stick is really the wand of Trismagistus. How pleasant! Oh, how exquisite! Thy beauty framed for sweet delight! Thy stature like an upright palm! Thy breasts like clusters dropping balm!.. I my Belov’d first raisèd thee From under the pomecitron tree; Thy careful mother in that shade With anguish her fair belly laid … Queen and huntress, are you listening?… Listening, but bored, wood louse … I was in a hurry — I hadn’t time to explain to you — I would like to explain to you — explain everything. I had no right on the first-cabin deck, of course — I am in the second cabin. Poverty. Poor but proud. I have often, for that matter, traveled in the steerage. I believe in being democratic, don’t you? I remember you said your brother William … always got along well with people of humble origin … Yes … So do I … I like them. Queer creatures, often, aren’t they? I really like them better than most people of my own class. Why then, apologize for liking them — or why claim it as a virtue? Tee hee—nervous giggle. I believe you are a snob, Cynthia. I remember my friend Giles, who met you at a dance in Oyster Bay — Oyster Bay! — said “Battiloro? Oh yes. I remember. An awful snob — looked down her nose at everybody!.. One of those damned English snobs.” Ha ha! Apparently you had been rather cool to poor good-natured Giles, Giles with his loud bark and perpetually wagging tail, Giles who at college was known as “Susie.” Poor Giles, a failure at everything, but so disarming, so ingenuous, so eager to please, so nice! How had you the heart to be cruel to him? Are you cruel, Cynthia? Or was it that you thought him a snob? Well — perhaps a little. He probably tried a little too hard to show you how much he knew about England, and how many “fish heads” he knew there … Lady Rustlebottom of the Mount, Torquay. Et cetera … He bought a blazer especially for the purpose and spent a weekend there … I was in a hurry — I hadn’t time to explain — I must explain — all — everything — Smith, for example. You probably noticed at once that Smith is not a “gentleman”—in the accepted sense. The way he cocks that absurd great tweed hat! His dingy clerical-looking clothes, and his shoes humped at the toes! A mere ship’s acquaintance, a rather interesting little character. You wouldn’t like him — he would bore you — but you would like to hear about him, the salient features of his career brightly related by Demarest. Of course, you aren’t a very good judge of character! You remember Wetherall? You said, “What a really charming face he has. I’m sure he’s awfully nice!” Ah! The joke was on you. Wetherall was at the moment seducing a little trained nurse who was on board — he told me at every meal of his progress, and dear Billington was so shocked that he could hardly eat … One of their difficulties was that she had two roommates … But the weather, you remember, was warm, they stayed late on deck, and there was no moon. Also, they did not attend the ship’s concert. Wetherall described it all to me — every detail, his kind brown eyes humorously bright, his Bradford accent at its very best. What a curious pleasure it gave me to share in that secret conquest, so passionate, so frankly carnal, so frankly obscene, and so laconically casual, while at the same moment I was conscious of falling in love with you, and falling in love in a sense so antithetical, so ethereal! While Wetherall was turning wine into blood, I was turning blood into wine. Yes. It was magnificent. A slow and beautiful counter-point. Wetherall the bass and you the treble. You remember that afternoon when I encountered you at the foot of the companionway? — you were carrying a book — it was a book of Negro spirituals — and you smiled, and then immediately looked away, frowning, at the sea. You hesitated as if — you were perhaps really going somewhere, you had an errand, you didn’t want me to suppose that … you in any way sought my company. I, too, hesitated — as if I knew that my company could not be of much interest to you, and yet — might we not pause together for a moment, touch our wings together in the air? And besides I — and perhaps you, too (we discussed this problem — so peculiar to ships — a few days later in the train to London, in the light of the queer implicit intimacy which by then had sprung up between us) feared that you might think me trying to avoid you — it is so difficult, on a ship, to avoid the appearance of persecution, or, on the other hand, of avoidance!.. “Have you been reading?” I said, and you answered, “I’ve been trying to — but it’s so extraordinarily difficult, on a ship, to concentrate!.. I’ve had to give it up” … I too had found it difficult — even with The Spoils of Poynton. I told you of this, and we discussed Henry James, standing there, as we did so, a little uneasy with each other, or, as Mandeville (is it Mandeville?) puts it, in a mammering and at a stay. And then, taking my flimsy life in my hands, I said, “Shall we go up on the boat deck and concentrate together? It’s rather nice forward of the bridge …” Singular and daring remark! You half smiled and turned, we ascended the companionway; and at the forward end of the deck, leaning our backs against the old plates of the Silurian, which we could feel buckling as the ship plunged, we talked deliciously for an hour, for two hours. And do you know what gave, for me, a special exquisiteness to that talk? It was my fresh sharp recollection of my conversation at lunch with Wetherall. Behind that forward lifeboat, on the starboard side — where later we played a game of chess, the young student of architecture watching us — behind that lifeboat, the evening before, Wetherall and Miss Kirkpatrick had lain together till one o’clock. They had been discovered and reprimanded. Of all this, naturally, you knew nothing; and still less could you conceive the nature of Wetherall’s confidences to me. You would be astounded — horrified! The grossness of the human being! And the vulgar candor with which one man to another confesses it! Wetherall informed me that Miss Kirkpatrick was, up till then, “inexperienced.” But, setting out for a two months’ holiday in Scotland and Belfast, she had in advance made up her mind that, should a sufficiently attractive man be available, she would give herself to him. Wetherall — a married man, with a daughter of eight — had been the lucky man. He had noticed from the outset that she smiled at him a good deal, and somewhat intensely. On the second evening he kissed her — and as he remarked, “Didn’t she come up to it?… O Boy!..” But I give you the impression — are you listening, Cynthia?… Still listening, earthworm … I give you the impression — partly a wrong impression — that this organ point, supplied for our intercourse by Wetherall, was unalloyedly pleasant. No no no no no. Good God. This is precisely what I don’t want you to think. It reminded me, certainly, of my own obscenity; but it also served to show me already the immense altitude of my — flight! Wetherall was precisely what I was proposing, with your support, to leave behind. More precisely still, what I was leaving behind was Helen Shafter: coarse, voluptuous, conscious, witty Helen, who had so ungovernable an appetite for the farcical, and who had so skillfully and swiftly and horribly exposed the essential fleshliness of “love between the sexes!” Yes. The experience was horrible. And how even more horrible was it to come thus to you, before whom I so passionately longed to stand with something of Parsifal’s mindless innocence, bearing on brow and palms the stigmata of that crucifixion!.. MISERY … And what intricacy of fate brings it about that again it is from a meeting with Helen that I come to you, and that as I passed you twice on the deck this evening it was of our so miserable affair — Helen’s and mine — that I was foolishly boasting to a total stranger? Is it possible that you overheard it?… Well, that is what I am … Even supposing that we could have … even supposing that you could have … loved me, it is impossible that I should always have been able to deceive you — sooner or later I should have had to drop the pretense (so skillful) of refinement and idealism and innocence; you would have seen me for the Caligula that I am … Somebody out in the corridor — a stewardess giggling. And a steward. Mrs. Antherton. “No — NO!” and then a little appealing laugh, ending abruptly in “M-m-m,” and then the stifled laugh again. Tompkins is kissing Mrs. Atherton. Intervene, Cynthia! This sort of thing shouldn’t be permitted on shipboard. Now it is Tompkins — I know his voice. “What did he say, eh? What did he say?…” “None of your business …” “Well, I don’t give a damn what he said — he can stick it up — the flue” … “Sh!” What’s the matter with you? This ain’t inspection time” … “No, but somebody might hear you …” Murmur murmur murmur … For God’s sake speak up! I’d like to get to the bottom of this … “and said I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him any more …” “… drunk the first twenty-four hours anyway — lying like a log in his bunk with a wet towel …” “It isn’t the first time either. Voyage before last they had to fetch him … Carter and St. Clair it was … wife … she was standing outside there looking …” Murmur murmur murmur. Pause. Have they gone, or is he kissing her again? Have to do it like this, poor devils — on the q.t., late at night. Snatches between watches under hatches … “Good night, then.” “Good night, sweet dreams.” “Cheerio.” Gone: a rustle of starched calico, muffled footsteps, and gone. The Irish girl is breathing heavily and slowly — asleep. What is she dreaming of? Pittsburgh. She is in uncle William’s house in Pittsburgh. Uncle William has grown a black beard, horrible, too long, obscenely alive. His mouth, seen through it, is unfamiliarly round and red, like a great red rose, but too opulent and fleshly, almost mucous. He sits and looks at her. Then he begins speaking harshly and says over and over again, “Thy belly is as an heap of wheat” … Yes. Everywhere this motif — everywhere. You too, Cynthia — who knows? What concupiscent preoccupations, only fleetingly conscious and perhaps obscure, do you perpetually conceal? Eunice — until once I laughed — used to tell me her dreams. She dreamed one night that she was a nun, in a convent. A fire broke out. The nuns ran into the corridors, looking for the fire, but only finding dense clouds of smoke pouring up the stairs. They ran down the stairs, and coming at length to the celler, could see through the smoke every now and then a fitful glare of flame in what appeared to be a deep hole, or arched cave, at one side of the cellar, a sort of underground entrance. The nuns dragged a garden hose down the stairs, thrust the brass nozzle into the cavern, and the fire began to go out … Darling Eunice … I wish she hadn’t got married … disappeared. “Don’t look at me like that!” she said — that was one night when we had dinner on the roof garden. We were falling in love. Blue taffeta. Those sleeves of a sort of gauze. That night she was suddenly sick in the street, and closing her eyes said, “Oh, I can’t even love you a little bit … so … sorry!” … Then the time we were standing at midnight in the dark portico of the church — the church with the angels blowing trumpets from the tower … We thought we were concealed … but Eunice murmured too much when I put my hand … and the policeman … Good God what a fright he gave us … “Move on, now! haven’t you got any better place than that?…” How delightful to remember it. I wonder if Eunice, married, lying beside her husband, thinks about me sometimes? She liked me, we were happy. But I couldn’t see her often enough. “No—” she said, “this time you mustn’t kiss me … I’m going to be married!” … MISERY. Absurd, if I could face Eunice’s departure with so much equanimity, that this about Cynthia … Different … Not much intellectual or esthetic companionship with Eunice — well-matched emotionally and physically (and her sense of humor — delicious! and her courage!), but not otherwise. My longing to see her now is largely nostalgic. Still — I was frightfully fond of her … With Cynthia — so extraordinarily at one in all things — a kind of shorthand of understanding at the very beginning … Tschunk. The lights in the corridor are off. Dark. The engines throbbing; late, the night shift of stokers; sweating like a lot of firelit demons. The shaft, all the way through the ship, gleaming, revolving — ectoplasm. Somebody coming. Faubion? Light! Must be the watchman with a flashlight. At his priestlike task — of bold intrusion … Ship, I am on a ship. Cynthia is on board, but in the first cabin. Shall I transfer to the first cabin? Money enough; just barely. But nothing left for tips and drinks and the train to London. It would look too pointed. Cynthia is on board. Incredible! Anticlimax!.. How am I going to see her? Walk boldly into the first cabin looking for her? Besides, under the circumstances, do I want to see her? It would be useless. It would be “pleasant”? Good God … After all these dreams of ships, too! Always looking for Cynthia on ships … When I get to London, I won’t dare to go and see her. No point in it. Spoiled. The whole thing spoiled. The world pulled down and wrecked. Better be like Smith and gather my rosebuds while I may … Poor old Smith! The cherub, in pink pajamas, sleeps surrounded by Faubion’s heliotrope-smelling dresses, and dreams he is dancing with chorus girls. Lottie, Flo, Hyacintha, Vyolette, Dol, Maybelle, Parthenia. They all dance frou-frouishly around him, squealing, ring around a rosy, joining hands, and Cherub Smith stands in the middle, in the grass, with his finger in his mouth, looking coy. Coo-hoo, Parthenia! I see you, Maybelle! I know it was you who slapped me, Nottie Lottie!.. There’s a corporal in the grass … Smith, impersonating a satyr, runs with a resinous torch and thrusts it under a translucent chlamys, igniting it. Parthenia is burned. Goes off flaming. Ha ha!.. Splendid old Smith … This is what it is to be homo sapiens, the laughing animal, the animal who remembers and foresees … Smith and the clairvoyant — the clairvoyant corporal springs out of the deep grass, skull-faced and hideous, and grimly pursues poor old Smith, who screams among the tombstones — Flottie, Hyacintha, Partha, Flow, Boybell, Dole, Violent. He is felled like an ox. To what green altar, oh mysterious priest? And all his crispy flanks in garlic dressed. The uses of assonance. Gloom and gleam. Birth and death. Love and live. Mingle and mangle. Fix and flux. Prick and puck. Pop and pap. Twit and tot. Point and punt. Dram and dream. So near and yet so far … What if it were at last possible to talk of everything with a woman? To keep no secrets, no dark recesses of the mind, no dolors and danks, which could not be shared with her? But then she would have ceased to be attractive. Is it simply because we have to pose before her … to pretend to be angels … the angel with the sword?… Ah, the awful fixed curve of determinism! MISERY … You overhear all these reflections, Cynthia?… All, maggot … Forgive me forgive me forgive me forgive me. I am horrible but I am penitent. I will crawl on my knees to the Bilbao Canal and drink of its filthy waters. I will bathe in slime. I will fill my belly with ashes. I will go naked, and show the corns on my feet, the mole on my right fess. I will work for ninety-nine years in a Chinese rice field, sleeping in the mud. I will pray to Kwannon to purify my heart. I will hop on one foot all the way from Sofia to Jerusalem, speaking to no one, and die at the foot of the cross: the weeping cross. You have seen, in Mount Auburn cemetery (beautiful isn’t it), that tombstone of white marble … with a marble lamb … upon which, annually on a certain day, two drops of blood are found? Those drops of blood are mine. Expiation. On the twenty-eighth of February each year, in the evening, I go there and cut my left wrist, letting two drops fall on the stone. Twenty-eight is my fatal number. The moon is shining when I arrive. Snow is on the ground and on the graves. Snow covers the obscene vaults. Crows are asleep in pine trees. The snow plough moans along Mt. Auburn Street … And I, solitary, grieving, expiate the sin and horror of the world — its grossness, its cruelty, its ugliness; its triviality, its vileness, its deceit. Bowed with sorrow, I ascend the little snow-covered hill by the tower, pass over it westward, and come to the Lamb. Then I take from my wallet a razor blade (Gillette) and gash slightly the left wrist … In heaven, those two drops of blood fall like thunderclaps. The angels fly up like doves. God, asleep, has a dream. He dreams: “The infinite darkness is gashed redly with a sword, and from the gash pours a torrent of blood. I am no longer unconscious suffering — I become an awareness and a shape. I am the region worm — the undying and infinite and eternal caterpillar; and I am the host of red-eyed ants who attack him in every part and devour him forever. The infliction and reception of pain comes to me from every particle of the caterpillar world. And the particles become more conscious. The chorus of suffering swells unceasingly: it is the sound of the world — the sound of sorrow. Who will teach me how I may again return into the darkness of nescience? What Siegfried will ring his ram’s horn and destroy both Fafnar and himself? What messianic atom among my wailing myriads will so crucify himself and die that his death will carry in its train ALL DEATH?… I writhe with all my length … Oh, man, save me!.. But all I hear is the sound of gnawing and moaning, the sound as of the ten million silkworms which in China, at night, keep travelers awake with their champing of mulberry leaves … CLAP! CLAP!.. What is that? Two drops of blood! Man begins to destroy himself: out of horror for his own nature, at the nature of Me. It is the beginning of the end! Ah! peace will return to me! I will return at last into the womb of nothing!” … Tin-tin. Two bells. One o’clock. I ought to be asleep. One three five seven nine eleven thirteen fifteen. Two four six eight ten twelve … One four seven ten thirteen sixteen nineteen twenty-two twenty-five … I’m on my belly with my palms crossed under my chest, right cheek on pillow. But the right nostril obstructs. On my back again, carefully, these damned ship-folded bedclothes come apart so easily. The cat’s prayer. Give us this day our daily mouse. And forgive us our trespusses as we forgive those who trespuss against us … I really ought to give up this awful habit of punning. Just the same, I always regretted not saying, when her knitted sleeve caught in the log and stopped its ticking (reducing the day’s run), “A miss is as good as a mile!” That was when we were discussing Brooke’s poetry. And I quoted—“And suddenly there’s no meaning in our kiss … And your lit, upward face grows, where we lie, Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is, and dumb and mad and eyeless, like the sky …” I told her also of the Catholic poetess (so tiresomely self-conscious and exquisite) who remarked about his poem “Heaven”—“So stupid, don’t you think? So very stupid!” Squamous, omnipotent, and kind. Mrs. Battiloro frightens and annoys me in the same way. What was her phrase about Moore, when I repeated his comment on Yeats? Something deliciously Victorian. Hm. Offensive … No. Noisome. No. — What the devil! Lie in wait for it. How exasperating, especially when sleepless. ODIOUS! Yes. An odious person! I laughed, and she was annoyed. She didn’t invite me to come again — I said good-by to her in the dining room, where she was giving instructions to the maid for the dinner party. Who was coming to that dinner party? How I longed to know! Good-by, she said, and turned back to her silver and her refectory table (which I had been brought to see!). Refractory table. That’s what old man Tucker always called it — frosty-faced old fool. Table tipping. Ectoplasm. That reminds me of old Duggan in his shirt sleeves behind the counter, taking his false teeth out of the cigar box on the window sill. I ought to have told Cynthia about him. When his wife died! “I miss her terribly, the lovely little dear … I was looking at her grave … It looks sort of bare. I ought to set out some flowers there. I thought maybe some Christian anthems would look nice?” Chrysanthemums. When I took M. there, hoping to get Duggan to repeat it (how heartless), it all went off like clockwork, even to the furtive tear on his cheek. Poor old Duggan. His wife was like the sheep knitter in Alice. Cancer of the liver. Dying in that shabby little shop, selling tins of tobacco, ten cents’ worth of stale peppermints, sardines, glue, shoe strings. Patient and kind. I was his only friend — almost impossible to get away from him some evenings — he followed me to the door, talking, reluctant to have me go … Breaking out violently about some of his neighbors — particularly the O’Briens, whom he hated. Their hens getting into his yard, “smelling up” the place, waking his wife in the morning. A God-damned nuisance. I’ve complained, and I’ll keep right on complaining. Yes, by God, I will: Think they own the place by God … The shop shut, and cheap crepe hanging from the latch. The curtains drawn. Afterward he had a fox-terrier pup to keep him company — it was run over and killed. Then a timid little mongrel, sleeping in a box by the stove. “Yes, you know, she keeps me company — and you’ll be surprised how much she understands” … He got his own meals — bacon and fried potatoes. Moonshine whisky — a fine plume he used to breathe out sometimes in the evening! “These travelers you know—they know where to get it” … The Greens were nice to him when his wife died — but nobody else was. Not a soul. Poor old man. MISERY. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Would you like to kiss your father? No. The others were lifted up and kissed the dead face, surprised. Why did I refuse? Shyness and horror. The people sitting there, after the service, staring and weeping. The parson wearing a queer thing with white sleeves and the Bible with a pale purple ribbon, and the parson’s mouth getting moist at the corners when he talked. Then we sat in the carriage … feeling that we oughtn’t to talk or look out … Trot trot. Clop clop. The palmettos swayed and flashed. The moss was hanging in long gray streamers. The shell road glared in the sunlight. Too hot to walk barefoot. What flower had that been that smelled so sweet?… Tuberoses … The mortuary tuberose. Tomb-smelling tuberose. Trot trot. The sidewalks lined with crowds of staring niggers, niggers smelling blood and death. That murder I saw from the front “stoop”—bang bang bang bang bang, and the man’s felt hat falling off, and his head sinking down on his breast, and the niggers flocking like ravens, flocking and cawing, while the murderer (a fireman whom I knew, who owned a pet monkey) stood there in his shirt sleeves, unmoving, as if surprised at what he’d done … Was it he who walked past the porch, a year later, in shirt sleeves, carrying an empty coal scuttle? Back from the penitentiary, or the chain gang?… Disappointed at not seeing the mark on his face. If I had kissed him — or perhaps it didn’t show anyway. Somebody said — Harry it was — that one of his eyes had come out and rolled across the floor. The bloodstained mattress had been put in the outhouse — I and Harry went and looked at it, pretending that we were looking for the kittens. Felo de se. Being pushed forward, in the crowd at the cemetery, to the edge of the grave. Sandy soil. An arrangement of pulleys and bands of canvas. Ashes to ashes. A little dust taken in the same parson’s clean fingers. And dust to dust. Then the shovels, more businesslike. — My father. My father which art in earth. It was just over there he took my picture once, on the bluff by the river. In the white duck sailor suit. Hollow be thy name.… Julian, who said that it was always in the presence of death, or in the thought of it, that life, and therefore love (reproductive) most astonishingly asserted itself. He meant the merely physical. Quite understandable. Ain’t Nature horrible? Love and Death. In Latin almost the same — ditto Italian. Death sacred and love profane. Eunice telling me of her friend the trained nurse, Miss Paine. Miss Paine was fond of poetry, she read Keats and Shelley. Periodically, she developed a taste for lubricious fiction. Presbyterian. Strong self-control, — but also strong passions. On that case in East Orange, on the night when the father died, the son, aged eighteen, through whose room she had to pass, put out his hand to her. She said afterward she couldn’t understand it — it had seemed so right. So absolutely right. The strain, the exhaustion, the grief, all breaking down into this other, this divine ecstasy, in which suffering has supremely its place. Her only experience of passion. Age: thirty. For a month afterward she did nothing but pray: the whole of Sunday spent at church. Forgive us, for we know not what we do. MISERY. A child crying somewhere. The most desolating of all sounds is the sound of a child crying. Harrowing — makes you feel helpless. Might as well run, but then you can’t forget it. The echo rings in your ear. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh … oo-oo-oo … ah-h-h-h … oo-oo-oo-oo … the first thing we do when born is cry. All language therefore must develop out of the sound of crying — it is probably most affecting when plangent for that reason. Make a note of that — and remember it. Spring it on somebody as if I’d always known it. There, there darling, don’t cry. There, there, darling, don’t cry. By baby bunting. When the bough breaks the cradle will fall. Lullaby. Traumerei. My father whistled the Lorelei to the cat — he had a theory that the Lorelei, whistled slowly, was infuriating to cats. But the cat seemed to be delighted. He would now be — let me see. He was thirty-seven. From nought is 8. Fifty-five. What would he think of me, I wonder. Would I be afraid of him still? I am taller than you are. I am more intelligent than you are. Freer from fetishes than you are … Look! You see that scar? You gave that to me, holding my hand in the gas jet … You see these plays? they come from the deep wound you inflicted on my soul … You see the unhappy restlessness with which I wander from continent to continent, this horrified and lack-luster restlessness which prevents me from loving one person or place for more than a season, driving me on, aimless and soulless? This is what you did to me by depriving me of my mother … Think of Silberstein saying that he wants to find his mother. He wants to die. O God — O God. To die — to die in the middle of a deep sleep, to sink deeper and deeper into the darkness … That’s of course, what he wanted — that poem he left on the table — the darkness—“closer, closer all about, Blotting all the light of living out.” Intra-uterine reversion. Perhaps the fact that he—will prevent me. Explode it. It was a sort of exhibitionism, leaving a poem on the table like that — defeated ego. Vanity. See what a great spirit has left you. Mighty, I spread my wings and left you … I suppose I liked him when I was very small, before the other kids were born — before I can remember. He must then have fascinated me and drawn me out powerfully and skillfully. Yes, I can feel that he did. There was something angelic about him — later it became diabolic. The angel that revolted. My God, what basilisk eyes, eyes that shot through you, tearing out thoughts, blood, and vertebrae. “Where is that other letter?” “There wasn’t any other letter.” “Look at me. Where is that other letter?” “But there wasn’t any other letter.” “You brought back three letters. Do you deny that you gave one of them to your mother?” “There were only two letters!” “Why did you sneak in by the back door?” “It was because there were some boys I didn’t want to meet—” “Don’t lie to me!.. Why did you come in by the back door?” “It was because I saw ‘Butch’ Gleason.” … O God have mercy upon us. Pity us and have mercy upon us. Shine down upon us, star of the sea, and guide us gently to the haven of Heaven. Manumit us from slavery to our passions; deliver us from the tyranny of all-too-human reason. Take from us that part which makes us to suffer, and at whose bidding we bring suffering to others. And lead us down into darkness forever. MISERY … Can never change the swan’s black legs to white. Curious I should have opened to that line when I tried the sortes Shakespeareanae. The devilish double entendre. Swan — ugly duckling — play-wright=compensation. Black legs=black leg=rotter=inferiority. My abiding sense of sin. The feeling of being dishonest and filthy. This is probably the cause of my curious failure in all human relationships. This is why I try to write plays. This is why, when I feel a friendship failing, feel myself failing to attract or hold by means of personal charm (a fake), I begin trying to impress—let my plays fight my personal battles for me. Take my new play MS. to Cynthia tomorrow. Yes — the impulse is perfectly clear. This is what I can do—this is the angelic sort of being I am! Read and admire! Sound me and wonder! I sit near you with eyes modestly downcast while you read. You wouldn’t think, to look at me, that this rather harmless nice creature harbored in his soul such a shattering power … How disgusting!.. Never, never again will I show my work personally to a living soul. Publish it, get it performed — yes, since that seems to be the mechanism by which I preserve my sanity. But employ it as a secondary sexual characteristic — a bloodshot erect crest — a rainbow-eyed tail — a mating call!.. The Bulgarian weasel. That hideous tramp on the stage who said he would now give an imitation of the cry of the young Bulgarian weasel to its mother. “Mommer!..” in a quiet restrained voice. “Mommer!” … It was during the same performance that the Russian girl, playing the xylophone, looked at me so fixedly and invitingly. Did I go round by the stage door? Can’t remember. Probably not … Perhaps it’s because I fear my rainbow tail won’t be liked, won’t make a sufficient impression—? That would simply add, of course, to my ruling sense of inferiority … I wonder what it was about me that always made people laugh. In streets … On street cars … How I hated to get into street cars or trains, facing all the staring people! Probably only my self-consciousness and sheepishness and furtiveness that attracted attention? Then I would blush. Always blushing — with a sense of guilt, of having been found out … Does your mother know you’re out? That was when I had on that gray Norfolk suit. It probably did make me look absurd — with my pale little chinquapin of a face, and sorrowful baby eyes … I went home and looked at myself in the glass, trying to discover what was wrong. As usual, I looked admiringly, lovingly, into my deep deep violet orbs. The eyes of a great man. All-seeing and all-knowing. All-suffering and all-saying … She returned the fifth act without comment — except that she didn’t understand it. “I’m like the servant girl,” she said, “who remarked, when … ‘I don’t presume to understand’ …” On board — Cynthia on board, stretched out in a sea berth. Like a dead fish. “It’s rather nice—” she was saying to Billington as I approached—“to be seasick, and just lie there feeling like a dead fish!” … “But I don’t like to feel like a dead fish!” I cried, and she gave her exquisite swift laugh, gay and understanding. Ah Psyche from the regions which. And turn, and toss her brown delightful head. The conspiracy against poor Billington, to preserve her from his boring attentions. “You owe me a vote of thanks … I sidetracked — took him firmly by the arm just as he was starting toward you … and walked him round the upper deck for over an hour …” She was grateful … She rewarded me later by telling me of poor Billington’s desperate efforts to get himself invited to come and see her aunt in London — he tried in various ways to find out where she lived. Cynthia, leaning over the Irish sea, laughed lightly, slightly — in the act of gently deriding Billington, she contrived to say, “You see — I take you for granted — that you should come to see us is admitted! Isn’t it?” Yes. And this paved the way. “Shall I encounter you in London, I wonder?” Off Holyhead; the pilot putting out; his sail tossing in the white southwest sea. “Well — if you should go to Battersea Bridge — and turn to the left — and see a shabby little house with that number on it — and ring the bell—!” “I shall do all as instructed” … That afternoon — I saw her sitting in her deck chair, wrapped in the brown steamer rug, a book opened on her lap. Billington — hm — yes — was kneeling on the deck beside her, talking, oh so very earnestly, with all of his little academic intellect. What about? — poetry? He had been writing a sonnet series, “Sonnets to Beatrice.” As he talked, wagging a finger, he occasionally emphasized the point by touching, with that forefinger, her rug-covered knee. A damned outrage. I was furious. Cynthia — how saturnine, how somberly and unutterably scornful and bored she looked. Twice, when I passed, I saw him do it. Odd that it should have so sickened me. I sat in the smoking room, absolutely trembling with rage and disgust. Partly jealousy? I would have liked to be able to do it myself?… No no no no no. Yes yes yes yes yes … It’s true — forgive me … but only partly true. I would have liked to be able to do it, but not to do it — to be sufficiently free from self-consciousness, that is. To touch Cynthia’s knee! Good God. Playing chess, I used to forget everything, as we sat cross-legged on the stone-scrubbed deck, and watch her hands. How fearfully beautiful they were, how intelligent, as they lay at rest or moved meditatively to king or queen. The gentle frown — the dark absorption. Her Italian blood. Italian nobility, I wonder? Italian+American=English. She introduced me to her father there on the station platform at Euston. “Father, this is Mr. Demarest — who played chess with me …” The delightful broken accent, the kind and wise face, the greeting at once intimate—“And dances? You had lots of dances on board?” “No — no dances!” “You see, there wasn’t any orchestra!” “Ah! Oh! What a pity!” … It was after that that I went and sat all afternoon in Hyde Park, unhappy. By the waters of Serpentine I sat down and wept. The separation: it was as if half of me had been cut away. How soon could I decently go to see her? Not before a week or two. No. She would be busy — busy seeing all the rich and rare people whom she knew so much better than she knew me. Distinguished people, people of social brilliance, wits, artists, men famous all over the world — how indeed could she allow herself to be bothered by me? I would never dare to go … But after her invitation — I couldn’t dare not to go. I would tremble on the doorstep — tremble and stammer. And what, I wondered was the English formula—“Is Miss Battiloro at home?” “Is Miss Battiloro in?” And suppose a lot of others were there, or a tea party! It would be frightful — I would make an idiot of myself, I would be alternately dumb and silly: just as when I used to call on Anita. The whole day beforehand I was in anguish, wondering whether I would go, whether I would telephone. That time when Anita’s mother answered, and I suddenly, from acute shyness, hung up the receiver in the middle of a conversation!.. But of course I must go and see Cynthia — otherwise it would be — impossible to live. I gave her The Nation as I passed her compartment in the train at Lime Street—“Why, where did you get this?” Delight and surprise. Then later, an hour out of Liverpool, she brought it back — as a suggestion that I might talk to her? “May I?” “Rather!” Her aunt, sleeping opposite, with crumbs on her outspread silken lap, opening her eyes a moment, smiling, and sleepily proffering the folded chessboard, which we declined, looking at each other gaily. Then — no, it was before — we were standing in the corridor, watching the English fields rush by — daisies, buttercups, campion. The hedges in bloom. “I think,” she said, “heaven will be that — a green bank covered with buttercups!” … “Well — heaven might be worse than that!” MISERY … And then I went after three days! That was my first mistake … Or no … The first mistake was my going there the day before, in the morning, just to see her house! Incredible mawkish folly! Suppose she had seen me? Perhaps she did. Well — there it was. Which window was hers? At the top? A young man coming out, and I crossed to the other side with face averted. Brother, perhaps. Or someone she knew, had known for years. A friend of her brother’s. A cousin. A cousin from Italy. That young artist she had talked about — Rooker … The child crying again—A a a a h h h … oo … oo … ooo … aaaahhhh — oo — oo — oo — oo. A child crying at sea, crying in the infinite, noia immortale, cosmic grief. Grief is my predominant feeling — why, then, in talk, am I so persistently frivolous? flippant? Probably for that very reason. “Demarest has the ‘crying face’”—it was Weng, the Chinese student, who said that. The eyelids are a trifle weary. I wonder why it is. It had never occurred to me before that — it shows how little one is able to see the character of one’s own face. And that day when I said something, jokingly, to M. about “my mild and innocent blue eye,” he replied quite savagely and unexpectedly, “Your eye is blue, but it is neither mild nor innocent!” Astounding! My eye was not the timid little thing I had always supposed? And good heavens — not innocent! I didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. But it radically altered my conception of myself, and helped me in my painful effort to acquire assurance … Aaaahhh … oo … oo … oo … oo … Poor thing — everything horribly unfamiliar. It’s probably crying because it misses one familiar trifle — the light in the wrong place, or the wrong color; the bed too dark; the smell; the humming in the ventilators; the throb, so menacingly regular, of the ship’s engines. Or a shawl, which was perhaps left behind. Everything combining to produce a feeling of frightful homesickness and lostness. The way that kitten must have felt, when we told Martha to “get rid of it”—instead of having it killed she put it down in the street and left it. Poor little creature … It was used to us … Its funny long-legged way of walking, the hind legs still a little uncertain! It liked to catapult back and forth in the hall after dusk; or catching moths. And that night, when it rained and blew all night, shaking the house — where was it? Mewing somewhere to be let in. Lost. How much did it remember, I wonder — how much did it consciously remember? A lot, probably. A warm and happy place with kind people whom it trusted — irrecoverably lost. Paradise lost. Where are they — where is that wonderful house? Ask the policeman. Good God it was a cruel thing to do — to take it in for a few weeks and then put it out in the streets like that. How horrible the suffering of any young thing can be. Speechless suffering, suffering that does not understand — the child punished by the parent whose nerves are on edge. Struck for reasons which it cannot conceive — dogs and cats the same way. Man’s inhumanity to dogs and cats. Cattle too, driven into the abattoir — no wonder there are complaints by the S.P.C.A. “Those who eat meat do not realize that it is not invariably at the first blow of the poleax—” etc. Falling down on their knees and bleeding, looking at man with surprise — that look ought to be enough to destroy the human race. Lex talionis. Cruelty is inevitable — all that one can possibly do is to minimize it. We could live on nuts and vegetables — but I go right on eating beefsteaks just the same … The consciousness, though, of a lost kitten — what an extraordinary thing it must be. I suppose it’s exactly like ours, except that it can’t be partly linguistic — probably almost wholly visual, a kaleidoscopic series of pictures. Memory? Hm. Not so easy. Perhaps in that case all it really felt was the terrifying unfamiliarity, strangeness, and of course the discomfort. It would be sentimental to ascribe any more than that — to think of it as being as aware as I was, thinking in bed about it, of the wildness of the night, the wind, the strange shutters banging on strange walls of strange houses, the torn puddles under lamplight, the deluge of driven rain rattling against windows, solid water sousing down from eaves. Yes, I remember how sharply and dreadfully I visualized it — seeing the black street blattering with water, a green shutter hanging from one hinge — and refusing (shutting my eyes) to visualize the kitten as somewhere out in it—damned cowardice, sentimental cowardice!.. I remember getting out of bed early in the morning and tiptoeing down to the back door to let in the maltese. The time my father scolded me for it. “Don’t ever do it again, understand!.. I thought it was someone who had broken into the house — a thief — and I very nearly shot you … Next time, I will shoot you!” … Perhaps that’s the source — that extraordinary cruelty both to the kitten and to me. I can’t remember what I felt about it at the time — but it must have been appalling. That’s the sort of thing, in one’s childhood, that’s “part of one’s experience of the world”—the discovery of the sort of nightmare into which we are born. MISERY. A voice cried sleep no more. There’s one did swear in his sleep, and one cried Murder. Murder equals redrum. That’s poetic justice. I waste a lot of time in logolatry. I am a verbalist, Cynthia — a tinkling symbolist. I am the founder and leader of the new school of literature — The Emblemists. I wear a wide black hat, a dirty shirt, boots with spurs, and shave once a month. Traces of egg can be seen at the corners of my mouth. I am hollow-cheeked, exophthalmic, prognathous: I express my views at any and all times, savagely, and with a conscious minimum of tact. I glory in my dirtiness — I am a Buddhist — I look at you with sleepy cynicism to prove it — utterly indifferent to the needs of the body. Nevertheless, I eat heartily, and I make no bones about the tiresome necessities of sex. I am, into the bargain, slightly mad. I have persecution mania. They try to ignore me — they slander me — they suppress mention of me — they whisper about me and laugh. Insults are heaped upon me, but I stride on, magnificent, a genius manifest; the winds of my poems whirl them about and make them whimper. Ha ha! That last phrase, Cynthia — would you believe it? — was actually used about me by a famous poet in an interview — something I had said annoyed him. “The winds of my poems … make him whimper,”—that’s what he said. That reminds me of an article I saw once — in the New York Nation, was it? — called “Wind in Tennyson.” Perfectly serious! Isn’t it incredible, the singular things people will do … I do them myself … Yes … From time to time … I am a poet of the Greenwich Village school — slightly eccentric, but really quite commonplace. I make a point of never sleeping more than once with the same woman. Hilda J—? Yes. Sophie S—? Yes. Irma R—? Yes. Madeline T—? Yes. And Irma’s sister, too. And her seven cousins from Utica. And every actress in the Jack-in-the-box Theater. Typists, poetesses, dancers, reciters, fiddlers, and organists. I have a particular passion for organists. You can see me any noontime at that charming little café in Sixth Avenue — you know the one. I look pale and bored. I carry yellow gloves and a stick, and my utter indifference to everything around me convinces you that I am distinguished. I can tell you all the secrets of all these people. That girl in the corner? Takes morphia. For ten years has been writing a novel, which nobody has seen. Smokes, drinks, swears, twice attempted suicide. M—, the dancer, gave her an “an unmentionable disease” … That other little girl, dark and pale, with one eye higher than the other? A hanger-on — the hetaira type. A nice girl, nevertheless, and once or twice has really fallen in love. No moral sense whatever — a rotten family in Flatbush. She is hard up most of the time — on the one occasion when I slept with her I found it necessary (or charitable) to give her a pair of my B.V.D.’s … I am an unsuccessful artist, wandering from one city to another: New York, Chicago, Boston. Everywhere I carry with me a portfolio of my sketches, drawings, etchings, color washes, pastels. I show them to people on trains, I show them to people in restaurants, or on park benches. I have a large pale head with shiny sleek yellow hair and the yellow stubble on my cheeks and chin glistens in the sunlight. Once I grew a beard — but although I adopt the pose of indifference to public opinion, I must admit that the jokes of small boys, and the more violent comments of roughs, finally led me to shave it off. “Look at the Bowery Jesus!” they cried: “Pipe the Christ!” … One critic referred to me as “that immoral and hypocritical fin de siécle Jesus” … In Chicago, I ran a private dance hall. In Boston, I conducted a tea shop and edited a little magazine. In New York, I have sold cigars, dictionaries, soap and fountain pens. In St. Louis, I nearly died of flu. When Hurwitz, the poet, came to see me I was lying under a sheet, like a corpse. “Why don’t you take your shoes off?” he said, seeing my feet which protruded. “They are off,” I said. It was only that I hadn’t washed them for some time. I practice a saintly contempt for the physical … Yes … I am all these. A little flower of the slime … For a time, I was X, the novelist, the dabbler in black arts, alchemy, hashish, and all known perversions. How fearfully wicked I was! Women shuddered when I was pointed out to them: when I touched them, they fainted. I collected slippers — a hundred and sixty-three. The fifty-seven varieties were child’s play to me, and the sixty-nine, and the one thousand. You know that poem of Whitman’s — something about “bussing my body all over with soft balsamic busses”? That’s me — the omnibus. In my rooms, with a few expensively dressed women who considered themselves New York’s most refined, I celebrated The Black Mass. One of these women, I discovered, was a cynomaniac … Several women have supported me … While the stenographer was paying my bills, I was absorbed in a passion for an Italian castrato … You hear me, Cynthia?… Darling William! You do not deceive me for a minute — not for a minute. I see through all this absurd pretense of naughtiness! — I see the dear frightened, fugitive little saint you are! — Ah, Cynthia, I knew I could trust you to understand me! I knew it, I knew it! — Come, William, it is spring in New England, and we will wander through fields of Quaker Ladies. Don’t you adore the pale-blue Quaker Ladies? — Yes, yes, Cynthia! Four petals they have, and sometimes they are blue, but sometimes ash color! — Come, darling William, and we will romp among them joyfully. We will climb birches. We will discover the purple-banded Jack-in-the-pulpit, hiding in the snaky swamp. We will tease the painted turtle, and give flies to the high-backed wood tortoise. — Yes yes yes. They sun themselves on stones. Plop, and they are gone into the water. — And the tree toads, William! Their ethereal jingling at twilight in the water meadows! Their exquisite little whisper bells! — Ah! the tintinnabulation of the toads! Poe wrote a poem about them. — How melancholy your New England is, William! One misses the hand of man. Deserted, forlorn, shapeless — but beautiful, wildly beautiful. I could cry when I see it. It fills me with nostalgia … A poor thing but mine own, Cynthia. These gray-lichened pasture rocks — I created them out of my tears. Out of my bitter heart grew these sumacs with blood-colored bloom. Out of my afflicted flesh came these white, white birches. Nothing of me but doth change into something rich and strange. — And those huge desolate frost-scarred mountains, the white and the green, lightning-riven, scree-stripped, ravaged by hail and fire — ah, William, my dearest, what a terrible weight upon the soul are they!.. My burden, Cynthia — the burden of my thought … Aaaaahhh-oo-oo-oo … aaaahhh-oo-oo-oo-oooo … MISERY … Damn that child, why doesn’t it go to sleep. Or damn its mother, anyway. Women are so extraordinarily unperceptive. All nonsense, this theory that the perceptions of women are acuter than men’s — or intuitions. No. I’ve never met one with perceptions as quick as mine — I can skate rings around them. You hear me, vain, intellectual, snobbish Cynthia? — To me, William, you would yield in this — to me alone. So sensitive am I to impressions, that … that … that … that … Quack … quack … And you beside me, quacking in the wood. For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love … The sagacious eye of the duck — something of that in Helen. And how she loved to quack. And how she loved to sprawl ungainly and kick her heels in the air and laugh and fling her slippers about and make absurd, hideous faces! Too young — it was merely the joy of release, rebellion, that she was experiencing — she was, at the moment, incapable of love. Listen, chaste Cynthia! And I will tell you … tell you … Speak fearlessly, William, as you always do — I am looking at you with wide deep eyes of understanding. I see the pebbles at the bottom of your soul. — Yes, Pyrrha’s pebbles. Arranged in pairs. Rose quartz, white quartz, gneiss. Rose quartz, white quartz, gneiss. And did you see that little trout hiding among them? That was my very me. My little trout soul … But I was going to tell you, Cynthia — tell you — Wait, dearest — first let us find some quiet little backwater of the Cher. There! the very thing. Under that low-hanging willow, to which we can fasten our punt. Now we cannot be seen or heard. Oxford two miles away — Lady Tirrell, my dear, dear friend, unsuspecting. Arrange the cushion under my head. Is my dress pulled down properly? Put the bottles in the shade to keep cool, or hang them in the water. I bought this dress especially for the occasion, so that none of my friends on the river would recognize me. All the castles of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the pattern. Here is Dover. Here is Harlech. Bodiam there, and there, on my left knee, Kenilworth. Why will these stupid people bring their wretched phonographs? So vulgar, so very vulgar … Aaaaahhhh-oo-oo-oo-ooo … I was going to tell you, Cynthia, of one night with Helen Shafter. Would you like to hear it? — Is it something I ought to hear? — Certainly. Why not? I believe in absolute frankness between the sexes — don’t you? Tooth brushes, sponges, cascara — everything. Our comings in and our goings forth. Our sittings down and our standings up. One egg or two. Linen changed once a week — twice a week — four times a week — daily. The matutinal dose of salts. The nocturnal suppository. The application of lip salves, clouds of powder, rouge, and deodorizers. The tweezers forextracting superfluous eyebrows — henna and orange-sticks for the nails. The stale sweetness of the clothes cupboard. All … Then, William, it is my painful duty to inform the police that you are a voyeur. Need I remind you of certain episodes of this character in your childhood — adolescence — youth — and early manhood? There was that time in … But this, Cynthia, has a kind of beauty! — Beauty, smutbird? Beauty? Beauty is that lascivious life of yours? No — it’s quite impossible. Quite. — But I assure you! I go down on my knees! I swear to God! I kiss the Bible, the Koran, and the Wisdom of Lao Tzü. This experience, although sensual and sexual in origin and fundamentals, nevertheless had a certain beauty. I swear it had, Cynthia! Listen, and you will see! You will be moved by it, I’m sure! — Poor Little William — I recognize in you this imperative impulse to confess — it is not for nothing that I go to confession myself and tell the holy father of my little white sins. But are you sure I am the proper repository for this secret? — Cynthia! Orbèd maiden with white fire laden! Moon-daughter, snow-cold and pure, but fiery at heart! It is from you alone that my absolution can come. I will tell you — But not so fast, William! This is Sunday, and I have tickets for the Zoo. Don’t you adore the Zoo — simply adore it? The toucans. The pelicans. The ring-tailed tallula-bird. The whiffenpoof. The tigers, miaowing, and the lions reverberating, rimbombinando. The polar bear — trying to lift from the wintry water, with hooked claws, a pane of ice. The elephants, swaying from one rubber foot to the other, swinging their trunks, and lifting their teakettle spouts for peanuts. And the little baboons and monkeys, so ingeniously and ingenuously obscene! — te hee! — Oh yes yes yes, Cynthia! I saw a madonna and child, once, swinging in a little trapeze! The mother was searching intensely … Aaaahhhh … oo-oo-oo-oo-oo … This is really passing endurance. It shouldn’t be allowed on a ship. Steward, take this child and throw it overboard. Push it head first through a porthole. Weight it with lead, or tie the anchor to it. Drape it with the star-spangled banner. Taps. The time the men in Company K, 4th Illinois, lent me a bugle and four bayonets — we paraded three times around the square. It was magnificent. The hot tropical sun on the asphalt. The trumpet flowers bugling on the graves, and Dr. Scott’s terrapins scrambling in the tubs and bins. Then there was that terrifying green sea turtle with soft flat flappers flapping softly in a separate tub. The cook said they would have to build a fire behind it to make it put its head out for the ax. Turtle’s eggs — soft, tough, puckered. They find them by thrusting a sharp stick into the hot sand — if it comes up stained, they dig … It must be the law of tetrahedral collapse that gives them that peculiar shape … Oh, that cartridge! I blush. I stole it — stole it from Private Davis’s tent — after he had been so nice to me, too. Good God, how awful it was. It was Butch Gleason who suggested it — he said he always took money out of a cash register in his father’s store. It must have been arranged. Sergeant Williams went out, and in a minute came back. I was leaning against the tent pole at the door. As he came in again, brushing against me, his large hand fell naturally (so I thought!) against my jacket, and he closed it on my pocket. Why, what’s this? he said. O God, O God. Then they were all silent and ashamed — they wouldn’t look at me. Why didn’t you say you wanted one, Billy? That’s no way to go about it, stealing from your best friends!.. Here, take it! You can have it … I didn’t want it, but I took it. I wanted to give it back to them — I wanted to explain everything — I wanted to cry, to wash the episode out of history with a vast torrent of tears. But I could say nothing. I crept home and put it on the mantelpiece in my room, above the toy battleship, and never touched it again … By George, how nice they were to me: that first day it was — I took them a big paper bag full of animal crackers, when they were just off the train, hungry. I believed them when they said they’d been living for months on nothing but tinned mule. Afterward I used to march into mess with them in the penitentiary yard — under a long wooden shed which had been built there, with long tables under it, tables of new pine. A tin cup, a tin plate, tin fork and spoon. Soupy, soupy, soupy, without a single bean. That heavenly melancholy nostalgic tune the bugler played when they marched along the shell road into the country — over and over … I was again given a bayonet and marched at the side, giving orders. Close up the ranks there!.. Get me a coupla chinquapins, willya, Billy?… Then they were singing. Good-by Dolly, I must leave you … Just tell her that I love her … I wonder what place that was where they had their new camp. I got lost that time coming back from it — the conductor gave us transfers, but we didn’t know what to do with them, when to transfer, and finally got off and walked. We walked miles through the Negro quarters in the dark. Mysterious lights. Noisy slatternly houses. Smells. That might be where the gang we were always fighting came from. Gang fights with stones. Sling shots. Pluffers, pluffing chinaberries. I cut down an elderbush in the park to make one … Sneaky Williams it was who saw me cutting down a young cedar to make a bow and arrow and took me home by my sleeve, my feet barely touching the ground … I thought I was being arrested … Ah, that delicious dense little grove of saplings with a hut in the middle! What was it that made it seem so wonderful? It was dark, gloomy, little leaf-mold paths wound here and there intersecting, twigs snapped. There was something Virgilian — I remember thinking about it four years later when I began reading Virgil. Et vox in faucibus haesit. It must have been the sacred terror. I can remember the time when I hadn’t yet been into it. That day, when, after being ill for two months, I went out for the first time — my mother sat on the bench near it, and I made little houses out of dry twigs in the grass. The only moment at which I can see her — she sits there, absent-minded in the sun, smiling a little, not seeing the path and the cactus bed at which she appears to be looking. The penitentiary walls were behind us — the tall barred windows, behind one of which I saw a man looking down at us. He was moving his arms up along the bars high above his head. And the Sacred Grove was near us, and the red brick vaults, and the table tombs of white stone … Are you watching me, Cynthia? Surely I was harmless enough on that day? Surely you like my mother sitting there with her parasol? And isn’t it nice of me to remember it all so clearly, after a quarter of a century?… O God, that swooning sensation, anguish that contracts the belly and travels slowly down the body … MISERY … This is what it is to be in love. Unmitigated suffering. The most all-poisoning of all illnesses. And nevertheless, it’s the chief motive of all art — we return to our vomit. No, no, that’s not fair. It has beauty!.. Think of the extraordinary way in which it changes, suddenly, the whole coarse texture of the universe! — I remember, when I first fell in love, how I used to want to touch everything with my hands. Stone walls. Bark of trees. Bits of metal. Glass. Woolen clothes. All of them had suddenly become exquisite, all of them responded. And when I met you, Cynthia … But there’s no concealing the suffering it has brought, that frightful and inescapable and unwearying consciousness of the unattainable. The soul aching every moment, every hour, with sharp brief paroxysms of intenser pain: the eyes closing in vain, sleep vainly invited, dreams that concentrate into their fantastic and feverish turmoil all the griefs of the whole life; and the eyes opening again to the blindingly unforgotten sorrow — this is what it is, this is what now returns to me in even greater virulence. The intolerable suffering entailed in trying to remember a half-recalled face! That night at the Northwestern Hotel, when I had one nightmare after another all night long, trying to find her … And then, when I went down to breakfast in the morning, exhausted, and still in a kind of dream, all unsuspecting that she too had slept at the Northwestern, I found her, with her aunt, alone in the breakfast room! What an extraordinary discovery that was! She was lost, and she was found. The light, laughing “Good morning!” The eggs being eaten in English eggcups!.. And it still goes on. Her face escapes me. Why should this be? It isn’t really, of course, that it escapes me any more than any other recollected sense impression. No. Probably less. The trouble is precisely in the fact that one wants too much of it — wants it too often, wears it out with staring, and not only that, but one is also, in a way, trying to revenge one’s self upon it. One seeks to possess it — with a violence not thrust upon one’s ordinary recollections — simply because one has not been able to possess the reality. One evening it is absurdly easy — I can’t “turn it on” at any moment and luxuriate in it. But the next morning it is gone; and no sleight of mind will give it back to me. I try the chin, the mouth, the profile of the cheek, the eyes — all in vain. The face is a complete blank. Perhaps one trace alone will be discoverable — I can see how, at that particular instant, when she found me staring at her, she looked slowly down, lowering her eyelids, and with what an extraordinary and baffling intensity of expression! There was pain in it, there was annoyance, but there was also, from the dark of her unconsciousness — could I be wrong in thus analyzing it? — a frightful unhappiness and desire, a relaxed and heartbroken desire, desire of the flesh, as old as the world. This alone I can remember, often, when all other aspects of her face have dislimned … Creek, creeky-creek, creeky … The Irish girl moves from her left side to her right. Easy enough to remember her face — because I don’t feel any tension about it … Smith too. Or Silberstein — that massive stone face! Bastile façade! Or Faubion. Ah! a pang. You see that gleaming pang, Cynthia? — I see it, unfaithful one! — No, not unfaithful! Not unfaithful! I swear to God … Is fidelity an affair only of the flesh? No — that’s not what I meant to say. Not at all. It’s very very complicated. It’s absurd, this fetish of fidelity. Absurd and chimerical. It leads to the worst hypocrisy in the world. It involves a lie about the nature of the world, of God, of the human being; a misconception or falsification of the mind and psyche. Ah, psyche from the regions which. I am not faithful — and I am faithful. My feeling for Eunice will never change. Nor my feeling for Helen. Nor my feeling for you. Nor my feeling for Fleshpot Faubion. Why should it be considered an unfaithfulness, a betrayal, to love more than one woman or more than one man? Nothing sillier could be conceived. It’s preposterous. We love constantly, love everywhere. We love in all sorts of degrees and ways. Can any one person or thing or place or belief possess one’s soul utterly? Impossible. It is true that when we “fall in love,” experiencing that intense burning up of the entire being which now and then some unforeseen explosion of the unconscious brings to us, our one desire is to possess and be possessed by the one object. But this is largely, or to some extent, an illusion — it’s an illusion, I mean, to suppose that this will completely satisfy. An illusion, Cynthia! Even had I been destined — had we been destined — had I succeeded — had I not too horribly blundered — had I not lost every brief and paralyzing opportunity and at every such turn shown myself to be a fool and a coward — even so, even had I possessed you as madly as in imagination I have possessed you — you would not wholly have absorbed me. No. There would have been tracts of my soul which would never have owned your sovereignty — Saharas and Gobis of rebellious waste; swarming Yucatans from whose poisonous rank depths derision would be screamed at you and fragrances poured at you in a profusion of insult, flagrant and drunken; Arctics of inenarrable ice; and the sea everywhere, the unvintagable sea, many-laughing. Do you listen, Moonwhite? — I hate you and despise you, lizard! — I am walking in Kensington Gardens, Moonwhite, telling you of these things. The man wades into the Round Pond with a net to catch his toy steam yacht. Nursemaids pullulate. Would it shock you to know that I could love even a nursemaid? Is there anything strange or reprehensible in that? For that matter, I did, once, fall in love (mildly) with a lady’s maid. Her name? Mary Kimberlin. Age? Twenty-four. Where did we meet? In Hyde Park, where she was taking the Pom for a walk … Afterwards she married. I liked her, and I still like her … Did Helen Shafter interfere with my fondness for Eunice? Not in the slightest! — You felt guilty about it, William! You felt guilty, you were furtive, you concealed it, and you were in constant terror that you would be discovered. You never met her without experiencing a sense of wrongdoing, you never returned from a meeting with her to your Eunice without a sense of sin, a sadness, a burden of duplicity, that you found intolerable and crippling. Isn’t that true?… That is true, Cynthia. True. True. Oh, so frightfully true. And yet it ought not to be true … MISERY … I admit the sense of evil which permeates that sort of adventure, the sense of treason and infidelity; but I affirm again that it is a sin against the holy ghost to bring up humans in such a way that they will inevitably feel it. It’s hideously wrong! It’s criminal! It is not an infidelity for me to love Eunice and Helen at the same time! It is not!.. No man can serve both God and Mammon, William. — The distinction is utterly false! If I find something precious in Helen to adore, and at the same moment find something equally precious in Eunice to love, and if both of them love me — then what academic puritanism or pedantic pietistic folly can that be which would pronounce it wrong? NO! It is not wrong. It is only that we are taught to believe it so that makes it appear so. It is true that I was furtive, that I concealed from Eunice my knowledge of Helen — but why? Only because I wanted to spare Eunice, — who perhaps believed (though I never tried to make her do so) that she possessed me wholly, — the pain of disillusionment, the pain of jealousy. Good God, how much I would have preferred to be frank! I hated the necessity for concealment … It is only the necessity for concealment which introduces ugliness; the thing itself is no less, and often more, beautiful than the rest of daily life. Honi soit qui mal y pense … No, William! You are not being honest with me. You admit that as things are constituted, as society does view it, these furtive and clandestine love affairs are ugly. What defense have you, then, for deliberately seeking the ugly? I can see to the bottom of your soul, William, I know everything in your past, and knowing that, I see everything that will be in your future. All. I can see the way, whenever you go out into the streets, or ride in buses or trains, or go to a concert, — in fact everywhere and at all times — you look greedily about you for a pretty woman, you devour them with your eyes, you move closer to them in order to touch them as if accidentally, you lean backward to touch them, you luxuriate in every curve of mouth and throat and shoulder, you step back (as if politely) to permit them to get into the bus first in order that you may see their legs as far as the knee or even a little farther. You note, as you walk behind them in a crowd, the way their shoulders move as they walk, the curved forward thrust of the thigh, the slight subtle oscillation of the hips, the strength of the gait, and the sweet straightness and resilence of the leg-stroke as observed from behind. You gauge, through their clothes, the proportion of torso to legs, the breadth of waist. You never tire of speculation as to the precise position and dimensions of the breasts; watching a woman’s every slightest motion in the hope that by leaning this way or that, drawing closer her jacket against her body or relaxing it, she will betray to you the secrets of her body. Confess! Kiss the book and sign your name! You are indicted for erotomania!.. Pity me, Cynthia! I will confess everything if only you will believe that never, never, NEVER, was this my attitude toward you. I would have given everything to have been able to wipe out my entire past. My recollections of Eunice, and Helen, and Mary gave me nothing but pain — and all the countless minor episodes, of the sort you have been describing, constituted for me an inferno from which I seemed never destined to escape. Yes. Horrible. To come to the gateway in the rain of fire and looking through it to see the slopes of Purgatory; to guess, beyond, the Paradise; to see you as the gracious wisdom who might guide me thither; and then to know that LAW would not permit, and that in the Inferno must be my abode forever! — Do not think this is merely picturesque or eloquent, Cynthia. No. What I am approaching is a profound psychological truth. It is my own nature, my character as patiently wrought by my character, as the snail builds its house, from which I cannot move. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Do you remember what I wrote to you when you had gone to France? A silly letter, to be sure. Overeloquent, overliterary, sobbingly self-conscious. I told you that I had decided, finally, to go back to America. I had failed with you — to tell you that I adored you was out of the question. But my agile subconscious did the trick. “Do you think,” I said, referring to your description of poppies in Brittany, “that I don’t know a poppy when I see it!” Fatuous! Could anything have been in worse taste? Impossible. My double entendre, of course, is quite clear. The poppy is Europe, and also Cynthia. I was abandoning the poppy not because I failed to appreciate it, but because I recognized my own inferiority. It was my Sabachthani … Tin-tin-tin. Half past one. Good God. Try counting again, shutting my eyes more lightly, breathing through my nose. Hot in here. Ten — ten — double ten — forty-five and fifteen. Um-ber-ella — Cinder-rella—TWIST. What the devil could that have come from? A little girl bouncing a red ball as she said it. Lovely things little girls are — their extraordinary innocence, candor, transparency, charm. Grace. Something light and beautiful in women after all, in spite of their boringness and curious mental and emotional limitations. Toys. Nice to overhear them talking together and laughing in a garden. Nuns in a convent garden. Or singing. How beautiful they are when they sing! That girl, with scarlet-flushed cheeks, singing Morgen, waiting for the beautiful melody as given first by the piano to reach the downward curve, and then coming in so deeply and sorrowfully with the slow rich voice. O God, O God that strange mixture of the soaring melody, so perfect in its pure algebra, and the sad, persistent meditative voice — there were tears in her eyes when she finished, and she had to turn away. Then the piano melody, finishing delicately and ethereally by itself … O God, if I could only get that sort of effect in a play — not melodramatically, or with stained-glass windows and paper snow, but naturally and simply by that superb use of the counterpoint of feeling and thought … Extraordinary sorrow in that song. That queer feeling that comes over me when something moves me too much — a kind of ache that seems to begin in the upper part of the mouth and throat, and yet it isn’t an ache so much as an unhappy consciousness which seems to be localized there, and then to spread downward through the whole aching body, a slowly flowering sort of echo in a hollow darkness, opening out with painful tentacles … MISERY … Now the red rim of sight discovers … No … Where the red rim of life discovers … no, sight, is better, suggesting … Where the rid rim of sight discovers … The void that swarms with shapes of death … And the departing spirit hovers … Batlike above the failing breath … Is it good or is it bad … Impossible to say. Nonsense. One more of the “Where the … There the” type of lyric. Give it up NOW … Dante would come into the next verse … How lovely she was, standing there under the dim lamp, elbows behind her, laughing, saying, “I’m going to be married”!.. Lost. Lost forever. That afternoon at the concert, if I had only … It would have been so simple … Or walking back from those absurd dancers; over Waterloo Bridge … “You know, I simply adore you!” … But it was too soon — it really was too soon … It’s never too soon … But I thought it was too soon … Is it really gone? that opportunity? Good heavens how often I re-enact all those scenes — impossible to persuade myself that they can be finished! The after-sense is so vivid. I was always expecting to meet her in the street — in the most unlikely places. Always looked at everybody in the street, or bus, or theater, expecting to see her. I even thought she might be on the ship again, — when I sailed back to America! And on Fifth Avenue, or at Aeolian Hall, or in the Museum — constantly feeling that I was on the point of encountering her, and that she was just round the corner, or behind the Rodin. She would be sure to be standing before the Manet parrot!.. Why is it?… The frightfully vivid experience, with its appalling after-sense, destroys one’s reason, one’s belief in time and space. Over and over again putting myself into the middle of that concert — the Bach concerto — sitting there in the Wigmore Hall. It was that morning just before lunch, while I was taking off one suit and putting on the other (which reeked of petrol, just back from the tailor) that the maid said, “Two ladies to see you, sir …” “Will you show them up?” … Who could it be? Americans? I was going to tea with Cynthia that afternoon — therefore it couldn’t possibly be she … I hurried dressing … It was she, and that artist’s daughter … “What a lovely room!” she cried, “and how extraordinary to find it in this street!” … The concert suggested … Delighted, but frightened — the complications … this other girl tall, grave, rather lovely. Ought I to ask them to lunch? No. Perhaps that had been their idea? Good heavens — I wonder! Anyway, I didn’t … “Meet in the entrance at …” … then they were gone, and I discovered my awful hasty unkemptness — hair unbrushed, coat collar kinked up, buttons unbuttoned … and at the concert … smelling abominably of petrol, sitting beside divine Cynthia and listening to the pure rapture of that music! Cynthia so near me — her heart within eighteen inches of mine, her sleeve touching my sleeve — so that I could feel the rhythm of her breathing — her dress once or twice brushing my foot. O God o God o God o God o God … Squirming. Twisting and stretching my wrists. The crucified Christ by Perugino in that chapel in Florence — the wrists quivering, squirming like a spitted worm, worming like an earthworm on a hook, the worm that convulsively embraces the hook, the worm that squirms, the worm that turns … Kwannon, Goddess of mercy, serene and beneficent idol, Cathayan peace! Smile down upon me, reach thy golden hands to me with the golden fingers, touch my eyes that they may see not, touch my mind that it may remember not, touch my heart and make it holy. Take away from me my gross and mischievous and ailing body, let me lie down before thee and sleep forever. Let all be forgiven me, who forgive all; let all love me, and have compassion for me, who love all; let all sorrow cease when my sorrow ceases, suffering with my suffering, and life with my life.… One three five seven nine eleven thirteen fifteen seventeen nineteen twenty-one twenty-three twenty-five twenty-seven 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 47 49 51 53 55 57. One five nine thirteen seventeen twenty-one twenty-five. Too complicated — keeps me awake. Child Roland to the dark tower came. The dead sheep lying under the birch tree, in the wood, which the dead leaves swept away in a neat circle by the last struggle. The dead horse in the cellar of the burned stable. The cat with one red eye, blood-filled. The old woman lying against the wall, staring, indifferent, breathing slowly, while blood ran slowly from the corner of her mouth. Dying in the street, strangers walking around her in a ring, and she as inattentive as a dying animal. Her pocketbook, muddy, beside her on the sidewalk. B said afterward he had heard her “scream like a siren” when the accident occurred … Dying, Egypt, dying … Crowds walking past while she dies, cars and buses honking, taxis ticking, horses clop-clopping, children running and yelling, “Susie — wait for ME!” the policeman’s whistle blowing, the church clock striking, the newsboys running with the EXTRY EXTREE and sliding with nailed boots on the asphalt, ferries hooting on the river, “she’s dying, poor Thinggggg,” “Dyinggggg.” “Susie wait for meeeee.” Suuuw-oo-or-nhoreeeeeee … Pax. Pox vobiscum. Dead. One hundred and thirty-two pounds. Five feet four and three-quarters. Torn flannel showing. The blood had run clear across the sidewalk in four separate rivulets … When the red rim of sight discovers … The void that swarms with shapes of death … and the departing batsoul hovers … Above the fountain’s falling breath … Rotten. But there is, off in the void there, an idea, a sort of ghostly fountain, tossing up and dying down again … Green light … What goes on in the brain just before and just after death? Possible that the brain may live for a time. We may go on thinking, remembering, in a confused sort of way — a jumble of sensations. Or rarefied — a tiny gnat song of consciousness … Dr. Kiernan stated that when called in at 7.13 there was still a spark of life … she looked alive but extraordinarily still. Eyes shut. Mouth wide open, fixed in the act of screaming, but silent. TERROR! … Perhaps she knew I was there, looking at her, and then walking softly, quickly, away … Strange, if that were true — but no stranger than anything else. “Yes, William, I am dead. But I know you are there. Do you want to know if an accident has occurred? Yes. A dreadful accident has occurred. I am quite all right, now. Run and wake Nanny. Shut the door into the nursery. Wind the clocks on Sunday morning. And say good-by to this house and world forever …” MISERY … My bonnie has too-bur-kulosis … My bonnie has only one lung … My bonnie has too-bur-culosis … HOK HOIK!.. My bonnie will surely die young … Be-ring ba-a-ack. Be-ring ba-a-ack. Oh, bring back my bonnie to me … I remembered how for a long time afterwards I couldn’t hear a door squeak on its hinges without hearing her scream. TERROR! I remember her face vividly. Very like mine, same forehead, same mouth. My bonnie lies over the ocean — she used to sing it to me, and what was that other one? that she said used to be sung in the Civil War … Shine I shine I shine — shine like the evening star … Shoo fly, don’t bother me … Shoo fly, don’t bother me … for I belong to Company G … I remember her singing and laughing and singing again: If you don’t wear a collar and a tie … then you won’t go to heaven when you die … If you don’t wear ruffles on your drawers … then you won’t go to heaven when you die… Negro spirituals. It was Krehbiel, wasn’t it, that wrote that book? Let mah — pee-pul — go … And those stories the Negro nurses used to tell us in the mornings while they dressed us. The crane with the cork. What a story to tell children. It was Brer Rabbit who pulled out the cork. At the party, it was — and it created a scandal … Like Smith’s story of the Starcroft Inn. Heavens, how superb — the real Chaucerian flavor. Pop-eyed Popper Smith watching eagerly from the door, with all the other men, while all the women fled from the ball room … She lying on her back there, laughing hysterically, drunk, with her skirt up, fallen down and unable to stand, screeching with laughter, and the jazz orchestra of niggers going suddenly cuckoo with excitement — drums banged, trombones yelling, saxophones bubbling the Himmelfahrt, the niggers themselves screaming and sobbing … Goodness gracious gawdness Agnes. Agnes Day equals Agnus Dei … “No-no! — too many ladies here,” said Smith. Yes, there it is — that whole side of a man’s life that must be concealed. So many things we conceal even from other men … We all have our little p-p-p-p-peculiarities which we don’t mention; and which nevertheless are of great importance to us. Canyon yodling. Pearl diving. Muff barking. Palpation. The dance of the seven unveils. Arrangements of mirrors. That girl at the casino, when I was with Julian — there was a scuffle in the row ahead of us and the young man was taken out. “I didn’t mind when he give me the leg, but when he give me the”—I wonder if he was arrested or what.… That time visiting with Julian for the weekend — at Plymouth it was — the young school-marm who was taking her Easter holiday alone at that little deserted hotel. She sat with her knees, oh, so carelessly crossed — black silk stockings. The misty wisty wistful yearning expression in Julian’s eyes — he sat on the table edge and talked to her in a peculiar soft way, gentle, gently laughing, gently suggestive, gently agreeing and gently echoing: turtledoves, Cooo — coooo. A problem: both of us attracted to her, but neither of us admitted it or wanted to say to the other—“You go on to Plymouth — I’ll stay here …” At breakfast in the morning I tried to touch her knee with mine under the table. But I wasn’t bold enough. More wistful conversation, and then we motored away, both of us sulky for the rest of the day … Wonderful charm such incomplete adventures have … They take on gradually a special beauty … Abbozzi … Life is full of them … Familiarity breeds contempt. Sometimes they are too painful, though. C. I. E., on the train, for example. How frightfully unhappy that made me, and still, when I think about it, makes me … I got into the train and she was sitting opposite me, with her dress-suitcase on the seat beside her … C.I.E. were the initials on it — a fiber suitcase. In the rack above her was a violin. Small, she was, in a soft gray coat; with a mauve or lilac-colored hat — I could see white stitches in it. An artificial flower on her coat lapel. I couldn’t decide at first whether I thought she was pretty or not — but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was reading Tilly of Bloomsbury—I watched her blue eyes, small and of a sweet roundness, traveling along the lines. Now and then she smiled. Her mouth — it seemed to me extraordinary. I can’t visualize it, but I thought it like a Michelangelo mouth — great richness and subtlety of modeling, voluptuous and yet suggestive of strength and curtness; the color rather peculiar, a pale coral. Freckled a little, with dark golden hair showing in circular plaits over her ears. Her eyebrows darker than her hair, and richly curved, softly curved, over shy eyes … She occasionally looked up obliquely at the woman who sat beside me — or looked at the woman’s gay-striped stockings when she put her feet on the edge of the seat opposite. She avoided my eyes — if she found me looking at her, she slid her eyes rapidly across me and looked out at the fields, and the bare trees which had been etherealized by a beautiful frost, trees like white smoke. It was cold. The other window open. Had to keep my gloves on. Shy about taking off my gloves to unbutton my gray coat and fish out my handkerchief: she covertly watched me. Then I thought of that theater program in my pocket — so I read it to impress her with our similarity in tastes. Sorry I hadn’t bought The Nation instead of John o’ London. The cold wind whistling about our feet; she crossed her knees, and then drew them up under her, just touching the floor with the tip of the Cordova slipper, a slipper somewhat worn, but nice. Woolen gloves. Once — halfway, after an hour — she looked at me — O God, what a look. Perplexed, shy, injured, reproachful. “You shouldn’t stare at me like that; I am a nice girl, intelligent and refined, sensitive. Nevertheless I perceive that we have something in common.” Then she turned two pages at once. She read more rapidly, she skipped. A station. Another station. Only an hour more. Clippity clop te clap te clip te clap te cluckle, te WHEEEEEE. Tunnel! Shall I rise and shut the other window? No: too shy. It might lead to a harmless and friendly beginning to talk? No. In the dark (the dusty lamp burning dimly on the ceiling) perhaps our feet would encounter? No. I uncrossed my knees and crossed them the other way, away from the door and pointing toward her. No … After she looked at me like that, in that desolated way, I turned to the window, sorrowfully, apologetically, suffering, frowning. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t offend you for worlds. I too am gentle and refined … Then, just that once, her foot slid scraping sharply forward and touched mine. Should I look at her and appear conscious? No. Pay no attention. Out of the corner of my eye observing, I saw that she showed no sign of confusion or self-consciousness. She had withdrawn her foot instantly … We were approaching London. She put Tilly of Bloomsbury into the suitcase — it was neatly packed, full, covered with a transparent silk. No secrets disclosed. Would she get out at London Bridge? No — but the two old women did. Now! What would happen? Her toe had touched twice, oh so faintly, the cuff of my trouser-leg. Intentional? Probably not. Dare!.. I dared — I slid the right foot forward, resting a little more palpably in contact. Not enough — it might appear accidental. Dare again! I dared again, as the train started from Waterloo, with only five minutes to go. My right ankle rested firmly and ecstatically against the side of the Cordova slipper. I looked at her — devoured her — stared — but she kept her eyes averted, her face suffused with — what? Unhappiness. Speak to her! But I was shy, hungry, weak, cold, psychically out of joint. I had been desiring her too long and too intensely, and though the words went round and round in my head — Will you lunch with me? — I couldn’t speak them. The Thames covered with mist. We were sliding into the station, ankle and toe still praying to each other. Dare! The last chance! Dare! Say “May I help you with your bags?” Hurry! A porter was at the door, with his red tie. I stood up, trembling, to take my bag from the rack. I looked at her beseechingly, still hoping for a miracle; but as I turned she leaned toward the opening door and said in a low harassed voice, her dry lips barely moving, “Porter!” … I got out and walked along the platform, walking slowly, so that she might overtake me. How exquisite, small, graceful she was! The neat, precise, energetic and charmingly girlish gait! She did not turn toward me — her small chin was lowered humbly into the bright batik scarf. Gone. She was gone forever. We were divorced, after a marriage — how divinely happy — of two hours … MISERY … Why hadn’t I said, “Will you have lunch with me?” Why hadn’t I said, “Need we separate like this?” Why hadn’t I said, “Do you like Tilly?” Or do you play? I’m passionately fond of music myself. Do you know Morgen? by Strauss? or Wiegenlied? Do you go to the Queen’s Hall? Wigmore Hall? Have you heard Coates conduct? Glorious, isn’t he? Shall we lunch at Gatti’s — or the Café Royal?… Those side tables at Gatti’s, with red plush sofas. The table legs so close together that if two people sit on the sofa their knees must be contiguous. The music at the far end. That’s where Mary and I went for supper when we came back from Banstead … It would have been so simple to say, “Won’t you lunch with me? I should so much like it if you would!” We were so clearly “made” for each other. And especially now that Cynthia — it might have prevented that. Lost; gone into the jungle of London. I advertised three times in The Times Personal Column — there was no answer. I thought of employing a detective to try and trace her. Yes, I three times proposed in The Times that she should meet me at the platform gate, and each time waited for half an hour, wondering what we would say when we met … Where are you, C. I. E.? Are you in London? Am I destined someday to see you playing in a hotel orchestra, or in a cinema, playing with the spotlight on you, lighting your shyly downturned small and lovely face?… By that time you will have forgotten me. And as for me — Cynthia has intervened. I am on a ship in the Atlantic, passing the Grand Banks, with Cynthia. I am in love with Cynthia, miserably and humiliatingly in love. More intensely than I was with you? Who can say? Heaven knows I loved you with a blind intensity that made me unhappy for weeks after. But then, how much was my misery due to my feeling of having been so horribly and unforgivably inadequate? Inferiority complex … And so absurd, that I, who on a score of other occasions had … “picked up” … women here and there in two continents … should have sat in silence and allowed you to go out of my life — in spite of your so clearly and so desperately signaling to me. O God that with divine rightness … inestimable lightness … O God that with celestial brightness … merciful and benign Kuan Yin … O lamas riding on llamas and bearded ascetic Arhats hunched meditative on tigers. O Solomon, O Song of Songs and Singer of singers … I will never forgive myself, nor will she ever forgive me … She will say, over and over, “I met a man once, on a train from Folkestone” … C.I.E. The name — good Lord — might have been Cynthia … Do you hear me, Cynthia?… Hear you, tadpole … Forgive me! Absolve me! Let me bury my infant’s face against you and weep! Like Father Smith, I am looking, looking everywhere, for my mother. Is it you, perhaps? I have thought often that it might be you. You remind me of her. Let me be your child, Cynthia! Take me to Kensington Gardens with you in the morning — carry my golliwog in your left hand, and let me clasp your right. Past the tea gardens. To the banks of the Serpentine, or the Ornamental Water … Who is it that has that theory of compulsory repetition. Freud, is it?… Orpheus.… Sequacious of the liar … I shall go mad someday. Yes. Etna will open, flaming and foisting, and I will be engulfed in my own volcano I can hear it, on still days, boiling and muttering. Mephitic vapors escape through cracks in rock. Red-hot lumps are flung up and fall back again — I have seen the livid light of them in my eyes. — And do you know, Cynthia, what form my dementia will take?… No — tell me, absurd one, poser!.. I will weep. I will do nothing but weep. That is what I have always wanted to do — to weep. The sorrow of the world. I will sit and weep, day after day, remembering nothing save that the world was created in pain. The syphilitic family in the cobbled mud of Portobello Road. Goya. The lost kitten. The crying child. The dog whose nose had been hurt, bleeding. The old woman dying in the street, far, far from home. Lions weeping in cages and dead men roaring in graves. Our father that weepest in heaven; and angels with whimpering wings. Smith, walking among the stars looking for his wife-mother. The Disciples waiting in vain for the miracle to happen. My father, which art in earth. Billy, who was tied to the bedpost and beaten across his naked back with eight thicknesses of rubber tubing because his younger brother had told a lie about him. Μακάριοι οἱ πενθοῦντες ὅτι αὐτοὶ παρακληθήσονται The dead sheep under the beech tree by the pond. The numbed bee, crawling for the hundredth time up the windowpane, and falling. The poet, who discovers, aged thirty-five, that he cannot write. The woman who finds that her husband no longer loves her. The child who is mocked at school for her stupidity. I will expiate the sin and sorrow of the world for you, my brothers. You will be happy. I will give up all my selfish ambitions and desires in order that I may help you. I am worthless — I am nobody. Do not think of rewarding me. Anonymous, I will pass everywhere like a spirit, freeing the imprisoned and assuaging the afflicted. The bee I will catch in an empty matchbox and carry to Hymettus, releasing her amid a paradise of heather and wild thyme. I will untie Billy from the white iron bedpost and take him to see the circus. Elephants! Peanuts five a bag! Speedy the high diver with a gunny sack over his head! The boxing kangaroo!.. For the syphilitic family, an immediate cure, money, and a cottage in the country with a flower garden and a vegetable patch … For the old woman who died in the street, believing in God and a future life, the strangers walking around her in a ring will be cherubim and seraphim, with rainbow wings, and angelic eyes of love. The throne of God will be before her; and looking up she will see seated there — with Mary star of the sea in a blue mantle at one side and Jesus in a fair robe of vermilion at the other — not Jehovah the terrible, but her own father, with his watch chain, his pipe, and his funny, flashing, spectacles! “Why, if this isn’t my little Blossom!” he will laugh … and she will cry for joy … I will find the lost kitten and bring it back to a house even more glorious than that it remembers. Saucers will gleam before every ruddy fireplace: there will be fish tails; and there will be cream. Children will dart to and fro, pulling after them deliciously enticing strings. Immortal mice of a divine odor will play puss-in-the-corner, melodiously squeaking and scurrying. Moths undying will dance with her at dusk in the corners, and unhurt, sleep all night in the cups of lilies … Smith, star-wandering, cigar in hand, will find his mother. For the fly with torn wings, I will make new wings of an even more Daedalian beauty. The clairvoyant I will deliver from his torment of vatic dreams; and Goya, touched by my hands, will at last close his eyes … The crying child will find his adored blue shawl … Hay-Lawrence will recover the sight of his left eye, and his wife will no longer sit alone by the fire reading letters three weeks old … From the whole earth, as it rolls darkly through space around the sun, will come a sound of singing … MISERY … And in order to accomplish this, Cynthia, — how can I accomplish all this, you ask? Very simple. I will permit myself to be crucified. My SELF. I will destroy my individuality. Like the destruction of the atom, this will carry in its train the explosion of all other selves. I will show them the way. The Messiah. They will pursue me, mocking and jeering. They will crowd closer about me, stoning. And at this moment I will destroy my SELF out of love for all life — my personality will cease. I will become nothing but a consciousness of love, a consciousness without memory or foresight, without necessity or body, and without thought. I will show mankind the path by which they may return to God; and I will show God the path by which he may return to peace … Are you listening, Huntress?… Listening, madman!.. Not mad, not mad — it is only the well-known doctrine of sublimation. Suicide of the unconscious. Nothing of it but doth change into something rich and strange. Recommended by all the best metaphysicians. Miss E. Z. Mark, of No. 8,765,432 Telepathy Alley, Chocorua, N.H., writes: “I suffered continually from ambitiousness, appetite, and reckless energy, until I tried sublimation … Now I do nothing but beam at the universe” … Used and praised by millions … Sublimation rules the nation … One three five seven nine eleven thirteen fifteen seventeen … Is it my heart or is it the engine? Te thrum: te thrum. Seems to me it’s a little rougher. Creaking. Cynthia is asleep in the first cabin. I wonder what position she lies in and how she does her hair. Pigtails — one or two? Not pigtails? Clothes carefully arranged on a wicker chair. Pink-white-elastic. Mrs. Battiloro’s middle-aged nightgowned body gently snoring and gulping. A crescendo, and then a strangling gasp, and the head turned, and silence, and the crescendo all over again. A Puritan. What is love to a Puritan? What does he make of the pleasures of the flesh? Shuts his eyes. A painful duty. Did you remember to wind the clock?… Oh, dear, I forgot to order the flour … The immaculate conception … Sublimation again … Te thrum te thrum. In my left ear my heart. Smoking too much. Sua pipetta inseparabile. Pressure on the eye makes a tree, one-sided, dark tamarack with downward claws, purpurate and murex. Tamurex. Tamarix. What was I thinking about, or was it a series of images simply, or a fragment of dream. Claws hanging from a tree. Claws paws clods pods. The purple locust claw. A green bright cataract of leaves. Tamaract! And a red fish leaps out and up! Gone. What a lovely thing. Now where did that come from I wonder. Ah Psyche from the regions whish. My little trout. Tree-trout, that swims and sings. Swings. Up from my cabin, my nightgown scarfed about me … fingered her placket. Coward Shakespeare. Her scarf blew away along the deck and I ran after it. The squall blew her skirt up as she went down the ladder. They laughed. In my left ear my heart te thrum te thrum. The Sea. Sea. Sea. Sea.