whose advent will surely strew our world with blood, but I weep for such a wate of life lying under my thumb.
His foreshortened face appears in profile on the car window like an irregular graph of my doom, merciless as a mathematician, leering accompaniment to all my good resolves. There is no medicinal to be obtained from the dried herbs of any natural hill, for when I tread those upward paths, the lowest vines conspire to abet my plot, and the poison oak thrusts its insinuation under my foot.
From the corners where the hill turns from the sea and goes into the secrecy and damp air of forbidden things, I stand disinterestedly examining the instruments and and the pattern of my fate. It is a slow motion process of the guillotine in action, and I see plainly that no miracle can avert the imminent deaths. I see the time, regarding equably the appearance, but I am as detatched as the statistician is when he lists his thousand dead.
When his soft shadow, which yet in the night comes barbed with all the weapons of guilt, is cast hugely upon the pane, I watch it as from a loge in the theatre, the continually vibrating I in darkness. Swearing invulnerablity, I measure mecilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.
But what huge shadow is more than my only
moon, even more than my destruction: it has the innocently slipping advent of the next generation, which enters in one night of joy, and leaves a meadowful of lamenting milkmaids when its purpose is grown to fruit.
Also, smoothed away from all detail, I see, not a the face of a lover to arouse my coquetry or defiance, but the gentle outline of a young girl. And this, though shocking, enables me to understand, and myself rise virile as a cobra, out of my loge, to assume control.
He kissed my forehead driving along the coast in evening, and now, wherever I go, like the sword of Damocles, that geater never-to-be-given kiss hangs above my doomed head. He took my hand between the two shabby front seats of the Ford, and it was dark, and I was looking the other way, but now that hand casts everywhere an octopus shadow from which I can never escape. The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart; the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done.
It is written. Nothing can escape. Floating through the waves with seaweed in my hair, or being washed up battered on the inaccessible rocks, cannot undo the event to which there were never any alternatives. O lucky Daphne, motion-
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