Ian stood an easel up before them and began to draw.
The busy students became even more silent than before. Eccentric Englishmen, they suspected the disinterestedness of another Englishman’s eccentricities.
Unconcerned as his movements had been it was most probable that he counted on attracting their attention.
They behaved as London behaves at the parties of the newly rich.
But the newcomer was drawing with authentic ardour, there was a virile litheness in the lines of dejection — he scattered about.
+
And when the Professor entered he could scarcely be said to have glanced at the isolated monomaniac as he strolled on his rounds of correction.
He would cock his head aside a student’s and together they would wag, appraising the proportions of the lamentable being who hardly appeared able to hold together at all.
He talked a good deal of sensing the bourgeois structure beneath the masses, of noting how the leaning torso sagged into the pelvis.
When Ian felt that he was coming towards him he half abstractedly lifted off the long leg he had been resting over the wooden stool, and drawing aside a little, waited with a certain attention.
The Professor surveyed the drooping garments almost cautiously; with Ian’s drawing he was considerably more at ease.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose you know what you are doing.”
“That is my intention.”
Ian drew towards the little man and pushed his eyes slowly into his, as if imparting a confidence.
“I feel,” he rumbled ponderously, “for the contours of collapse, the bony structure to be, er, misleading.
“That is, that every issue, aesthetically should be kept — pure — absolute.
“If you get me?
“And that the degeneration of form, if it must be considered, be followed to its inevitable — ah — conclusions.
“That for instance, I can perhaps put it more clearly — the essence of drooping is a lack of inner support.”
The professor nodded at every pause.
“That fluidic quality of your line, I like,” he said.
“I aim, at — er — that particular sagging so to speak, of the stuff into the atmosphere,” Ian answered.
The professor popped down the chalk he was holding with a sharp return to himself— He looked at the model and then at Ian.
“Anyhow,” he said, “Next week we have a woman.”
“Ah the bastard—” Ian mumbled after him, “—the bastard!”
It was as if he had been smudged horribly across his eyes with an intimation of something unformedly akin to the creature on the model’s throne.
It occurred to him that he had never seen a woman unclothed.
Because the studio dust was somehow similar to the straggling hair on that body, it seemed so fearsomely to deprive that body of a divine right.
It was as if his mother in her chaste dress momentarily in his vision, foundered.
+
The sun through delicate shades was shining on Hyde as he awoke.
He was conscious of nothing except the vast living landscape of his body in which the faculty of existence never came to a frontier.
And yet the chest with the marble angels stood immovable only three yards from where he lay.
The bone of his brow and the spring of his nose between his eyes seemed to increase to a volatile mountain in which the mental nerves lay diffused in the strange numbness of this something infinite he projected.
The golden penetration of the sun through his eyelids, spread inwardly like supernatural light—
it liquefied him, and lifted him in imaginary ascension.
To his soul there were no limitations once he had shut his eyes.
TRANSFIGURATION
Outside the window a dead man hung from a tree beside the track, and the wind moved in his trousers.
The scout-train with its watchful soldiers standing barefoot on the roof preceded us for a space of danger, shunted off somewhere into the steaming sunset.
We crawled along among the prodigious verdure, miraculously ejected in a thousand varieties from the same inch of earth that bound the cocos in spiral strangulation, and fell in tufted cascades in their rush towards the skies.
Now that it was no longer protected, our train bucked monstrously, jarring my spine with the reverberation of impact; the gliding locomotive had been driven leisurely upon by another — — yet it was still twilight. The lights of an Indian farm in a clearing were not twinkling very brightly yet.
One of the extra soldiers who lay along his gun on the roof of a compartment rolled off and was crushed between the buffers; he was still a child and his gun was splintered.
“Do you come from far away?” asked the Mexican woman at my side.
“From Europe, New York, from Mexico City, and I have no salt.”
In my lap, saltless, in white impotence to the appetite, lay six hard boiled eggs; the sullen light from the ceiling filmed in their slippery spheres, while contours like diagrams for constructing female heads in old art primers reminded me how Dan Leno had said: “Funny thing an egg — — it hasn’t got any face.”
“Come we will go to the Indians and beg some salt,” said my companion.
Night pressed on the red glow of the torches held to the private parts of the locomotive that the train men were tinkering at blunderingly.
We pressed the palpable blackness that hit us back at every onward step, and arrived at a circle of human shadows. A woman with breasts under her insane hair challenged us, then she murmured to the circle and brought us back her gift.
I held my cupped palm out before me as I walked over the rocking flints, carrying the rough and turgid crystals carefully as a sacrament through the dark where the parted forest reared over the steel ribbons of the railroad.
Thick within the infinite foliage a sudden wooden seed would fall and stroke to a hush the close lying layers of leaves. In there, in the turbulent jungle entangled, lurked with their strange diplomacies of smell, species of beasts. How would it be to hack through these fortresses of vegetation? To move footloose among violent fowl and fantastic insects haunted by my primeval recognitions? To hold my peace with the stir of the forest, that sibilant silence — — the in-breath of nature, drawing me in a panic of treacherous invitation?
The s-s-stir — — every moment the Night should come crashing through with the incalculable tonnage of his invisible footsteps, to snap the cocos and tear the savage plants — — And something enormous, sentient, inimicable was striding now among the unholy vapours left by the setting of a murderous sun — — — the forestal Jove.
The flesh of the Mexican woman’s face was baked onto the bone and must jar inhumanly to the touch. In her glaucous eyes the memories of her excitements shrapnelled like the flavour of the Chili pod.
Where woman meets woman in out of the way places her first concern is to tender a conversational passport of her chastity, so does the thin-lipped spectre of dishonour drive her buffoons before her even to the end of the earth.
My companion who had fallen thankfully upon half of the eggs and the crude salt, told me how she had had to leave her native town, owing to the misadventurous liaison of her son with a light woman. She was seeking to renew her impeccable occupation as a seamstress elsewhere. I could understand could I not? Her shame and her humiliation before the neighbours who had watched her flower and wither, a virginal tiger lily, before and after her espousals and widowing. And even as she tore the egg with her teeth, did she wrack that light body of her left-hand daughter-in-law for my approval.
Confident that I had now accepted her at a desirable valuation, clucking, and darting appraisals of the passengers on the train, she told me that the bad land of Mexico was populated by the devil’s brood, and that I should save half a peso and probably my life by staying overnight at the apothecary’s to whose good graces she would accompany me.