She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow.... Fingers, cold and calm and moving.... A touch, a touch.

Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please, mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world!....... Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!

Great bows of her slim silver shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl.

The lady goes aspace, aspace, aspace.....Pure air on the upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance. Bellumo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand..... Pure air and silence on the upland road: and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler!

The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked lemons, jeweled cherries, shameful peaches with torn leaves. The carriage passes through the lane of canvas stalls, its wheel spokes spinning in the glare. Make way! Her father and his son sit in the carriage. They have owls’ eyes and owls’ wisdom. Owlish wisdom stares from their eyes brooding upon the lore of their Summa contra Gentiles.

She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore Albini, the critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he did not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they are quite sure which country it is.

She listens: virgin most prudent.

A skirt caught by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking. Si pol?

I play lightly, softly singing, John Dowland’s languid song. Loth to depart: I too am loth to go. That age is here and now. Here, opening from the darkness of desire, are eyes that dim the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of the scum that mantles the cesspool of the court of slobbering James. Here are wines all ambered, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths, the pow-fouled wenches and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clip and clip again.

In the raw veiled spring morning faint odours float of morning Paris: aniseed, damp sawdust, hot dough of bread: and as I cross the Pont Saint Michel the steel-blue waking waters chill my heart. They creep and lap about the island whereon men have lived since the stone age . . . . .