— What happened to it?
— At that party, that terrible party, in the ladies' room, another woman hit me with her hand bag. This has gone far enough, she said. She didn't think I was really a… she thought I was one of the people in costume. Agnes was staring at the floor. Then she sniffed and turned to Stanley with a smile forcing her lips. — But analysis is safer, and you have the same confessional.
— But don't you understand what happened this morning? he brought out fervently. — You didn't know you were coming to Mass, but you were directed there, as I was, as He led me there to…
She put an arm around his shoulders, and her strap came undone. Mickey Mouse pointed to 6:45. —Stanley, she said. — You're such a boy.
Dawn, somewhere beyond the incinerator plant which had won first prize in functional architecture a decade before: Fuller was busy in Mr. Brown's bathroom, picking up every piece of Mr. Brown's hair he could find and putting it into an envelope. Esme wakened for a moment in a strange bed, looked at the arm round her, could identify neither its owner nor its sex, and went back to sleep. Esther woke, hearing sounds which seemed to have been going on for a long time; as though she'd heard a key turn in the lock hours before, and footsteps, and the sound of a voice, or voices. But she lay still, and closed her eyes, as she did always on the dull sounds of Rose's dreams. In the street below, young policemen raced the engines of their motorcycles to arrogant pitch, and roared to duty. In the East Fifty-first Street station-house, Big Anna sat on a bench weeping. — But nobody even saw my gown, he cried. — We saw it, Jack, said the man behind the desk, turning to another policeman in shirtsleeves, — Is he known? Anselm was descending the steps of the I.R.T. West Side subway, on all fours. Adeline had just closed a door behind her, having wakened beside someone with short-cut hair and heavy hands, whom she remembered having taken for a man the night before. Herschel was not to be wakened until some hours later, by two sailors in a Chelsea hotel room, where he lay bandaged over chest and back, the protective gauze of Dutch Siam, tattoo artist.
Dawn, just as it came to Australian skies, a woman of bad character in a cloak of red possum skins.
What Stanley marveled at most was the wealth, of her that had appeared as her garments came off. There was so much of her. She stood, wiping the make-up from her face turned away, and he stared at her thighs from behind, as a collector stares at the fine patina glazed over the courses of worms, for those vast vermiculated surfaces were furrowed so. Terror struck him. He started to rise from the bed and reach for his shirt. Too late. She was there, tumbling the marvelous cucumiform weights down upon a chest which looked as though it would cave in under such manna. — Look, she said, joy of this world recovered, raising herself so that her front swung pendulant over him, unequaled, and unequal lengths untouched by baby's hand, — you can play telephone with them.
Trains from great distance over barbarous land, ships from civilized shores and airplanes from nowhere aimed at the island, dived at it, into it, unloaded lives upon it. Far uptown Mr. Pivner lay, unconscious arabesque in nervous imitation of sleep (he was, in fact, enduring a train wreck in Rajputana), that part of him already vigilant which would reach the control of the alarm clock an instant before it went off.
In Harlem, walking alone, Otto looked at his watch, forgot to see the time and looked again, as he sought the scene of Saturnalia where he hoped to recover the pigskin dispatch case.
The streets were filling with people whose work was not their own. They poured out, like buttons from a host of common ladles, though some were of pressed paper, some ivory, some horn, and synthetic pearl, to be put in place, to break, or fall off lost, rolling into gutters and dark corners where no Omnipotent Hand could reach them, no Omniscient Eye see them; to be replaced, seaming up the habits of this monster they clothed with their lives.
The newspaper quivered in Basil Valentine's hands, clasped behind him. Music, from another corner, plucked at his back. It was a pavan by a dead Spaniard.
Hungary to Sell Famed Paintings. . Vienna. . Diplomatic sources here said today that Hungary was attempting to sell in the West masterpieces from Budapest's National Art Gallery. The Gallery included paintings by Raphael, Tintoretto, Murillo, and others collected by the Austro-Hungarian emperors and princes. The informants said some of the paintings were being shipped to the United States as diplomatic luggage in the hope o£ interesting American art collectors.
He brought the newspaper up before him and read that again in the dull light of the dawn where he stood at the windows.
The desk in the far corner of the room was still littered with the papers he had spent the night over, finally snapped off the light and sat in a deep chair with his fingertips resting against his eyelids, and his head erect. The Vulliamy clock on the mantel had struck three times gently, at regular intervals, before he moved; and then, only his fingers moved, to remain arched before his face, meeting their tips in gothic contemplation, his eyes clear as though he'd done no more than blink them.
Now he gave an impatient sigh, dropped the newspaper on the window shelf, and stood looking straight out at the gray sky. — Another blue day? he murmured, as the stately strokes of the harp came to an end, and he turned from the window.
The letterheads among the sheaf of papers on his desk witnessed important oppositions in the world, languages as various as the devices and crests which adorned them. He sat down and hurriedly checked over a coded message against its original, — Put Inononu in touch immediately, have received necessary information. . which he crumpled in his hand. He slipped the rest of the papers into a dispatch case, and was gone for a moment into the bedroom to lock it in a wall safe behind the chest. Then he went to the bathroom, dropped the crumpled note into the basin and put a match to it, washed the ashes down the drain, washed his hands slowly and with care, and went in to make tea.
There was exquisite correspondence between the Sevres cup and the back of his hand, where blue veins showed making the flesh appear translucent: it was not a reflection of mutual fragility, but rather the delicacy of the porcelain completed a composition enhancing, as it did, the tensile strength of the hand which raised it. In the other, he opened a book, and read. Now and then his lips moved, as he turned the pages of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises which he had, contrary to habit, lent out (for this was not the only, certainly not the nicest copy he had). A fly landed on the print, and he struck at it. The fly rose and crossed the room to settle busily upon a golden figure, a bull lowering its jewel-collared head to thrust with its horns at the egg floating in the rock cavity before it. The figure was small, and stood on a column at the end of the couch.
He turned another page. A fine-sprung coil of brown hair lay in the inner margin. Basil Valentine leaned down to blow at it. The hair did not move. He made a sound with his lips, and flicked it away with a finger. Then he read for less than a minute more, closed the book abruptly and bent down, searching the floor for the coil of hair. He found it on the carpet, put it into an ashtray, opened the book again and gazed at the page. There was a faint hum, from the corner where the phonograph had shut itself off. His gaze shifted to the ashtray. Then he moved quickly, to stand, take the coil of hair from the ashtray, into the bathroom and drop it into the bowl. He flushed the toilet and washed his hands, studying his face in the mirror as he did so.
The expression of anxiety which he had worn all this time did not leave him as he returned to the living room, tightening the cord of his dressing gown, and taking the gold cigarette case from its breast pocket. Snapped open, without taking out a cigarette he snapped it closed again and stood looking at the inscription worn almost smooth on its surface. — Damn him, he whispered. — Damn him. He turned to look at the Vulliamy clock. It was adorned with a cupid. He loosened the cord of his dressing gown.