Gulls crawl into my arms but I’m not alive. It’s rather odd suddenly being dead, being out of it and the others alive, somewhere, no, dead somewhere and I alone alive. Loneliness of Eve in paradise. That is my loneliness. Gulls crawl into my arms for I am too happy to cry but if I could cry it seems to me I would be happier. I don’t care about anything, about anybody. This place seems to have been made for me but what is wrong? Paradise won too soon, beauty in its perfection come too soon. I hate myself for not caring any more about the lilies that grow with each minute across the length and breadth of France. Each minute that the clock ticks, each minute that my heart beats, some boy is flinging away a flower, a white flower, one alone on top of a hill, one alone in a ditch, but one can’t go on remembering these things. I forgot them long ago and I for-got them for if I had gone on thinking, remembering (Americans don’t care, don’t understand) I should have gone mad simply. I felt it coming up, rising up against my skull. I felt a lily-bud push up against my skull, it wasn’t imagination, it was reality, (like the bracelet that day, going to Milly Lechstein’s) something I saw, not something I imagined, vision not dreams. In a vision, I saw myself grow up against my self and knew in a few days the white lily bud would strike the top of my head which is my brain, which is my skull. Then, if the lily-bud had struck the top of my head (the metal layer that was my brain) it would have withered simply. My soul would have withered as simply as a lily itself (any French lily) seared by a cannon flare. Lilies that fall and lie fallen, the lily of me grew up and up and up because I let the head go, the right and wrong of the head and Darrington helped me, Darrington said do wrong for to do wrong is to do right. What is right? What is wrong? Wrong is plodding through days and dying in London, dying in London. Right is saving myself, my life, for what? I am lonely in this paradise. Look at me bird, you hate me. I found you, I got you. I don’t care how your parents screech and wheel above me, you are old enough to leave your nest and you fill a hollow of my arms. There is some hollow of my arms you fill. You fill it completely. I know I have stolen you, ruined your happiness, but why shouldn’t I? I am priestess, infallible, inviolate. I am chosen. No Penelope. Cassandra? Madness rings me. I see in rings, in circles, light is advancing in a spiral. Light struck from the wall. Gulls. Crabs in sea pools. The wild orchids ring rocks. Make sacrifice. The white bull that lowers after me seeks to slay me. The fox crawls out of his hole to watch me. We are alone. Phoenician, left over, this coast has reality but the rest is hollow nothingness. I am sorry that I can’t any more believe in the reality of war-fare. Jerrold.
“Jerrold, I must tell you at once. Let me know how you feel about it. .” But before she could hear from Jerrold there was some oracle to be placated. She would find what the oracle said and she would follow the oracle whatever Jerrold said. She would ask Jerrold first, tell Vane afterwards, consult the oracle in between times but whatever the oracle said, must go. Oracle, there are thousands of you. Antiquity lives here. Witchcraft. . but I won’t try anything like that though I could try it. . I know I have knowledge. It’s come here to me, the knowledge that I have knowledge. I must make some demand, find out something for things like this don’t happen (only in war-time) and Cyril said he would be careful, would be careful. . careful. They always say that, Darrington said that. Vane said that. “Careful.” What is care? Cassandra. Am I then Cassandra? What has Vane to do with it, long body, slim and cool and different. . what has he to do with it, always thoughtful, never domineering? He has had nothing to do with it for he says always he has been careful but what is careful? There is God in one and God out of one and now that God is in me. I feel no difference between in and out. Something had happened to me, whatever the oracle may say, I know already something has happened to me. But I’ll ask it, for inside and outside are the same, God in and out, all gold, gorse, pollen-dust, gold and gold of rayed light slanting across the low spikes of white orchid and fragrance in and out, the same wind that blows across waters blew sails here from Phoenicia and perhaps I was a gypsy, Egyptian, having children as priests, priests having children with priestesses. This is no ordinary thing, war-time, things happen and the white bull shook and lowered at me but I must have the answer. Gull in my arms fill my arms. Sacrifice and sacrifice and now they will hate me, the birds will hate me, not all the birds. Go away sea-bird, I must find a land-bird and now in my room, I’ll wait and ask. .
Layers of life are going on all the time only sometimes we know it and most times we don’t know it. Layers and layers of life like some transparent onion-like globe that has fine, transparent layer on layer (interpenetrating like water) layer on layer, circle on circle. Plato’s spheres. Sometimes for a moment we realize a layer out of ourselves, in another sphere of consciousness, sometimes one layer falls and life itself, the very reality of tables and chairs becomes imbued with a quality of long-past, an epic quality so that the chair you sit in may be the very chair you drew forward when as Cambyses you consulted over the execution of your faithless servitors. Cruelty and beauty and love of beauty is the common heritage of the whole race. Everything is to each but it is only in developing ones own genius, one’s own mean personality (which is one’s innate daemon) that we can reach the realization of some sphere which is for all time, eternal, flowing as water, colourless, transparent which falling imbues the very common chair you sit in the very ordinary book you lift and open with some quality that is one with the Revelation of Saint John the Divine or the orders of Sappho. Colour there is in this sphere world, colour of the red anemone, colour as seen under clear water, colour as sea-coral seen through crystal. World falls over your head and you are embedded in the world; you are its only imperfection, a fly in its clear amber; you are its only imperfection yet your very presence giving quality, point, perspective to this otherwise so measureless luminous body. Fly in amber, Hermione stood in her room, a very fly enclosed in clear substance and she asked of swallows wheeling and swirling before the small open window if she should have it. Her heart ticked, dared not tick, knew the moment she had made the poignant demand of something outside (you may call it God or Plato’s circles) that it would answer, that its answer would be infallible. The door was shut. The window was open. The window faced east, faced the semi-circle of terraced stones that was the Druidical, that was the almost classic amphitheatre that the opposite earn made for the receiving of the sun’s first rays, for the receiving of the dew of the sky, for the receiving of the round globe of the moon that floated above it, would fall and embrace the very curve of the hillside like Artemis the thigh of tall sleeping young Endymion. Classic images here blend with Druidical surroundings, the round stones placed in their circle of seven, the very obvious flat altar stones higher on the earn and the enormous great ivy-trees, rounder than a huge, huge arm, trees of stock of ivy like a body, were the body (obviously) of some God. Dionysus. Druid priests. Ivy. The crown of the sacrificed. Things in the air, several layers of mysteries and all the time the knowledge that England was a cloud and she was looking down at England and at the war and at all the poor dark cloud of people from a height, so high, so clear an atmosphere that breathing it, she felt her very lungs gross and porous, great porous gross wings, beating inside her hulk of bone and frame of white bone covered with parchment flesh. Her body was like some mummified thing come to life and the breath in her lungs was pure spirit, the breath was part of the outer circle, the circle that had fallen, that had fallen some days ago (what was it, two days, three, must count exactly) when even the remote possibilities. . how did one think of these things? The whole pain and worry had been eliminated. Her body was like some coffin merely, a thing of bone and fibre, a cocoon for the enfolding of a spirit.