Tilly?” Or do you play? I’m passionately fond of music myself. Do you know Morgen? by Strauss? or Wiegenlied? Do you go to the Queen’s Hall? Wigmore Hall? Have you heard Coates conduct? Glorious, isn’t he? Shall we lunch at Gatti’s — or the Café Royal?… Those side tables at Gatti’s, with red plush sofas. The table legs so close together that if two people sit on the sofa their knees must be contiguous. The music at the far end. That’s where Mary and I went for supper when we came back from Banstead … It would have been so simple to say, “Won’t you lunch with me? I should so much like it if you would!” We were so clearly “made” for each other. And especially now that Cynthia — it might have prevented that. Lost; gone into the jungle of London. I advertised three times in The Times Personal Column — there was no answer. I thought of employing a detective to try and trace her. Yes, I three times proposed in The Times that she should meet me at the platform gate, and each time waited for half an hour, wondering what we would say when we met … Where are you, C. I. E.? Are you in London? Am I destined someday to see you playing in a hotel orchestra, or in a cinema, playing with the spotlight on you, lighting your shyly downturned small and lovely face?… By that time you will have forgotten me. And as for me — Cynthia has intervened. I am on a ship in the Atlantic, passing the Grand Banks, with Cynthia. I am in love with Cynthia, miserably and humiliatingly in love. More intensely than I was with you? Who can say? Heaven knows I loved you with a blind intensity that made me unhappy for weeks after. But then, how much was my misery due to my feeling of having been so horribly and unforgivably inadequate? Inferiority complex … And so absurd, that I, who on a score of other occasions had … “picked up” … women here and there in two continents … should have sat in silence and allowed you to go out of my life — in spite of your so clearly and so desperately signaling to me. O God that with divine rightness … inestimable lightness … O God that with celestial brightness … merciful and benign Kuan Yin … O lamas riding on llamas and bearded ascetic Arhats hunched meditative on tigers. O Solomon, O Song of Songs and Singer of singers … I will never forgive myself, nor will she ever forgive me … She will say, over and over, “I met a man once, on a train from Folkestone” … C.I.E. The name — good Lord — might have been Cynthia … Do you hear me, Cynthia?… Hear you, tadpole … Forgive me! Absolve me! Let me bury my infant’s face against you and weep! Like Father Smith, I am looking, looking everywhere, for my mother. Is it you, perhaps? I have thought often that it might be you. You remind me of her. Let me be your child, Cynthia! Take me to Kensington Gardens with you in the morning — carry my golliwog in your left hand, and let me clasp your right. Past the tea gardens. To the banks of the Serpentine, or the Ornamental Water … Who is it that has that theory of compulsory repetition. Freud, is it?… Orpheus.… Sequacious of the liar … I shall go mad someday. Yes. Etna will open, flaming and foisting, and I will be engulfed in my own volcano I can hear it, on still days, boiling and muttering. Mephitic vapors escape through cracks in rock. Red-hot lumps are flung up and fall back again — I have seen the livid light of them in my eyes. — And do you know, Cynthia, what form my dementia will take?… No — tell me, absurd one, poser!.. I will weep. I will do nothing but weep. That is what I have always wanted to do — to weep. The sorrow of the world. I will sit and weep, day after day, remembering nothing save that the world was created in pain. The syphilitic family in the cobbled mud of Portobello Road. Goya. The lost kitten. The crying child. The dog whose nose had been hurt, bleeding. The old woman dying in the street, far, far from home. Lions weeping in cages and dead men roaring in graves. Our father that weepest in heaven; and angels with whimpering wings. Smith, walking among the stars looking for his wife-mother. The Disciples waiting in vain for the miracle to happen. My father, which art in earth. Billy, who was tied to the bedpost and beaten across his naked back with eight thicknesses of rubber tubing because his younger brother had told a lie about him. Μακάριοι οἱ πενθοῦντες ὅτι αὐτοὶ παρακληθήσονται The dead sheep under the beech tree by the pond. The numbed bee, crawling for the hundredth time up the windowpane, and falling. The poet, who discovers, aged thirty-five, that he cannot write. The woman who finds that her husband no longer loves her. The child who is mocked at school for her stupidity. I will expiate the sin and sorrow of the world for you, my brothers. You will be happy. I will give up all my selfish ambitions and desires in order that I may help you. I am worthless — I am nobody. Do not think of rewarding me. Anonymous, I will pass everywhere like a spirit, freeing the imprisoned and assuaging the afflicted. The bee I will catch in an empty matchbox and carry to Hymettus, releasing her amid a paradise of heather and wild thyme. I will untie Billy from the white iron bedpost and take him to see the circus. Elephants! Peanuts five a bag! Speedy the high diver with a gunny sack over his head! The boxing kangaroo!.. For the syphilitic family, an immediate cure, money, and a cottage in the country with a flower garden and a vegetable patch … For the old woman who died in the street, believing in God and a future life, the strangers walking around her in a ring will be cherubim and seraphim, with rainbow wings, and angelic eyes of love. The throne of God will be before her; and looking up she will see seated there — with Mary star of the sea in a blue mantle at one side and Jesus in a fair robe of vermilion at the other — not Jehovah the terrible, but her own father, with his watch chain, his pipe, and his funny, flashing, spectacles! “Why, if this isn’t my little Blossom!” he will laugh … and she will cry for joy … I will find the lost kitten and bring it back to a house even more glorious than that it remembers. Saucers will gleam before every ruddy fireplace: there will be fish tails; and there will be cream. Children will dart to and fro, pulling after them deliciously enticing strings. Immortal mice of a divine odor will play puss-in-the-corner, melodiously squeaking and scurrying. Moths undying will dance with her at dusk in the corners, and unhurt, sleep all night in the cups of lilies … Smith, star-wandering, cigar in hand, will find his mother. For the fly with torn wings, I will make new wings of an even more Daedalian beauty. The clairvoyant I will deliver from his torment of vatic dreams; and Goya, touched by my hands, will at last close his eyes … The crying child will find his adored blue shawl … Hay-Lawrence will recover the sight of his left eye, and his wife will no longer sit alone by the fire reading letters three weeks old … From the whole earth, as it rolls darkly through space around the sun, will come a sound of singing … MISERY … And in order to accomplish this, Cynthia, — how can I accomplish all this, you ask? Very simple. I will permit myself to be crucified. My SELF. I will destroy my individuality. Like the destruction of the atom, this will carry in its train the explosion of all other selves. I will show them the way. The Messiah. They will pursue me, mocking and jeering. They will crowd closer about me, stoning. And at this moment I will destroy my SELF out of love for all life — my personality will cease. I will become nothing but a consciousness of love, a consciousness without memory or foresight, without necessity or body, and without thought. I will show mankind the path by which they may return to God; and I will show God the path by which he may return to peace … Are you listening, Huntress?… Listening, madman!.. Not mad, not mad — it is only the well-known doctrine of sublimation. Suicide of the unconscious. Nothing of it but doth change into something rich and strange. Recommended by all the best metaphysicians. Miss E. Z. Mark, of No. 8,765,432 Telepathy Alley, Chocorua, N.H., writes: “I suffered continually from ambitiousness, appetite, and reckless energy, until I tried sublimation … Now I do nothing but beam at the universe” … Used and praised by millions … Sublimation rules the nation … One three five seven nine eleven thirteen fifteen seventeen … Is it my heart or is it the engine? Te thrum: te thrum. Seems to me it’s a little rougher. Creaking. Cynthia is asleep in the first cabin. I wonder what position she lies in and how she does her hair. Pigtails — one or two? Not pigtails? Clothes carefully arranged on a wicker chair. Pink-white-elastic. Mrs. Battiloro’s middle-aged nightgowned body gently snoring and gulping. A crescendo, and then a strangling gasp, and the head turned, and silence, and the crescendo all over again. A Puritan. What is love to a Puritan? What does he make of the pleasures of the flesh? Shuts his eyes. A painful duty. Did you remember to wind the clock?… Oh, dear, I forgot to order the flour … The immaculate conception … Sublimation again … Te thrum te thrum. In my left ear my heart. Smoking too much. Sua pipetta inseparabile. Pressure on the eye makes a tree, one-sided, dark tamarack with downward claws, purpurate and murex. Tamurex. Tamarix. What was I thinking about, or was it a series of images simply, or a fragment of dream. Claws hanging from a tree. Claws paws clods pods. The purple locust claw. A green bright cataract of leaves. Tamaract! And a red fish leaps out and up! Gone. What a lovely thing. Now where did that come from I wonder. Ah Psyche from the regions whish. My little trout. Tree-trout, that swims and sings. Swings. Up from my cabin, my nightgown scarfed about me … fingered her placket. Coward Shakespeare. Her scarf blew away along the deck and I ran after it. The squall blew her skirt up as she went down the ladder. They laughed. In my left ear my heart te thrum te thrum. The Sea. Sea. Sea. Sea.