8.

The more there is for you, the less for him. Can you
wonder...?

We were at the field's edge. He said, gravely: "I don't
know that you have so much the worst of it, Sis. It is awful
here. Haven't we always known that there is something wicked
about the house ? I have to hang about there all day, and
listen to the clocks striking."

"Go away and get something to do."

"My guardians won't let me."

"You have friends and books."

"A lot you'll find people want you when you have no money
to spend on them."

"A nice set you know."

"They're not used to beggary."

"Thank God, mine are."

That was it. I was looking at the splintered sphere of
that world that had given us birth. I saw its ruins turned
brothel for him to live and solicit in. An eternal priest.
Outside, I was working in the clay. In the woman is the race.

X X X X X

A yellow gravel road ran to the field's edge. There we
kissed. I turned the corner of the hedge so that I should not
have to see him go, and craned over to watch the hesitant walk.

There was a packet of sweet, soft biscuits in my pocket.
I sat down on the curb and munched and listened to the child
twitching. Tomorrow I would go back. There would be stairs to
climb. I wanted to climb a Ivory-knobbed stick, wine and a single feather
fan. A steak and peaches. A first-class ticket to Town. People

A MAGICAL EXPERIMENT.

She leaned over the dark table, and swept the papers onto the floor. She had come in from the street where she had seen the square back of a taxi and its window. There was a face in it that screamed at her. As the taxi ran away, the mouth opened and shut till it looked like a black pin-head. This gesture had been made at her, and the circle which had contained her and the origin of the scream had contracted and gone out.

She remained with the painful noise in a huge room where the circle had shot its rubbish.

Already she was imagining a place east of the sun, west of the moon where the intolerable loss was made good. She also understood immediately that she could not even begin to think what the face would express when it agreed.

She stuck pennies on the table for the sun and moon, and pushed them about. She spun them between her palms. She shut her eyes and moved them when she was blind.

Sun and moon ran round the table. Other spheres cannoned and shot off. In the wooden mirror they repeated it. She looked for an abstraction of events and for the place where one thing that had happened met its opposite, touched and spun off in huge ellipses, and cut each other's tracks, and travelled on and met again.

She rested there in a sweet futility. There was a place east of the sun, west of the moon. If they spent their lives taking knots

2.

out of a piece of string, they would meet there.

Through the passages of the house the unstirred air whistled.
The circumference lines tore out. The spheres ran into the
stream of circumstance. The heavens moved, but she lay across the
table, spinning pennies, making circles. Inside the circle were
torn papers, and the rubbed out ends of cigarettes.

Three years before she had been out in a quiet street.
There were square houses each one full of square windows, and a
railing passed them. She dragged herself along the wet pavement
observing. Her footmarks were shaped like fish.

A fog slid out of the low sky. It bulged and shook out
specks. It lifted and came curling again. It drew up and hung a
few feet over her, exhibiting the house and the rails. Round
the corner there was a house with a round window, and beside it a
conical tree.

The fog dipped up and down. She moved aside into a perception
that was cold, intenstive and oblique. Look at the most solid
and intimate phenomenon, and there remain certain formal shapes.
Go on looking, and the shapes will draw into one another, and
become a block, exceedingly solid, that moves in. She saw a
bundle of iron sticks closing. The most compact form could exhibit
another unique form (contained by it and exceedingly ugly.) There
were people with the same property in the mind. He was one of them.
Pleased she stood back on the curb, and drew the house out. It

4.

small, square, angry moon came out to look for them.

The wounded man with whom she had crossed the sky was with her.

She said "it is still nosing about under the earth-floor.

When it comes up it is square and irritable. We shall have to get rid of it. Go and throw my ring into the sea." When he came back the wind slid in beside him. They listened to the sea thudding on its stones.

He wrote them some post cards.

Finally a large grey omphalos, neither square, triangular, or round pushed its way up through the floor. It leaned to one side and another, it was like the broken end of a cigarette that swelled till it became like a slug. It was cold. They began immediately to quarrel with one another.

He reasoned with her. "He shewed you the house and railings in the brown fog, and that quintessential shape was not pretty. We have seen what has come out of the floor. And I know what I think."

And she answered:

"He cannot contradict me now. So I am free to love him."

"Love him if it amuses you, but do it in isolation."

"Am I to have had no pleasure at all?"

"What is this pleasure when it is not sentiment."

"He has a quintessential shape. Every man and woman is a star.

I am watching the patch of sky where some right he will come out, a little awkward, but it will be quite all right."

3.

dissolved immediately into its number and its curtains. She looked away and stepped up to it. It went into itself and took a step towards her. She shook it off, and went away, noticing her cold passion with appreciation.

Among the houses there had been one with a round window framed in a scroll, and beside it an elegant tree. In the South there was a house with a round window in its garden wall. Through it the sea glittered. Below it, on one side was a dark wood full of sea-wind. The stones and turf rested night and day, and the sea and the air never. On the hills were circles for war and magic and sheep folds.

These things were not in his mind.

The image-bearing discs that filled her perception went out one by one. Under the edge of the black sky something angry was looking for her. When it came up it would have anger without brightness. It would also be absurd.

She waited, and heard it moving about under the earth-floor. She rose and began to move away backwards so that she could see it.

The sky lit up. A fiery ball slid down. She mounted it and crossed the sky. The sun appeared for a moment, and gave the illusion of morning, and went away into the sea. Another ball of glass with a wounded man in it drew alongside. She stepped in beside him, and they fell away together also into the sea. A

5.

"You are pottering about the sky looking for a place east of
the sun, west of the moon. Where you will have an excuse to go to bed
with him again."

"I hear you whisper it in your sleep. I do not like to see you
nurse a dead brat that is not your own."

"I shall nurse it till I find out what it means, if it were
a dead brat, or if it were a slug."

"That is not all the truth."

"It is enough for me to go in with."

She went to his room at a time when he would not be there.
She was pushing a letter under the door when the key fell out from
a shelf under the fan-light. She unlocked the door. The air in
the room was clear like a dark glass and quiet. On his bed was a
gold rug where he had told her he had had several woman. She lay
down. The dust on it made her hand grey. He had pinned her
photograph upside down on the wall. She sat up at his table and
smoked. There was his razor full of scum and short hair. She
cleaned it, and cut herself, and licked the blood off her thumb.
She howled and laid her head on the square table immoveable with
books. She munched almonds from a bottle, and looked at an idol
full of pits like eyes.

There was a saucer full of broken cigarette stumps. A brown
choking smoke burst from one. He had pinned her photograph upside
down. She blushed. Another stump she had not rubbed out began to
smoke. She left the letter there. She would not see it again.

6.

She had completely misunderstood.

On his table the letter collected a gauze of dust. A long way
off she said:-

"I make circles.

He is inside a square.

No one has circled a square.

There are the formal shapes that move in, and those, because
of him I saw.

There is the irregular and shifting shape from below. He
evoked it. I cannot control it. It is like a slug. I think it
can control him. Last summer we saw them everywhere; in the grass,
in the wheel ruts, and on the tops of the hills.

There is my will.

Wheels full of eyes roll in from the four parts of the air.
Daimon, daimon, come from a long way off. I will have my will.
I have been a lover, I will be an illumination. That is my will.
He shall become my equal. This is my revenge and my love.

Daimon, that is my will. I fix it.

She breathed in and filled herself. She let out the breath
and said "The truth will do."

She met a man in a café who said to her:-

"He got his fish gilt. The gilt was off and there was the
fish."

7.

And another: "He will remember the time he spent with you,
as other men their affair with a celebrated mondaine." And a third:
"His people carry their burden. They wish to state a perception
that shall clarify and re-arrange all values, and from this
statement of an essential virtue, they fall aside into morality.

"It is like the fish god with whom they once contended,
hatched again, killed again, diverted, refished, lost.

And they do not break their hearts. They move off."

You crossed his will.

That is enough for you to go on with."

In the dead hours of the afternoon she sat in an old man's
room while he caressed his mistress. She said to herself - "The
little state of fatigue is over. In a quarter of an hour I shall
sit out in the café in the sun."

She held up the winged disc she had made for an image. The
objects in the room swam and fixed.

Through a square filled with squares she saw souls pour through,
rising and sinking like lights on noiseless shafts. They were
silent and took no notice of the other. There was a square like
the back window of a taxi. Out of it the same white pointed face
was shaking at her, and opening and shutting its mouth.

8.

She had said "The truth will do." A man began to talk about
the Italian Renaissance. "The full moon once held an old man
gathering sticks. He was being punished."

That age replaced him by *two* lovers. Now there is a
nostalgia to refurnish that grey moon."

You have been a black magician.

Throw your burning triangles round yourself. They are your
illumination. They burn him.

They burn him.

You would have shut him up in that moon under your will. You
are in your circle with your treasure.

Re-arrange either that, or the universal sphere.

You were a lover, and the lover must turn adept. The last
move of the lover *is* of the same as the last gesture of the adept.

The adept returns to the café, orders a drink, and lends an
acquaintance fifty francs.

She made the last gesture of the lover and burned the image
which was reabsorbed *slowly* into the fire.