A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (26 page)

The stones without set up a moderate uproar under someone’s feet. Valentine wrung his hands mechanically.

“So you are leaving Oxford?” Hamilton asked with guarded perspicuity.

“Of course,” he laughed sourly. “To Paris. To sit in a room like a bullpen, a room with an immense chandelier with claws precisely over my head, my aching hollow head, adding columns and licking stamps. For thirty- five francs a day, till night. To eat bread that is not gummy, to breathe scented air, to be a little drunk, to make love, flatly, comparatively, as a man compiling facts. A minor spoiled Joyce.”

“I have read it, I have endured, I have held on, like a cowboy with his teeth in a bull’s nose,” Hamilton boasted, trying again to arrest the intolerable monologue.

“Marion Alpha and Omega, Marion the Blessed Damozel?” the Irishman murmured, as the woman was paid, and, feeling like a troop of men, they marched into the black street. In the darkness, a jagged leafage divided by roofs and light, they heard in that acute voice, the voice of a saint in pain, a theory of
Ulysses:
Stephen the first theme, treble and terrible, throat of a fallen angel, blackened with old beauty, old theory; Bloom the second theme, loathsome and kind, “the man in the street”; the first, tragic by excessive awareness of the other’s evil, the second, tragic by unconsciousness of his own; developed and intricately combined, as a sonata, in the fantasy of lusts and the chapter like the catechism; closed by the chorale of Marion, who was before and will be after, leveling the heartbreaking contrast. “The revenge of two phases of man upon each other,” MacNeill muttered, beating the payment with his stick.

Neither could listen to him any longer; but Hamilton, having detected his friend’s misery, rested one hand on his shoulder, exactly and insubstantially, as if in bewilderment of his own misery, overlooked or unknown to others.

The thought rose and began to stir violently in Valentine’s mind: this was the hand of a prince “and whoever shall threaten the freedom or mar the peace or cripple the habits of such a one, inheritor of all kinds of pride and primitive grace and uncompromised power, is despicable and corrupt.” Therefore his sleep was heavy and impure, holding him down; the thought changed to “whoever shall do or say something horrible heard in the chattering, almost speech, of an animal, which in unutterable agony could not be understood, shall be whipped by an enraged priest or father, with a drop of spittle in each corner of his mouth.” So he would hold his tongue.

The friends met at breakfast, Arthur’s face like a plaster cast of itself. “Great heavens, boy, you do look as if you’d taken vows.” Leonard grinned gently as they sat down to the leather-colored tea, the rolls they called “bricks without straw.” “That Irishman of ours … He’s fanatical, fanatically intelligent. And the worst of it is, there’s a pitiful look about him, which says he can’t help it, and begs you not to avoid him.”

“I say the worst is, that he’s not a fool,” Arthur complained. They went bicycling.

No traces of the stained spring, the mouldy and pitiful mass in which the swan had appeared. Roads of damp silver-grey gravel rose and fell on hills which drew themselves up with a lovely small nobility. The sky painted with watery blue; and between small plump clouds, yellow sunlight was let down as if in a net. Many larks, after their effortless elevation, hung above, apart but in tune, and seemed, by the sound, to bloom and shake out pollen.

England, England … “Lovely word,” Arthur murmured. Oceanic island; who can forget how it lies in the sea, lies deep in the sea, like an overfreighted boat, fragilely, eternally moored? In the sea and of the sea and almost under the sea: trees like giant swaying shrubs, boneless and dim; blossoms beneath, all circular, with toothed edges, candid and small, nearly of shell; never startled and never angular cattle, drifting over a dreamily-moulded meadow; hills echoing the waves in soil. Even men move with a peculiar smoothness as if, like fish, their lives depend not on effort but on harmony, an inherited harmony with what surrounds them.

The light wet and strong, a substance mobile and severe; and as they moved swiftly on their bicycles, the bodiless horses of taut wire, it seemed to part the distance and make it shift, branch on branch, as a current pushing through submarine plants.

Arthur was stirred by the meaning of the landscape, but the movement was too headlong and laborious. His course became more and more like a tunnel, polished walls of glassy air streaming by and the floor plunging toward and under him so that he thought of falling on his face, a tunnel with a trembling speck which was Hamilton constantly snatched out of his sight by turns and valleys. He began to peddle with his mind as well as his legs.

The road suddenly vertical on a hill with some feathery trees. Leonard stopped and waited; they walked to the top. But Arthur’s mind, inflamed by fatigue, had no rest. Through it, frantically, the aspects of the man beside him rushed, not to be held, acute and inexplicably acute. The few glittering hairs on his wrists; the neck a cylinder rising at right angles from the collar bones, a pair of hard leaves; the head at once conventional and disturbing, with weighty eyes and schooled hair; the burned pallor and deep red. To each image was attached a value or quality; loyalty, courage, patience, to the hands compassion. The total had been friendship, now a chaotic sickness; his friend lost in a heightening and division of sensibility.

The little winds prowled around the top of the rigid hill, toothed and dripping. There the road went down, a pallid rut in the underbrush. Off again; again buzzing in his ears, and the hopping hotly desired speck in his eyes. Unequivocally down.

A small animal, perhaps a rabbit, crossed the road in front of him. He couldn’t bear it: swerved, struck a rock, struck a tree; his weight got very far away, not over his feet; his position suddenly blew up, exploded.

Beyond this accident, he did not join actual experience immediately, without a seam; the day was cut open and a panel set in. In it he crouched down over a spring shaped like a pear, and tried to hold the cold prickly water with his hands, which made him very unhappy. While this went on he did not open his eyes, but they were open, and only big enough to hold Leonard’s face, near and apprehensive

Editor’s note: An experimental, surrealist story, written in 1923 at age 22.