How pleasant! Oh, how exquisite! Thy beauty framed for sweet delight! Thy stature like an upright palm! Thy breasts like clusters dropping balm!.. I my Belov’d first raisèd thee From under the pomecitron tree; Thy careful mother in that shade With anguish her fair belly laid … Queen and huntress, are you listening?… Listening, but bored, wood louse … I was in a hurry — I hadn’t time to explain to you — I would like to explain to you — explain everything. I had no right on the first-cabin deck, of course — I am in the second cabin. Poverty. Poor but proud. I have often, for that matter, traveled in the steerage. I believe in being democratic, don’t you? I remember you said your brother William … always got along well with people of humble origin … Yes … So do I … I like them. Queer creatures, often, aren’t they? I really like them better than most people of my own class. Why then, apologize for liking them — or why claim it as a virtue? Tee hee—nervous giggle. I believe you are a snob, Cynthia. I remember my friend Giles, who met you at a dance in Oyster Bay — Oyster Bay! — said “Battiloro? Oh yes. I remember. An awful snob — looked down her nose at everybody!.. One of those damned English snobs.” Ha ha! Apparently you had been rather cool to poor good-natured Giles, Giles with his loud bark and perpetually wagging tail, Giles who at college was known as “Susie.” Poor Giles, a failure at everything, but so disarming, so ingenuous, so eager to please, so nice! How had you the heart to be cruel to him? Are you cruel, Cynthia? Or was it that you thought him a snob? Well — perhaps a little. He probably tried a little too hard to show you how much he knew about England, and how many “fish heads” he knew there … Lady Rustlebottom of the Mount, Torquay. Et cetera … He bought a blazer especially for the purpose and spent a weekend there … I was in a hurry — I hadn’t time to explain — I must explain — all — everything — Smith, for example. You probably noticed at once that Smith is not a “gentleman”—in the accepted sense. The way he cocks that absurd great tweed hat! His dingy clerical-looking clothes, and his shoes humped at the toes! A mere ship’s acquaintance, a rather interesting little character. You wouldn’t like him — he would bore you — but you would like to hear about him, the salient features of his career brightly related by Demarest. Of course, you aren’t a very good judge of character! You remember Wetherall? You said, “What a really charming face he has. I’m sure he’s awfully nice!” Ah! The joke was on you. Wetherall was at the moment seducing a little trained nurse who was on board — he told me at every meal of his progress, and dear Billington was so shocked that he could hardly eat … One of their difficulties was that she had two roommates … But the weather, you remember, was warm, they stayed late on deck, and there was no moon. Also, they did not attend the ship’s concert. Wetherall described it all to me — every detail, his kind brown eyes humorously bright, his Bradford accent at its very best. What a curious pleasure it gave me to share in that secret conquest, so passionate, so frankly carnal, so frankly obscene, and so laconically casual, while at the same moment I was conscious of falling in love with you, and falling in love in a sense so antithetical, so ethereal! While Wetherall was turning wine into blood, I was turning blood into wine. Yes. It was magnificent. A slow and beautiful counter-point. Wetherall the bass and you the treble. You remember that afternoon when I encountered you at the foot of the companionway? — you were carrying a book — it was a book of Negro spirituals — and you smiled, and then immediately looked away, frowning, at the sea. You hesitated as if — you were perhaps really going somewhere, you had an errand, you didn’t want me to suppose that … you in any way sought my company. I, too, hesitated — as if I knew that my company could not be of much interest to you, and yet — might we not pause together for a moment, touch our wings together in the air? And besides I — and perhaps you, too (we discussed this problem — so peculiar to ships — a few days later in the train to London, in the light of the queer implicit intimacy which by then had sprung up between us) feared that you might think me trying to avoid you — it is so difficult, on a ship, to avoid the appearance of persecution, or, on the other hand, of avoidance!.. “Have you been reading?” I said, and you answered, “I’ve been trying to — but it’s so extraordinarily difficult, on a ship, to concentrate!.. I’ve had to give it up” … I too had found it difficult — even with The Spoils of Poynton. I told you of this, and we discussed Henry James, standing there, as we did so, a little uneasy with each other, or, as Mandeville (is it Mandeville?) puts it, in a mammering and at a stay. And then, taking my flimsy life in my hands, I said, “Shall we go up on the boat deck and concentrate together? It’s rather nice forward of the bridge …” Singular and daring remark! You half smiled and turned, we ascended the companionway; and at the forward end of the deck, leaning our backs against the old plates of the Silurian, which we could feel buckling as the ship plunged, we talked deliciously for an hour, for two hours. And do you know what gave, for me, a special exquisiteness to that talk? It was my fresh sharp recollection of my conversation at lunch with Wetherall. Behind that forward lifeboat, on the starboard side — where later we played a game of chess, the young student of architecture watching us — behind that lifeboat, the evening before, Wetherall and Miss Kirkpatrick had lain together till one o’clock. They had been discovered and reprimanded. Of all this, naturally, you knew nothing; and still less could you conceive the nature of Wetherall’s confidences to me. You would be astounded — horrified! The grossness of the human being! And the vulgar candor with which one man to another confesses it! Wetherall informed me that Miss Kirkpatrick was, up till then, “inexperienced.” But, setting out for a two months’ holiday in Scotland and Belfast, she had in advance made up her mind that, should a sufficiently attractive man be available, she would give herself to him. Wetherall — a married man, with a daughter of eight — had been the lucky man. He had noticed from the outset that she smiled at him a good deal, and somewhat intensely. On the second evening he kissed her — and as he remarked, “Didn’t she come up to it?… O Boy!..” But I give you the impression — are you listening, Cynthia?… Still listening, earthworm … I give you the impression — partly a wrong impression — that this organ point, supplied for our intercourse by Wetherall, was unalloyedly pleasant. No no no no no. Good God. This is precisely what I don’t want you to think. It reminded me, certainly, of my own obscenity; but it also served to show me already the immense altitude of my — flight! Wetherall was precisely what I was proposing, with your support, to leave behind. More precisely still, what I was leaving behind was Helen Shafter: coarse, voluptuous, conscious, witty Helen, who had so ungovernable an appetite for the farcical, and who had so skillfully and swiftly and horribly exposed the essential fleshliness of “love between the sexes!” Yes. The experience was horrible. And how even more horrible was it to come thus to you, before whom I so passionately longed to stand with something of Parsifal’s mindless innocence, bearing on brow and palms the stigmata of that crucifixion!.. MISERY … And what intricacy of fate brings it about that again it is from a meeting with Helen that I come to you, and that as I passed you twice on the deck this evening it was of our so miserable affair — Helen’s and mine — that I was foolishly boasting to a total stranger? Is it possible that you overheard it?… Well, that is what I am … Even supposing that we could have … even supposing that you could have …