Purposes of Love Read Online Free PDF

approaching dreams.
    “Life’s an uncertain medium, I suppose. The effects you arrange in it don’t always come off.” Her mind floated into absurdities; her body relaxed and grew warm.
    The door had opened. In hospital this could mean many things, all requiring wakefulness; and Vivian woke. She could just see a tall shape, fair hair, and the gleam of a man’s dressing-gown in some extravagant brocade. Colonna stood beside her bed, in the manner of one whose presence needs no explanation.
    “Hullo,” Vivian whispered.
    The bed creaked beside her.
    “Here I am, lovely thing. Did you think I wouldn’t come?”
    Vivian’s hand touched her hair that was silky and smelt sweet like a child’s. She stroked it, recalling, with infinite remoteness, the Sunday evening counsels of a careful house-mistress. Her emotions, it was true, were unstirred; but she was flattered as one is by the caresses of a fine and fastidious cat, say a Siamese. It seemed boorish to offer no saucer of milk. Vivian grieved at her own unprovidedness, burying her fingers deeper in the curls behind Colonna’s ears.
    What next? Call on the hills, presumably, to cover her. But in her dream-entangled mind the dancing faun was still sliding between rain-washed stars. “Do you know De La Mare’s Silver ?” she said. Her eye had been caught by the green glass bowl, and it seemed the only thing with real existence in the room.
    “No.” Colonna slid an arm round her waist, bringing with it a faint scent of fern. “How does it go?”
    Vivian said it, sleep and the sound together making her voice streamlike and slow.
    Colonna’s arm slackened almost at once. Before the poem was over she was looking up at the window, her hand behind her head. When it was finished she said, lazily, “I wonder why I thought I wanted to make love to you. I don’t, at least not physically. There’s something rare about you. I don’t know what I want.”
    Vivian did not feel relieved, because she was transported already into the world she had evoked. Reinforced by Colonna’s belief she felt as rare as mist, and would not have been astonished to find herself levitated an inch or two above the bed.
    The night had grown windy, and the stars seemed to be cruising at speed between lazily drifting wreaths of cloud. They lay side by side and watched; the rhythm was hypnotic and lovely, spinning round them a thickening web of silence. Colonna’s drowsy weight and faint fragrance were companionable and undemanding. When, later, she stretched and kissed Vivian and went away, Vivian realised that they had both been sleeping and that the cocks were beginning to crow.
    In a moment of lazy thought as she curled up to sleep again, Vivian reflected how half-baked a virtue was inflexible consistency, a kind of small-town shrewdness of the hick perpetually nervous of letting himself be taken in. In every civilised personality there ought to be a green-room and a looking-glass at which to remove make-up and change it for the next act. She was on a large stage, dressed as Hamlet, explaining this to Horatio in very subtle blank verse. Horatio was Mic. He responded with a long speech of the eloquence of dreams, so moving that her throat ached and she slept without stirring till the morning.

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    M ATRON ANNOUNCED THE NUMBER of the hymn.
    It was a wet morning. In sunshine, the Victorian glass of the chapel windows had a tawdry but cheerful glitter, like that of a kaleidoscope; against a dull sky they looked heavy and slimy, like grocers’ oleographs.
    The nurses sat in tight rows, arranged in strict order of seniority. Their shoulders were dragged back by the straps of their aprons, their heads were kept stiffly upright by the effort of balancing their high starched caps. Sisters, sitting at the back, found chapel-time very convenient for reviewing these caps, and noting aberrations for future criticism.
    The chapel was of the Pusey-Newman period, and had not a square foot of plain surface