The Revolutions by Felix Gilman Read Free Book Online Page A

talking to her about her poetry.”
    “It happens infrequently,” Josephine said.
    There was something oddly unnerving about Mr Atwood. He smiled too much.
    Astonishingly, he began to recite. “Oh moon! Halt not thy ceaseless roll—oh sun, astride thy golden wheel—oh wake, oh wake thou sleeping soul—oh something something something stars … Oh, Mr Hare, are you leaving? Well, good-bye, good-bye, my best wishes to your wife. Miss Bradman, do I have those lines right? Please say I do.”
    “Close enough, Mr Atwood.”
    “‘Dream Verse,’ I think you called it.”
    “Oh, probably. One never knows what to call things.”
    “Well done.” Arthur clapped Atwood on the shoulder. “Well done indeed.”
    Atwood looked down at his shoulder with curiosity, as if a butterfly had suddenly landed on it.
    Mr Park and the Varleys had stopped to listen.
    “Atwood,” Arthur said. “What do you do, if you’re not a poet?”
    “Nothing in particular. I understand you’re a journalist, Mr Shaw?”
    “That’s right. I write for the Mammoth .”
    “I’ve heard that the Mammoth is no more.”
    “That’s true, too. News travels quickly.”
    “London is a very small place.” He turned back to Josephine. “Miss Bradman, was it?”
    “Was it what, Mr Atwood?”
    “Composed in a dream?”
    “No. I wrote that poem over the course of a long, cold winter’s worth of evenings in Cambridge.”
    “Miss Bradman, would you possibly—would you mind reading the poem for me?”
    “Oh, no—I couldn’t. I don’t think—”
    “Oh,” Mrs Sedgley said, “I’m sure there’s no harm in it—and she does have a very fine reading voice.”
    “Hear, hear ,” Doctor Varley said.
    She couldn’t reasonably or graciously refuse. Nor could she quite say why she felt like refusing—like running away, in fact. There was something excessive and unseemly in Atwood’s curiosity.
    “Now, steady on,” Arthur said. “Bit late in the evening for poetry, isn’t it? I know I’m a little tired—head full of India and Saturn and Mercury and all that. Perhaps another time.”
    Atwood glanced at Arthur, appearing to fully take in his presence for the first time. Then he produced a pen and a card from his pocket, and swiftly wrote something down.
    “An address, Shaw. I gather that you’re out of work?”
    “Between engagements, Atwood.”
    “Well. I leave it in your hands. They may be able to use you.”
    Atwood turned to Josephine then, as if Arthur was simply of no further relevance.
    “Miss Bradman—if I may?”
    Atwood held out an arm, almost touching her hand. Then he swiftly and gracefully interposed himself between Arthur and Josephine—so that when Arthur said, “Hold on a moment, Atwood,” he found himself suddenly face to face with Dr Varley; while Josephine, without quite meaning to, or even recalling taking a step, found herself by the wall, at the back of the room, under a large ugly gilt-edged mirror, with Atwood standing quite close. Someone seemed to have dimmed the lights.
    “Miss Bradman,” he said, very seriously. “Please.”
    The words of the poem rose unbidden to her lips. Awake, awake , and et cetera et cetera . Whirling wheels of this and that. The subject of the poem was the doctrine of reincarnation: the journey of the soul up through the various heavens towards God, and down again into the body; through the House of Venus, with its bright hot gardens, through the silent Caverns of the Moon. It had been written under the influence of a great deal of Greek philosophy, and some long conversations with a friend—born to parents in the civil service—about the doctrines of the Hindus. It was all rather overheated. The fact was that she was rather embarrassed by it now; it had been published in a small Cambridge magazine and it had never crossed her mind that it might surface again. She looked for Arthur—he’d somehow entirely lost sight of her, and was peering around with his wine-glass still in his