The Great Lover by Rhys Hughes, Michael Cisco Read Free Book Online Page B

resting on the skirts at her hips. The light of the sun slants across the lens of her unshaded right eye, illuminating the separate fibres of the iris, bleaching its green to grey. Her vehement face is dappled by freckles, and the shadows of leaves. She is transfixed by a thought, and stares as though it had appeared before her like a ghost out of the sunlight.
    She looks up, past the hut, to the treeless slope above. High against the horizon, looming up like a tower, is the shapeless peak of naked rock. The slopes above the treeline are criss-crossed by wooden fences. Standing, by a fence below and beside the peak, interrupting the horizon, her lover faces her and the valley. He is wearing a nankeen vest, and has a fowling-piece cracked and resting on his right arm. His straw hat is pushed back above his brow, and his dog sits in the grass, just as still. He looks down, or rather back, to where he’d just been, using eyes not proper to him — they’re my eyes. These two are not looking directly at each other, but at some midpoint in the landscape which receives and relays the gaze of each to the other. His face, free and impassive, calm and happy like a god’s; her face, tense with a savage joy and expectation.
    *
    Young Katherine Hepburn type; from a distance she looked like a slight old woman. Pale skin, like wax paper, pink and red around the eyes — not from crying, could simply be from looking. Lean, wise-seeming face, precociously knowing. Swingy shoulder-length nearly grey-silver blonde hair in an old-fashioned style, a windbreaker over her dress. The man with her is the father, I suppose. They are conversing properly. She is cheery, but not bubbly or ebullient. Almost certainly very thoughtful. A hard-to-fool woman — ergo, less than perfectly happy. Mature, and resigned.
    That night I feel the tug. It’s like the initial motion of the train, as it overpowers the vis inertiae . I speak this scrap of Latin to myself in the way I might dawdle a little on the threshold or stop to look for something I already know the whereabouts of, a way of jerking back or pausing for a moment when my will is split between wanting to go on and not wanting to go on. I suppose I’m under the impression that a bit of erudition might encloister me, putting me beyond her reach, so I wouldn’t have to go with her.
    With a soft, tearing sensation, like the parting of lips, my nerves tug me and I go with her.
    Spacious, limpid air resounding with outpouring sunlight of the hypnotic day, twinkling leaves in the trees and a glare shimmering on wet grass dark green as seaweed. A woman’s voice winds everywhere over the headstones, calling to her lover with a moaning song, luxurious and yearning. The love song comes out from a grave beneath a tree: the turf grows transparent and then vanishes, layers of earth underneath disappear like onion peels. In the pit, now, there is a shadowy coffin. The lid disappears; the pale violet radiance of her gauzy dress wanly mingles with her skin’s greys and blues, eyes sunken and head thrown back on the satin pillow, mouth slack. Faded hair the color of sun-bleached grass and tenuous as cobwebs streams back from her brow. Her song is still audibly emerging from her memory.
    — Beneath a tree, on a green hill, a hypnotic day with a view of a valley checkered with ponderous shadows of clouds, all frothing grass below the mountains, which blaze like scattered mirrors filled with giant sunbeams. They are alone, on a striped blanket, in the effortless shade of a widespread tree. There’s one moment in particular, when there was a feeling of tipping equilibrium, and somehow she had rolled onto her back bearing him in her arms partially on top of her.
    — Another memory is intruding, a painless, disembodied memory: she rolls into tiled room. His hands tug at her dress and she is kneading handfuls of his thick sweater, her body is unceremoniously lifted and dumped onto the table, a triangular rubber wedge