Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

the loveliest little pale firm cameo of a birdface he ever clapped his blazing blue eyes on. By God but he often thought she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede.
    On the fringe of the village, empty, invested with dilapidation, squatted the big blue Hof, four-square about a court-yard of weeds. There he lived, in a high dark room smelling of damp coverlets, with a glass door opening on to the park. To get to his room he could enter the Hof from the last village street and walk across the court-yard, or better still make the circuit of the corridors, or again he could come at it deliberately from the other side, from the park. As far as he knew, as he could hear, he had the whole of this side, the park aspect, to himself. At night, to be sure, the rats, galavanting and cataracting behind the sweating wall-paper, just behind the wall-paper, slashing the close invisible plane with ghastlily muted slithers and somersaults. Coming back after kissing the Madonna goodnight under the arch of the school buildings, ten minutes’ walk through the park away, and arranging at what time they could see one another (see one another!) next morning, he thought of the rank dark room, quiet,
quieted,
when he would enter, then the first stir behind the paper, the first discreet slithers.
    He is in a great open place. On his right hand, his blind side, a tall palissade of trees; on his left, the lowvillage dwellings and the splayed embouchure of the last village street; behind, the Dunkelbrau sanctuary into which she has passed; ahead, the clump of bushes where he makes water and the narrow breach in the hedge. Past the breach he shall see, apex of the avenue in the long crouch of the Blockhof, the distant lit room. But his impression is that he had extinguished before ushering her out into the sharp October night! That is definitely his impression. Every night when he squeezes through the breach and is absorbed by the avenue, that is his impression. But now, before that happens, before he regains his boxful of obsidional insanity, he stands well out in the dark arena, his head cocked up uncomfortably at the starfield, like Mr Ruskin in the Sistine, looking for Vega.
    The night firmament is abstract density of music, symphony without end, illumination without end, yet emptier, more sparsely lit, than the most succinct constellations of genius. Now seen merely, a depthless lining of hemisphere, its crazy stippling of stars, it is the passional movements of the mind charted in light and darkness. The tense passional intelligence, when arithmetic abates, tunnels, skymole, surely and blindly (if we only thought so!) through the interstellar coalsacks of its firmament in genesis, it twists through the stars of its creation in a network of loci that shall never be co-ordinate. The inviolable criterion of poetry and music, the non-principle of their punctuation, is figured in the demented perforation of the night colander. The ecstatic mind, the mind achieving creation, take ours for example, rises to the shaftheads of its statement, its recondite relations of emergal, from a labour and a weariness of deep castings that brook no schema. The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in a scurrying and plunging towardsexitus, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface. That was the circular movement of the mind flowering up and up through darkness to an apex, dear to Dionysius the Areopagite, beside which all other modes, all the polite obliquities, are the clockwork of rond-decuirdom.
    Nothing whatever of the kind of course occupied his fetid head nor was there room in his gravid heart for such strange feeling as he shuffles uneasily in the deeps of the desert place, peeping up like a fool at his dear little sweet little Fiinkelein, green, bright and in the Lyre, on