LITMIR.BIZ

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work on it, chiselling it to this perfection of its maturity: better than I could have done it, or Michael Angelo, or Pheidias. And to what end? Not to stay perfect: no, for the chisel that brought it to this will bring it down again, to the degradation of a second childhood. And after that? What matter, after that? Unless indeed, the chisel gets tired of it.’ Looking suddenly in her eyes again: ‘As I am tired of it,’ he said.

      ‘Of life?’

      He laughed. ‘Good heavens, no! Tired of death.’

      They walked a turn or two. After a while, she spoke again. ‘I was thinking of Brachiano:

      On paine of death, let no man name death to me,

      It is a word infinitely terrible—’

      ‘I cannot remember,’ he said in a detached thoughtful simplicity, ‘ever to have been afraid of death. I can’t honestly remember, for that matter, being actually afraid of anything.’

      ‘That is true, I am very well certain. But in this you are singular, as in other things besides.’

      ‘Death, at any rate,’ he said, ‘is nothing: nil, an estate of not-being. Or else, new beginning. Whichever way, what is there to fear?’

      ‘Unless this, perhaps?—

      Save that to dye, I leave my love alone.’

      ‘The last bait on the Devil’s hook. I’ll not entertain it.’

      ‘Yet it should be the king of terrors.’

      ‘I’ll not entertain it,’ he said. ‘I admit, though,’ – they had stopped. She was standing a pace or two away from him, dark against the dawn-light on mountain and tide-way, questionable, maybe as the Sphinx is questionable. As with a faint perfume of dittany afloat in some English garden at evening, the air about her seemed to shudder into images of heat and darkness: up-curved delicate tendrils exhaling an elusive sweetness: milk-smooth petals that disclosed and enfolded a secret heart of night, pantherine, furred in mystery. – ‘I admit this: suppose I could entertain it, that might terrify me.’

      ‘How can we know?’ she said. ‘What firm assurance have we against that everlasting loneliness?’

      ‘I will enter into no guesses as to how you may know. For my own part, my assurance rests on direct knowledge of the senses: eye, ear, nostrils, tongue, hand, the ultimate carnal knowing.’

      ‘As it should rightly be always, I suppose; seeing that, with lovers, the senses are the organs of the spirit. And yet – I am a woman. There is no part in me, no breath, gait, turn, or motion, but flatters your eye with beauty. With my voice, with the mere rustle of my skirt, I can wake you wild musics potent in your mind and blood. I am sweet to smell, sweet to taste. Between my breasts you have in imagination voyaged to Kythera, or even to that herdsman’s hut upon many-fountained Ida where Anchises, by will and ordainment of the Gods, lay (as Homer says) with an immortal Goddess: a mortal, not clearly knowing. But under my skin, what am I? A memento mori too horrible for the slab in a butcher’s shop; or the floor of a slaughter-house; a clockwork of muscle; and sinew, vein and nerve and membrane, shining – blue, grey, scarlet – to all colours of corruption; a sack of offals, to make you stop your nose at it. And underneath (when you have purged away these loathsomeness of the flesh) – the scrannel piteous residue: the stripped bone, grinning, hairless, and sexless, which even the digestions of worms and devouring fire rebel against: the dumb argument that puts to silence all were’s, maybe’s, and might-have-beens.’

      His face, listening, was that of a man who holds a wolf by the ears; but motionless: the poise of his head Olympian, a head of Zeus carved in stone. ‘What name did you give when you announced yourself to my servants yesterday evening?’

      ‘Indeed,’ she answered, ‘I have given so many. Can you remember what name they used to you, announcing my arrival?’

      ‘The Señorita del Rio Amargo.’

      ‘Yes. I remember now. It was that.’

      ‘“Of the Bitter River.” As though you had known my decisions in advance. Perhaps you did?’

      ‘How could I?’

      ‘It is my belief,’ he said, ‘that you know more than I know. I think you know too, in advance, my answer to this discourse with which you were just now exploring me as a surgeon explores a wound.’

      She shook her head. ‘If I knew your answer before you gave it, that would make it not your answer but mine.’

      ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you shall be answered. I have lived upon this earth far into the third generation. Through a long life, you have been my book (poison one way, pleasure another), reading in which I have learnt all I know: and this principally, to distinguish in this world’s welter the abiding from the fading, real things from phantoms.’

      ‘Real things or phantoms? And you can credit seeing, hearing, handling, to resolve you which is which?’

      ‘So the spirit be on its throne, I can; and answer you so out of your own mouth, madonna. But I grant you, that twirk in the corner of your lips casts all in doubt again and shatters to confusion all answers. I have named you, last night, Goddess, Paphian Aphrodite. Was that a figure of speech? a cheap poetaster’s compliment to his mistress in bed? or was it plain daylight, as I discern it? Come, what do you think? Did I ever call you that before?’

      ‘Never in so many words,’ she said, very low. ‘But I sometimes scented in you, great man of action you are in the world’s eyes, a strange capacity to incredibilities.’

      ‘Let me remind you, then, of facts you seem to affect have forgotten. You came to me – once in my youth, once in my middle age – in Verona. In the interval, I lived with you, in our own house of Nether Wastdale, lifted up and down the world, fifteen years, flesh of my heart, heart of my heart. To end that, I saw you dead in the Morgue at Paris: a sight beside which your dissecting-table villainy a few minutes since is innocent nursery prattle. That was fifty years ago, next October. And now you are come again, but in your black dress, as in Verona. For the good-bye.’ She averted her face, not to be seen. ‘This is wild unsizeable talk. Fifty years!’

      ‘Whether it be good sense or madhouse talk I am likely to know,’ he said, ‘before tomorrow night; or, in the alternative, to know nothing and to be nothing. If that be the alternative, so be it. But I hold it an alternative little worthy to be believed.’

      They were walking again, and came to a bench of stone. ‘O, you have your dresses,’ he said, taking his seat beside her. His voice had the notes the deeps and the power of a man’s in the acme of his days. ‘You have your dresses: Red Queen, Queen of Hearts, rosa mundi; here and now, Black Queen of the sweet deep-curled lily-flower, and winged wind-rushing darknesses of hearts’ desires. I envy both. Being myself, to my great inconvenience, two men in a single skin instead of (as should be) one in two. Call them rather two Devils in a bag, when they pull against one another or bite one other. Nor can I ever even incline to take sides with either, without I begin to wish t’other may win.’

      ‘The fighter and the dreamer,’ she said: ‘the doer, the enjoyer.’ Then, with new under-songs of an appassionate tenderness in her voice: ‘What gift would you have me give you, O my friend, were I in sober truth what you named me? What heaven or Elysium, what persons and shapes, would we choose to live in, beyond the hateful River?’

      His gaze rested on her a minute in silence, as if to take a fresh draft of her: the beauty that pierced her dress as the lantern-light the doors of a lantern: the parting of her hair, not crimped but drawn in its native habit of soft lazy waves, as of some unlighted sea, graciously back on either side over the tips of her ears: the windy light in her eyes. ‘This is the old story over again,’ he said. ‘There is but one condition for all the infinity of possible heavens: that you should give me yourself, and a world that is wholly of itself a dress of yours.’

      ‘This world again, then, that we live in? Is that not mine?’

      ‘In some ways it

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