Goose of Hermogenes Read Online Free PDF

an object lying in the centre of the pebbled way. It was a quarto volume, large but slim; and I am certain that it had not lain there on my outward path. I hastened towards a gap in the trees and waited impatiently for a lingering veil of cirrus to bare the moon. The succeeding misty glimmer did not last more than a few minutes, and was only just strong enough to show me what I had found; but I could see that the book was bound in parchment, somewhat browned with age, and fastened with ribbons of a jaded rose-colour. There was no title on the outside, but when I opened it and turned a few leaves, I found that it was called Corolla’s Pinions, and that it was not printed, but written out most carefully in a copperplate hand. The unknown scribe must have used, I should think, a crow-quill dipped in sepia. The frontispiece was set out as a complete work, but I recognised it as a detail engraved from a painting, and traced this original to the grotesquely-beautiful Garden of Delight of Hieronymus Bosch. It consisted of that portion which represents a juicy stem balanced above a pool, and budding from its elaborate calyx, as of some bizarre growth, a globe of glass – scrying-crystal, medusan nacre, lunar milk-orb, prismatic bubble-film, who knows what? – that contains within it a promise of the future as personified flower-organs, the lover-twins. The boy and girl recline side by side on a bank, for the first time essaying together the touches of love. Their naked thighs already meet in a caress, but their slender hands and unslaked lips still hesitate before the votive titillations. These couching figures, scarcely differentiated as to sex, are utterly absorbed in one another; and they do not look outward from the amniotic sac, delicately-veined as a petal, which encloses them, though its transparency enables others to watch their nascent pleasure, which even on completion, will never discard its innocence.
    I closed the book and hurried back to my room, where by the light of my candelabra, I glanced through a few paragraphs. I became rapidly engrossed, finding myself as completely identified with the heroine as though the story had been a record of my own past or future, and I now read every word.

‘... it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy;
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the white and yolk of the one shell.’
    – Yeats.
    Corolla’s Pinions
    On the occasion of the Duke’s twenty-first birthday a large house-party had gathered for the week-end at the Hall, and it was thought that from among those invited the young Duke would choose a bride.
    He was a delicate silverhaired boy who looked much younger than his years, for he had an ethereal face and the bones of a bird. He was an orphan; and his family in its wooded fortress of huge trees and oaken beams had been left, an inviolate island, by the Reformation untouched. He had been brought up by his Aunt Augusta, a large brown woman, now in the fifties, whose mouth would open to show formidable rows of yellow teeth. Everyone was nervous of her, including the family chaplain.
    She wished to remain the sole guide of her young nephew’s destiny, and, if the truth must be told, did not wish him to marry at all; but she recognised as clearly as anyone the importance of the line’s continuance. This acknowledgement which she owed to posterity, and pressure from other quarters, had proved too strong even for her; and so it came about that many of the Duke’s elderly collaterals had assembled round him, each with a protégée, to celebrate his coming-of-age, and to influence, if possible, his choice. The candidate whom Aunt Augusta looked on with least disfavour was a niece of hers, the Countess Astarte’s daughter, a massive red-haired girl a year or two older than the Duke.
    Corolla scarcely knew how it was that she came to be included in this rapacious gathering, since she had of herself no great position, and no one from among