Crazy Cock by Henry Miller Read Free Book Online

humbled himself with truth and had no faith in her wiles, because in tomorrow he saw only the sordid chaff of yesterday . . . because of so many things foreign to his masculine comprehension the words that she tore from her breast came to him weighted with pain and bitterness.
    Finally, in a voice from which all his manhood seemed to be drained, he said: “But aren’t you the least bit glad that I came?”
    â€œWe’re not discussing that,” she said.
    Like a blow her words struck him. As if he were standing at the head of a long flight of stairs and she had pushed him with all her might, left him stunned and helpless, the whir of bat wings ringing in his ears.
    S OMEONE WAS standing beside them, at their elbows. It seemed to him as if the person had been standing there for an eternity.
    â€œOh, it’s you!” Hildred exclaimed, looking up out of the corner of her eye. And immediately she grew flustered. “Tony,” she said, “this is my friend. . . . This is . . . Vanya.”
    Later, when this incident had assumed its true proportions,Tony Bring attempted again and again to reconstruct the details of this interview which was like a glimpse into a world hitherto unknown. But all that he could succeed in recapturing was the impression of a face—a face he would never forget—brought close to his, so close indeed that the features dissolved into a blur, the only thing standing out clearly in his memory being an image of himself squeezed into a space no bigger than a tear.
    From now on it was Vanya this and Vanya that. Great swoops of volubility from Hildred, whose soul had departed the body to soar amid regions celestial and remote. From Vanya silence, deafening silence.
    So this, he thought, is the Bruga woman, creator of that sunken-visaged, leering rake of a puppet which grinned at him night and day like a skulking lout. Well, he had a chance now to take a good look at her. . . . She was neither mad nor sane, neither old nor young. She had beauty, but it was rather the beauty of nature, not of a personality. She was like a calm sea at sunrise. She neither questioned nor answered. There were incongruities about her too. A da Vinci head stuck on the torso of a dragoon; steady, luminous eyes that burned behind torn veils. He gazed at her searchingly, as if to tear from her skull the cocoons constantly gathering in her eyes. A vital, hypnotic quietude. The stare of a medium, and the medium’s voice. Her white neck was a little too long. It quivered when she spoke.
    This meeting which, like an overture that threatened never to come to an end, left him hollowed out. His body was no longer an organism endowed with blood and muscle, with feelings and ideas, but a shell through which the wind whistled. Weird their language, like the flight of a whale at thesting of a harpoon when, quivering with rage and pain, it dives below the froth of the sea, its watery trail stained with blood.
    He abandoned all effort to follow their words. His glance settled on Vanya’s long goosey neck that vibrated like a lyre. So soft and smooth, her neck. Soft as vicuña. If you were left at the foot of the stairs, stunned and helpless, with bats whirring in your ears and a neck like that to fasten on, to clutch, to pray to . . . if you suddenly got up with rhododendrons in your mouth, and your mouth torn back to the ears, if you had an organ in your entrails and the arms of a gorilla, arms that would crush blasphemously, ecstatically, if you had all darkness and night to roll in and curse and vomit and a neck beside you vibrating like a lyre, a neck so soft, so smooth, a neck sewn with eyes that pierced the veils of the future and spoke an unknown, an obscene language, if . . .

Part 2

1
    D AY BY day the shadows grew longer and the colors everywhere merged into golden browns and deep russets. Here and there objects stood out against the dull horizon with skeletal vigor: gaunt oaks twisting their