To Here and the Easel

 

By THEODORE STURGEON

 

 

Up here in the salt mine I’ve got a log jam to break.

 

And that about expresses the whole thing. I mix pigments like I mix metaphors; so why not? Who’s a writer?

 

Trouble is, maybe I’m not a painter. I was a painter, I will be a painter, but I’m not a painter just now. “Jam every other day,” as Alice was told in Wonderland, as through a glass darkly; “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today.” I know what I’ll do, I’ll paint for calendars; isn’t this the ‘54 boom for the 44 bust? I’ll skip the art and do handsprings eternal on the human breast.

 

So quickly: grab the brush, sling the oils; en garde! easel; you’re nothing but a square white window to me; I’ll throw a wad of paint through you so’s we can all take a good long look inside. I’ll start just here with the magenta, or maybe over here, and-

 

And nothing.

 

So down I go on the chair, I look at the canvas, it looks back at me, and we’re right where we started. Didn’t start.

 

Up here in the salt mine, as I began to say, I’ve got a log jam to break. The salt mine is my studio, studio being a name for a furnished room with a palette in it. The log jam is in my head. Why is it I can’t work just because my brains are tied in a knot7 “Giles,” the maestro, the old horse’s tail of a maestro used to say to me, “Giles, don’t paint with your brains. Paint with your glands,” he used to say, “your blood. Sweat is a pigment. Dip your brush in-”

 

Shucks, Maestro! Get me a job in a sign shop. I’ll sell everything else. Ad in the paper: for sale cheap, one set sable-tipped vesicles. One heart: ventricle, sinister; auricle, Delphic. Nine yards plumbing with hot and cold running commentaries, and a bucket of used carmine, suitable for a road-company Bizet-body.

 

Was a painter, will be a painter, ain’t a painter. Make a song of that, Giles, and you can die crazy yelling it like Ravel chanting the Bolero. Ravel, unravel. Giles’s last chants.

 

Ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta pow! Ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta now!

 

You better shut up, Giles, you’re going to have another one of those dreams.

 

Well, I’ll have it anyway, won’t I? . . . the dreams, that’s what’s the matter with me. My glands I got, but my brains, they keep running off with me, glands and all. No not running off; more like a jail. I used to be a something, but I’m locked up in my own brains till I’m a nothing. All I have to do is figure a way out.

 

Or maybe somebody’ll come and let me out. Boy, what I wouldn’t do for somebody who’d come let me out. Anything. The way I see it, the other guy, the one in the dream, he’s locked up too. I should figure a way out for him. So maybe he’ll get on the ball and figure a way out for me. He was a knight in shining armor, he will be a knight in shining armor, but he ain’t nothing but a nothing now. There shall be no knight. He got a prison turns night into eternal afternoon, with dancing girls yet.

 

I should get him out of a spot like that? What’s the matter with a castle on a mountain with dancing girls?

 

On the other hand a knight who was a knight and who wants to be a knight is just a nothing, for all his dancing girls, if you lock him up in a magic castle on a magic mountain. I wonder if his brains are working str—

 

* * * *

 

—aight because mine are sore churned. Aiee! and here the echoes roll about amongst the vaults and groinings of this enchanted place. No sword have I, no shield, no horse, nor amulet. He has at least the things he daubs with, ‘prisoned with him. And yet if he would paint, and cannot, is he not disarmed? Ay, ay . . . aiee! we twain are bound, and each of us enchanted; bound together, too, in some strange way, and bound nowhere. And whose the hardest lot? He has a brush; I have no sword, and so it seems his prisoning is less. Yet I may call my jailer by a name, and see a face, and know the hands which hold the iron key. But he, the ‘prisoned painter, languishes inside himself, his scalp his fetters and his skull his cell. And who’s to name his turnkey?

 

Mine I can name; he comes now, soft leather awhisper on marble, his very stride abhorrent magic, the pressures of the unalive against the never-living. Atlantes, hated Atlantes, of the soft eyes and stone mouth, Atlantes who, controlling me, would alter fate itself.

 

“Rogero, is all well with thee? Such a cry . . . like a great wind tearing the rocks.” (His beard is full, he is too wise, he has no soul.)

 

“Ay, all is well!” I tell him scornfully. “Would I were such a wind, to tear and be torn on the rocks, and gladly, under the open sky; and never again to know a slow death of silks and sweets and boredom, the like of this . . . give me my sword.”

 

“Ay, I will. And an enchanted shield to blind thine enemies, and a steed to master earth and air; this castle to shelter thee and all in it for thine own, and my powers for thy convenience—and all for a word.”

 

Atlantes is tall; yet, rising, I may make him lift his beard to face me. Going to him, thunder-furious, I may come close, yet unlike other men he will not flinch. I may not strike him, nor anyone here nor any thing, so cautiously is he bemagicked. “For a word!” My voice stirs the hangings and sets the great stone halls athrum. “You call my faith a word, my fealty, my every drop of blood and all my days. I will never be your knight, Atlantes.”

 

And of all things, I hate his smile. “Thee will, Rogero, unless thy choice is to languish here forever instead. My plans for thee are better ones than fate dictated,” he says, and laughs at me. His voice booms inside my skull as my voice boomed a moment ago within the castle. “This is thy destiny, knight: that a maiden shall free thee, and that through her thou shalt embrace a new faith of sobriety and humility, and spend thy days accursed with earthbound slowness like a tortoise, dressed like a wren-hen; swordless and somber and chained.”

 

I think about this, and look at the carvings, the silks, the aromatic mounds of fabulous fruits. At last, “Maiden?” I ask.

 

“Just the one for such adventures,” he says laughing again, for he has trapped me into responding. “And a just return for thy kind of stubbornness. She shall hold her faith a greater thing than thy flesh; she shall prefer to walk like a peasant rather than be borne like a gentlewoman; she shall scorn satin and lace and cover herself like a winterbound tree earth-hued and hard-barked. And worst of all, she shall have more brains than thee.”

 

“Surely you speak of some afterlife, some penance for a great sin!”

 

“Na, lad! Thine afterlife is in other hands than mine. ‘Tis all thy destiny, lad. Thou may’st not take whatever part of it that pleases thee, and cut the rest to fit thy fancy. The maid will not come here; but should she come here she shall not free thee; but should she free thee, thou wilt indeed finish thy life like a clip-winged hawk, hobbling about amongst the sweating serfs and calling them thine equals.”

 

He reasons right; and fury from inside me pounds my hair-roots. And as the anger mounts, my mind’s aswirl again; I seem to be here in this hall with the wizard, yet there, in the dream, in that dusty box of poverty and miracles inhabited by the painter who may not paint. I fight against it, even clinging to this hated hall, holding to the familiar enchantments like Atlantes’ hippogriff and unbearable shield, his castle set in everlasting afternoon, and the silent and invisible chains by which he holds me; these, to me, are real, for all they are magic, and not beyond understanding like the painter’s chamber with its window overlooking swift horseless chariots, its squat black demon-sculpture which first shrills, then speaks with the voices of people outside the room; its music box no bigger than my two fists, with the glowing golden eye and the sound, sometimes, of a hundred musicians; and all the marvels which are part of his poverty. Again I am he, myself, and he again one, the other, then both, then neither, and again my brains churn in transition. My mouth holds the aftertaste of grapes and mead, then the blue smoke he sucks constantly from his little glowing white sticks; I taste one, the other, both, neither.

 

I turn from Atlantes and his hated smile and throw myself across the yielding mound of silks and furs. And far away I hear the golden clarion of a bell, the great gong of the castle’s magic gate. I hear Atlantes’ odd gasp, half surprise, half pleasure; I hear his soft feet on the hard marble. Who comes, who comes a-ringing, challenging, and unwanted—and unafraid of this castle and its many devils? If I am the knight, Rogero, I will watch from the window; if I am Giles, the painter, and I think I am, I will let the goddam doorbell ring. Whoever heard of a doorbell in a magic castle? What magic castle?

 

Here’s a dirty bed, and there a dirty window, and over yonder the cleanest canvas yet; now wait, wait—Giles is my name, paint is my trade, if I was a knight, I’d have me a blade. Give me my sword!

 

What sword? Will you for God’s sake get away from that doorbell so I can hear myself think? I almost had it then, that business about the knight, whoever he is—or is he me?—and his magic mountain, or is that really a furnished room? Ah, shaddap with that doorbell already!

 

“Whaddayewant?”

 

All it does, it rings.

 

“Who is it?”

 

Ring, ring.

 

All right, you asked for it, I’m going to snatch that door open, I’m going to haul off, no questions asked, and punch the nose that’s ringing my doorbell. Twist the knob, snatch the door, knock the ringer, to the floor. Blam, a dead ringer.

 

So sometimes a tenth of a second is as long as a paragraph or your arm. The door is open and I’m standing still and tight like a kid looking through a knothole, being with and of the ball game but standing quiet, watching. I watch my hand fly through the door, making a fist on the way, I watch it reach her cheekbone and curl and compact there, pudgy and hard. Back she goes, not falling but standing straight, across the narrow lighted hall and against the wall, wump-thump! She is a little brown thing with hair unwonderful, beautiful lashes opening now to make her eyes round and glazed, and that’s about all there is to her. “Mmmmmm,” she says, and slowly slides down the wall to sit, slowly bends her head to one side, the hair ahang like a broken wing. “Well I told you to get away, ringing that bell!” “Mmmm,” she breathes.

 

So I scoop her up, and up she comes, light as a leg o’ lamb and common as cabbage, and I kick the door closed and I throw her on the dirty bed, akimbo-crumpled and immodest as a dropped doll, and who cares?—not the artist, who’s seen better and wastes no time on the likes of this; not the man, for he is, as the saying goes, not quite himself just now. Here’s a dry paint rag to be wet at the sink and wrung out, and pressed against the smooth beige-brown brow over the smooth lids with the ‘tender row of feathers over the seal . . . lashes, I will admit, lashes she has. She has damn-all else but my God! those lashes.

 

And the rag, coming away, leaves a stain on the brow, verdigris. One can pretend she is a brazen head, skinned with old silk, and the bronze staining through. But only until her eyes open; then there is no pretense, but only a dowdy girl on my bed, a pallor ‘pon my unpalatable pallet. She gazes past the green-brown stain and the anger of her brutalized cheek, and she has no fear, but a sadness. “Still nothing?” she murmurs, and I turn and look with her, and it’s my empty canvas she is sad for and “Still nothing,” half whispering about.

 

“I am going to punch your face again.” It is a faithful promise.

 

“All right, if you will paint.”

 

“I’ll paint or not, whatever I feel like,” I am saying in a way that makes my throat hurt. Such a noise it makes, a Day-Glo fluorescent dazzle of a noise. “Giles is my name and paint is my trade, and you keep your nose out of it. Your nose,” I say, “looks like a piece of inner tube and you got no more side-silhouette than a Coca-Cola bottle. What you want to be ringing my doorbell for?”

 

“Can I sit up?”

 

By which I discover I am hanging over her close, popping and spitting as I bellow and peal. “Get up, get out!” I touch my neck and the scarlet swelling of an artery there, I spin to the easel to strike it but cannot touch it, so go on to the wall and drive my fist against it. It is better than a cheekbone which hardly leaves a mark.

 

“Oh please, don’t hurt yourself. Don’t,” she says, her voice high and soft-textured around the edges, like light through a hole in worn velvet, “don’t!” all pitying, all caring, “don’t be angry . . .”

 

“Angry I am not,” I say, and hit the wall again, “angry; I’m a devil and dangerous to boot, so don’t boot me. You,” I say, pointing at her, and there is blood on my hand, “are a draggletail; bad lines, wrong tone, foreground distracting—” (that would be my easel)—”background unappetizing.” (That would be my bed). “The whole thing’s not composed, it’s—it’s —decomposed. Where’d you get that awful dress?”

 

She plucks at it, looks at her hand plucking, makes a faint brief frown, trying to remember. She can’t remember, and she is not afraid, she is only trying to answer my question.

 

“Well don’t bother; I don’t care where you got the dress. What do you want?”

 

Up come the lashes. “I want you to paint again.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Don’t, don’t,” she whispers. “You’ll hurt your throat. I know everything you’ve painted. You’re getting good; you’re getting great. But you don’t paint any more.”

 

“I asked you why; you didn’t say why, you just said what happened.” She looks at me, still not afraid, still puzzled. This girl, I think, is not only homely, she is stupid. “I asked you why—why? What do you care?”

 

“But I told you!” she cries. “You were going to be great, and you stopped. Isn’t that enough?”

 

“No, not for people. People don’t want things like that, greatness, goodness.” I begin to be more angry at people than angry at myself. Much better, Giles—much better. “People want their work done easily. People want kisses and to feel important. People want to be amused and to be excited safely. People want money. Do you want money? Here’s a quarter. Here’s forty cents, even. Get out of here, people.”

 

“I don’t want money. I just want you to paint again.”

 

“Why?”

 

Down go the lashes, away goes the voice like a distant wind. “I saw them clustered around your Spanish picture, Candlelight Malaga—two young people, holding hands very hard, very quiet; and an old man, smiling; and there was a little boy tugging at a woman’s sleeve: ‘Ma? Ma?’ and when she said, ‘Yes, dear,’ she kept her eyes on the picture so he cried. I saw a man come away from Garret’s, where your Smoke was hanging, and he laughed and said to all the strangers, ‘All I have to do is tell her: she’ll love me, it’s right there in the picture.’ “ She spreads her square unwomanly hands to say, “That’s what I mean, it’s proved.”

 

I don’t care about the people, the crying child, the man who speaks to strangers, and all the rest of them. I never painted for them, I painted for—for—but it wasn’t for them. So they’re all intruders, and for them I’ve done enough, too much already. If what they have taken was really in the pictures, they have robbed me. If what they took was not there, they are fools. Must I paint for thieves and fools?

 

All this comes to me clearly, but there is no way to say it to the girl. “It’s for those things,” she says, as if my silence means I am agreeing with her. “So paint again.”

 

“Paint, how can I paint?”

 

“Why not? What’s the matter?”

 

“It’s my head:” I hold it, hard. My elbows knock together; I speak at her, peek at her through the wedge. “I’ll tell you because it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll tell you,” I say painfully, “because you don’t make any difference.” (And oh, no, she wouldn’t wince.) “When I painted, I was Giles, Giles yesterday and Giles today, so that where I stopped I could start, and even find the stopping place by tomorrow. And tomorrow I’d be Giles, and knew it so well I never thought about it. Now . . . now I’m Giles. Before that I was— somebody else, and before that I was Giles again. And being Giles now doesn’t matter, because soon I’ll be someone else again, and after that, Giles. You don’t understand that.”

 

“No,” she says. “Neither do you.”

 

“Right, so right; the first right thing you’ve said, no compliments intended, whatever’s-your-name.”

 

“Brandt.”

 

“Brandt. Miss Brandt, surely, there being limits beyond which the most foolish of men will not go. Painting, Miss Brandt, is a thing having a beginning, a middle, and an end; and the beginning is part of the end of the painting before, and the end is part of the beginning of the next picture. I am Giles, and being Giles I suppose I could paint; but before—an hour or a while ago—say when you were ringing my doorbell, you and your fat nerve—I was somebody else. And soon my brains will scramble and words will mean two things or three, and yonder is either a naked canvas or a far granite wall, and under me a dirty bed or a mound of silks and furs, and what I want will be to paint or to regain my sword; I will be Rogero and Giles, one, the other, both neither; until suddenly Giles is gone, the easel, the painting—no, not gone, but like a dream, not really remembered because not really real.”

 

“Let Rogero paint,” says the fool girl as if she believes me.

 

There’s a noise like one-third of a scream, one-half of a howl, and it’s mine. “Rogero paint? He can’t paint! He couldn’t believe in it, couldn’t think it, wouldn’t know a tint from a T square. Listen, you; listen to me: can you imagine me as a knight, imprisoned on a magic mountain, surrounded by spells I not only believe in—I must because they’re real—jailed by a magician who rides a hippogriff? A hippogriff, Miss Unimportant Q. Brandt, you hear? A shining hippogriff whose dam was a brood mare and whose sire was a gryphon—a gryphon whose mother was a lion and whose father was an eagle. This hippogriff is real, real as the spells, real as the magic mountain, real as the knight that you, Miss Interfering W. Brandt, can’t imagine me being.” (Have I been climbing, running? I am out of breath.) “To that knight,” I say when I can, “my telephone and my radio are laughable wonders without foundation in fact, my inability to paint is of no importance except to give me his sympathy; he too is captured and fettered. He can do as little with my brushes as I might do with his sword. And you, Miss Unbeautiful Brandt, could only be the most piddling of small nastinesses intruding into his unbelievable fantasy. Now you know; now I’ve told you. There’s nothing you can do, nothing you can believe, and your coming here or not coming means nothing. If you came to help, you’ve failed. If you came to fight something, you’re beaten.” 

 

There is a time for wondering, wondering what someone will say, and this is it, and it is good. Good as anything could be now, where that is real or this is real, never both. For I lie under a weight and I cannot move it, and when it disappears I am no longer myself, and it is good to defeat someone, something, even an unimportant, unlovely girl; even when in the defeat there can be no victory for me, nor a lessening of the weight. So I wait, wondering in which of several possible ways she will acknowledge her defeat; and here it comes from the usual lips and the eyes behind the unusual lashes; here:

 

“May I use your phone?”

 

Because I said she doesn’t matter, I may not let this matter either; I step away from the phone and turn my back, and soft footsteps pass me and soft fingers take up the hard phone; there’s a chorus of clicks, composed in syncopes, seven measures long. And a ring, and a ring.

 

What portals open to this lady’s ringing, this Brandt for the burning? What dilates to this dialling, this braw, bricht, moonlicht nictitation? My God, my God, here it comes again, the words like lyings in their layers, and I am he, and he is—either or, both, neither. Of these, “or” is king; I wear a coat d’or, that dry, exclusive little word. For we are desiccated to the preposition that all men are created sequels. The “or” is golden but my heart has been read, my mind has been lead; read, lead; just the color of Floradora orange-youth.

 

“Hello,” says the telephone tinily because it can speak two syllables without moving its open mouth; “Giles,” says Miss Brandt, “just Giles,” and the telephone laughs and says, “Okay.”

 

Soft footsteps on the wooden, or is it marble floor, and the ring has been answered with a shout of laughter; and soft-footed, swift, Atlantes strides to the casement and the curtains of cloud leave the court, the mist melts away from the meadow below, the great golden gate is agleam in the sun, and gone is the gloaming. “Rogero!” he cries (but am I not Giles, imprisoned in a dream, who says he is where a felon needs a friend? Aiee! Sharper than a serpent’s truth is an ungrateful Giles!) “Rogero, come and see thy destiny!” and in Atlantes’ laugh lies such a triumph, such a scorn, I can only come and see. I go to stand beside him.

 

To either hand are buttresses of weather-hammered stele; before me the castellated wall like a cliff, like a sea becalmed and stood on edge, falls to the courtyard. Away and down and away rolls the magic meadow to its lower margin, mighty walls patrolled by poisoned gnomes. And when I see the gate I am myself again; Rogero, ‘prisoned knight, hungering for that craggy path beyond the gate.

 

“Thy destiny, knight—you see it?”

 

I look again; and there like a mole under a monument is a small brown person, dun and dowdy. In one hand is a crooked staff little changed from its soil-sprung origins, and it is this which now again strikes the golden bell and sends its clang and hum to shake the shining air. “My destiny?”

 

He laughs again; there is battle in such laughter. “Look again!” With thumb and finger he makes a circle, and thrusts the hand before my face, and through that circle I see the gate —but not from the mountaintop, but as if I stood but twenty paces away. And though his magic is despicable to me, I yet must look.

 

Silently, for a long time I gaze. At last I say, “Of all you have told me of my destiny, magician, I see but one thing to bear you out, and that is, that yonder mudball is a maiden, for it is unthinkable that such a one could be anything else. As to the rest, it is not possible that fate should have stored for me anything so . . . unadorned.”

 

“Ah, then thee need only swear fealty to me, and we will squash this beetle together.” The bell rings again. “If not, I must do it myself, and keep thee bound as thou art. But one or the other must be done, for that rude clanging is indeed the voice of thy fate, and that barefoot damsel has come as fate dictates, to challenge me and set thee free.”

 

“She challenges you!”

 

“Ay, lad, with nothing but that crooked staff and the homespun cassock beneath which she generously hides her uninteresting limbs. Oh, and a piddling faith in some unimportant system of gods.”

 

“The staff is enchanted, then.”

 

“No.”

 

“She’s mad!”

 

“She is.” He laughs. “So tell me, good fool: wouldst go to her and spend thy days with her, swordless, horseless, tending the plaguey brats of peasants and slaves? Or wouldst thou ride with me and turn her into a damp spot on the meadow, and after, own the earth?”

 

“I’ll choose, wizard, but a choice of mine own devising. I’ll not go to her nor ride with you. I shall stay here and watch thy bravery and thine historic victory over that little brown she-monk, with her dried tree-branch arrayed against nothing but thy magic steed, thy mighty armaments, and thine army of gnomes. And when she is vanquished-”

 

“Thee would see her vanquished?” he mocks. “Thy last chance to be free? Thy destiny contains no other savior.”

 

“When she is vanquished, come back to me that may spit in thy face and tell thee that of my three possible hells, I choose the one which can give thee no pleasure.”

 

He shrugs and turns away from me. At the door he gives me his evil smile. “I knew that one day thee’d call me ‘thou,’ Rogero.”

 

I snatch up a heavy censer and hurl it. With a crash it stops in mid-air before him and, broken, falls at his feet. His smile is a laugh now. “Be certain, wizard, that I use not the ‘thou’ of an intimate, but that of an animal,” I roar, and he laughs again; and surely one day, when I find a way, I shall kill this clever creature. I go to the casement.

 

Far below, I can still see the gate and the shining wall. The gnomes file away and down out of sight; and there, one fragile hand on the golden bars, the other holding the staff, the girl clings peering. Her courage is too foolhardy to be admired and her strength too small to be considered at all; surely Atlantes need only laugh once (that thunder of evil) or raise his brows, to shrivel up this audacious sparrow.

 

There on the brow of the flying buttress stands Atlantes, the wind whipping his figured mantle, the sun all startled by his jewels.

 

He raises a hand and turns it, and the gate, so far below, so far away, stands open. Nothing as massive as those golden bars should move so swiftly and noiselessly; the tiny figure at the entrance nearly falls. The girl stands in emptiness, the gate looming about her, the rocky hill behind her, and high and massive over her, Atlantes’ castle crowned by the glittering magician himself. She is very small and very alone as she begins to mount the slope.

 

Atlantes, laughing, claps his hands twice-

 

And from a copse in the meadow comes a thunder of wings, and a glory. There with an eagle’s cruel head and the foreclaws of the mightiest of lions; with the splendid haunches of a stallion and golden hooves—there rises, there floats, there hurtles the hippogriff. His cry ripples the grass; it is a clarion, a roar, and a scream, and through it and through it is a thing which makes my heart melt as never a woman could do, and mine eyes are scalded with pity and fellowship. For he, even he, the hippogriff is enthralled; and with all his soul he hates his master!

 

I am glad there is no one by, for I weep like a child. I am a knight, and I know my merits; yet everything splendid is behind me. My shackles may not be broken, and my very destiny is without beauty. Yet here before me is beauty crystallized, shaking the world with its piteous, powerful protest . . . crystallized? Nay, alive, alive as a man could never be. See the sun on his golden plumes, oh see his purple flanks ... he is more than I can bear to look on, to think on ... I shall have him, mount him!

 

But if he sees me, knows my heart, I know not, for he sweeps past and hovers, and the top of the buttress takes him like a cupped palm. From the parapet Atlantes takes a curious shield, with its cover of soft bat skins cleverly pieced. He buckles it to the hippogriff’s harness, then with a hand on the parapet and a hand on the shield, he climbs to the great beast’s back; and oh! I am proud that the steed kneels not for him.

 

Atlantes leans forward and speaks, and what his word is I may not hear, but the animal’s sweet, strong pinions spread and flick the stone but once, and skyward they ride.

 

In a great circle the hippogriff wheels, with Atlantes leaning from the saddle. His piercing eyes, and all his magic to aid him, must discover any invisible armament she might have; and she must have none, for I hear his distant laughter as he leans over his steed’s neck to speak another secret command. The wings go up together and hold like a great wedge, and down they drop just to the height of her head, and with a single thrust and the sound of soft thunder, their speed is checked and they are meadow-borne. Fifty paces away, the girl drops her staff and waits, weaponless.

 

Tiny and evil, Atlantes’ mirth comes to me on the wind. He swings down from the beast’s broad back, unbuckles his shield, and with a deft twist casts off its cover.

 

Now, he stands between me and the girl so that the shield faces away from me. Were it any other way, I should have seen nothing; this I knew when I saw the blaze of light which fanned out and down; when I saw birds swing and flutter and fall, and a stag turn away and blunder into a tree trunk. I had heard of this shield, but until now I had not seen it. In unspeakable ways, its gilded surface had been polished until it struck blind any who saw it. This, then, and the hippogriff, are what Atlantes brings to bear against one girl’s fragile madness. Ah, a mighty magician he, and confident.

 

Beaten and dazzled, she stands frozen, waiting for—no, not mercy; she cannot expect that. Waiting, then, for him.

 

The work of the shield is done. He covers it and confidently he strides down the slope to her. If he speaks, I cannot hear; I doubt he does, for he knows I am watching, and he will want me to understand. He stoops to pick up the useless staff she has dropped, and thrusts it into her hand; he takes her by the shoulders and turns her about to face the gate; he steps back, then throws up his shaggy head and bellows with laughter. Such dismissal of the blind thing might have been predicted; instant death would have been, for him, too gentle a thing. And so he stands, laughing, impregnable even to such strength as mine, with the invisible wall his spells have built about him; cruel and victorious—ah, a mighty magician indeed!

 

So, defeated, she moves toward the door . . . door? the gate of gold . . . but no, it is not longer a meadow, but a room where I keep my easel and my . . . and now I see them both, the room and the meadow, as if one were painted upon glass and through it I saw the other; and which? which the painting? Aiee! my brains are mixed and muddled again, I am one, the other, both, neither. I see a curtain of sky with mountains for its ragged hem ... a dirty wall, with one small bright spatter of my blood where I struck it, and the dazed dun maiden raising her staff, which is a small blue book with gold letters on it. “But you’re blind!”

 

Miss Brandt has a twisted smile. Her teeth are no better and no worse than the rest of her, and not to be compared with her lashes. “I’ve been told that before, but I don’t think I am. This is for you—here!” and she gives me the book.

 

Before or behind my eyes there’s a flash, too bright; I think it’s a hippogriff. Up here in the salt mines I stand and shiver until the crazy thing passes; I open my eyes slowly and secretively so that I can snatch a reality and make it real. And Miss Brandt is here (or still here, I forget which) and the meadow and the hippogriff become a memory again (or maybe a dream.)

 

“Are you all right?” Her voice and her hand touch me together.

 

“Stay away from me! I’m crazy, don’t you know that?” (Her lashes are up.) “You better get out of here. I’m liable to do practically anything. Look, you’re already getting a black eye.” I’m yelling again. “Aren’t you afraid? Damn you, be afraid!”

 

“No.”

 

It’s a very puzzling thing, the way she should be dressed like a monk, and be holding a crooked stick; but that was a small blue book—that’s right. I’m shaking my head, or is it a shudder; the girl and the wall and the door blur by me and my teeth are side-sliding, making a switch-frog sound. It can be halted by holding the heels of the hands on the halves of the head very hard . . . and slowly saliva is swallowed . . . libation, libration, liberation, and quiet at last. In that moment of stillness, when at last I am here altogether, I know that my . . . dream, the Rogero thing, whatever it is . . . takes no time at all. For she was at the phone when it began, that last time, and all those things had happened to Rogero while she hung up and took two steps behind me . . . yes, and I heard the steps. So when I become Rogero again, no matter what happens here, how many hours it takes, I shall see Atlantes and the vanquished maid, down and away below, and she fumbling the dry rough stick, blind, defeated destiny of mine.

 

So open your eyes to here and the easel and Miss Brandt who is not afraid. Hold out the hand with the book. “What’s this?”

 

“Money.”

 

It’s a checkbook, sky-green and very disciplined and trackless inside, and sturdy and blue outside. “Blank checks.”

 

“Cartes blanches,” she smiles; and this is no place for smiling. So just wait, and the smile will go away. Ah. Unsmiling, she says, “It’s money; all you want. Just fill in a check and sign it.”

 

“You’re crazy.” But she shakes her head gravely.

 

So: “Why bring me money?”

 

“You can do whatever you want now.”

 

“I can’t paint. Do you think you can make me paint by giving me money?”

 

When her tongue touches her lips, they are the same color. No one, no woman, should be like that. Such a mouth could taste nothing, take nothing. It says, “Not if you don’t want to. But you can do all the other things you want to do—all you have ever wanted to do.”

 

What else have I ever wanted to do but paint? There must be something. Oh, there is, there is; I never had a chance to— to—and then my hand is crushing the book, the book of excellent quality which yields only slightly and, when my hand opens, is bland again. “It’s just paper.”

 

“It’s money. Don’t you believe me? Come with me. Come to the bank. Write out a check and see.”

 

“Money. How much money?”

 

Again: “All you want.” She is so very certain.

 

“What for?”

 

“Whatever you like. Anything.”

 

“I didn’t mean that.” Things are becoming real as real now. “When you take money you give something; you always give something, a painting or a promise or-”

 

Her head turns briefly, a little, right, left, right, her eyes steady on me, so sliding between the lashes. “Not this money.”

 

“Why are you giving me money?” (You know, Giles, you’re frightened?) “What I can do for money mostly is paint. But not now. Not now.”

 

“You don’t have to paint. Not unless you want to, and then not for me. Giles, maybe you can’t paint because you want to do other things. Well, do them. Do them all; finish them until they’re all done and there’s only one thing left. Maybe then you can work again.”

 

“Then the money’s for painting!”

 

Oh, she is so patient; oh, how I hate anyone as patient as that. “No. It’s just for you. Do whatever you want. I don’t want the money and I don’t ever want it back. It isn’t mine to begin with, so why should I care about it?”

 

“But you’d care if I didn’t paint again.”

 

The fringes fall, the lashes hide the ordinary eyes. “I care about that now. I’ll always care.” And now she has the door open. “Come to the bank. Come get your money. Then you’ll believe me.”

 

“The bank, yes, and then what? Go with you, I suppose, and you’ll tell me what to buy and where to go and how to-”

 

“It’s yours to do as you please. Now will you come? I’ll leave you at the bank if you like.”

 

“I like.”

 

But no, this doesn’t hurt her, and no, she is not angry; there’s only one thing that touches her, and that one thing reaches through the closed door as we walk in the corridor, stretches down the stairs and past the lintels and the newels and the curbs and cabs and garbage all the way down to the bank; and that one thing is my white, clean, blind square eye of canvas.

 

I wonder if she knows; I wonder. Wondering under the polyglot columns corralling the bank (Doric they are, with Corinthian capitals, yes but the door is not Doric but arched and Byzantine, closed with a fanlight. I’d say from Virginia). “I wonder if you know.”

 

“If I know what?” she says, still patient.

 

“Why I can’t paint.”

 

“Oh yes,” she says, “I know.”

 

“Well I don’t, Miss Brandt. I really don’t.”

 

“It’s because you don’t know why you can paint,” she says, and her eyes are no longer patient, but waiting. It is very different.

 

And when I shake my head (because that is no answer) her eyes are patient again. “Come,” she says; and in we go from the portico, and wouldn’t you know the ceiling is red with ropes of gilded plaster draped in altogether Moorish squares.

 

And here in a low wall made of glazed marble, and flat-topped with marbleized glass, is a little black gate that swings both ways. On the other side is a polished desk and a polished pate bearing polished glasses: “Mr. Saffron,” says Miss Brandt; “Mr. Saffron” says the chock-shaped sign on his desk, gold on black.

 

Mr. Saffron’s glittering glasses tilt up; then straight and slowly he rises, like the Lady of the Lake. When he stands, his glasses lose some high lights, and I can see his eyes. They are blue and shiny—not polished, but wet; turned to Miss Brandt they are so round they go pale; turned to me they are slits gone all dark, with a little eave of pink flesh all the way across over both of them. And here is a man who is astonished by Miss Brandt and repelled by me; what a wonderful way he has of showing it, over and over again: round-pale, slit-dark, the whole time.

 

“This is Giles.”

 

Mr. Saffron gives his slits to my brush-wipe khaki pants, and to my yellow shirt with russet cuffs which is really the top of my ski-pajamas, and to my face. “You’re quite sure, Miss Brandt?”

 

“Of course!”

 

“If you say so,” says Mr. Saffron, and sits. “We’re quite ready. Will you sign this, Mr. Ahhh?” I hear a drawer move but I am sure he pulls the white card from his spotless stomach. With the shiny pen from his desk-set I write Giles.

 

“First name?” says Mr. Saffron to the card, another shiny pen in hand.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Last name?”

 

“Yes,” I say again; and up come the glasses. “That’s his name, just Giles,” Miss Brandt says quickly. And then she recites my address. Mr. Saffron writes it, putting no more of his boiled-veal fingers on the card than he has to.

 

Miss Brandt says, “You want to cash a check now?”

 

“Oh sure.” I fumble around and get the book. Miss Brandt comes close with a finger. “You write the date there, and the-” But I just sit there looking up at her until she goes away. What’s the matter, does she think I don’t know how to write a check? I write the check.

 

Mr. Saffron takes the check by its two ends and it flips softly like a little trampolin. He turns it over with a brittle snap and does a squiggle with his pen. “Sixty-eight dollars. All right, the cashier will give you your money.” From his drawer he takes a yellow, ruled pad and curls down over it as if there were sudden fire in his watch pocket. Out we go through the little black gate, and when I look back he is not busy with his paper at all, but staring after us the round-pale way.

 

“Is that all you want—sixty-eight dollars?”

 

I look at her. “What would I do with more than sixty-eight dollars?”

 

Patient, patient she says, “Anything, Giles. Anything.”

 

So we go to a cage and a fierce face says in a sweet voice, “How do you want it?”

 

“Cash.”

 

“Any way at all,” says Miss Brandt.

 

So he gives me the money and we go to a marble table in the middle of the bank while I look at it. Miss Brandt says, “Is that right?”

 

“What?”

 

“Is it all there? Weren’t you counting it?”

 

“Oh no. I was just looking at it. It really is real money.”

 

“I told you.”

 

“Is there more?”

 

Again she says, “All you want.”

 

“Okay, good. Well, Miss Brandt, you can stay here or go do whatever you want.”

 

“All right.”

 

I walk away and when I get to the big door with the fanlight I look back. Miss Brandt is standing there by the table, not exactly looking my way. I come walking back. I have a feeling inside that makes the base of my nose hurt. I stop by her and look at her while I wet my lips. She has a real sunset of a shiner by now but the lashes are all right. So I tell her, “You just don’t care what happens to me now.”

 

“You know I do.”

 

“Well, why didn’t you try to stop me if you cared so much?”

 

She says, “You’re not going to do anything important just now.”

 

“With all this money? How do you know?”

 

She doesn’t say.

 

“I guess you want me to come running back to you so you can take care of me.”

 

“No, Giles, truly,” she says in that absolutely certain way. “You don’t understand. I’m not important. I’m not trying to be important. I just don’t matter in any of this.”

 

“Not to me.” Why does she make me so mad anyway? “So what is important?”

 

“Why you could paint. Why you can’t paint. That’s all.”

 

“Well, the hell with that for now. Well—maybe I’ll see you around.”

 

She sort of shrugs. I just go. Maybe I want to turn around but I don’t. There’s something in my head about how do I get in touch with her if I should want to, but the hell with that too.

 

By all the paint pots of perdition, nobody’s ever going to make Giles admit he’s a part of the works, like she does. People like her, all they do is go around believing in something and trying to trap other people into believing it too. “I just don’t matter in any of this.” What kind of a way to get along is that, the silly bitch?

 

I get out of line of the bank door and then go across the street and stand in a low areaway where I can watch her when she comes out. From now on by God my business is my business. Who does she think she’s brushing off?

 

It’s getting chilly out, but who cares? I’ve got lots of time. Lots of money. Lots of patience. Miss Brandt, now, she’s really got patience. On the other hand, all God’s chillun got patience. Will you look at that bank, now; those big fat pillars are doing just what? Holding up a pseudo-Parthenonic frieze, that’s what. That’s really patience. Year in, year out they stand there holding it up and nobody knows it’s there but the starlings. Patience—look at the work that went into carving all those figures, that fat, baggy nude in the middle clear down to the chow dogs or lions or whatever they are at the ends. Stiacciato, they call that work, the lowest form of relief, and that fat one in the center, she sure would be. So they in turn are patient, the hodgepodge of Hermes and Demeters and blind Justices, holding still for the starlings. And when it’s cold the starlings freeze on the marble stool, and when it’s warm they stool on the marble frieze, and the meek shall inhibit the earth.

 

Oh holy Pete what’s happening to my head . . . listen, Giles, hold on to this area rail and keep your wall eyes on that bank and don’t go off into no magic mountains. Watch that clock over the door. Watch it? I can hear it! Well listen to it then and keep your head in the here and now and don’t let yourself go splitting the definitive. That, now, is a sick clock, it must be three hours slow, and listen to it moan. Oh I know a bank where the wild time groans . . . Hang on, Giles boy; think of something else, like San Francisco where the second-story men from across the Bay are called berkelers, and the Golden G— no! Think of the statue down the block, the Mayor’s father on a horse, that’s in the papers every other day should they move it or not . . . My father’s horse has many mentions . . . and in the bank, now, Miss Brandt is leaving, see the gate is open and agleam in the sun as she stumbles on stones; it is as if Atlantes’ mirth alone were bending her down to be crushed like a tree in a thunder-wind. And across the street—but meadow, meadow’s the word—the blue-black helmets of the beastly gnomes show as they watch this . . .could it be called a challenge? Ay; but a battle, no; only a defeat.

 

All this in a flash of stern anger, and then—yea, she is sinking, twisting about as if to fall at his feet . . . then up she comes in a whirl, her crude staff invisible, lost in speed, and with a whip’s crack, the staff . . . Aiee!

 

For a moment I cling to the casement, scrabbling like a cat half-fallen from a wall; in that incredible moment I have leaned forward to shout and have all but pitched out through the window; and what of my destiny then?

 

Back at last and looking outward:

 

And the gate is lead, and shrunken, and the gnomes but a herd of goats; I stand not on a mighty parapet, but on the roof of a byre. Gone are the swan pools, the great gray halls, the soft-footed dancers and the grape-girls. Atlantes, mighty Atlantes, lies on his back with his eyes glazed and the bright blood flowing from his broken head . . . lying, aiee! like a goatherd after a bottle-fight on market day. And his steed— but horror itself! has she then turned the hippogriff into a milch cow? May the mandrake curdle her bowels if she’s harmed my hippogriff!

 

Ah but no; there he stands, the blazing beauty, and throws back his eagle’s head, and hurls his joy away to the farthest mountains. I mingle my shout with his, leap free of the wall, and run and tumble down the meadow.

 

In a transport I stretch myself against the unenchanted grass, and twist and turn in it until I can smell its sweet green ichor; and in just such a turning mine eyes fall upon her who stands meekly by, her two hands folded about the piece of her broken staff, her eyes downcast—but not so far they see me not.

 

“But ‘tis thee, my warrior-maid!” I roar. “Here to me lass, and I’ll buss thee well for thy trouble!”

 

But she stands where she is, so I must go to her. That at least I can do; has she not set me free?

 

(Or is she here to imprison me again? Destiny, now, is not fragile; yonder’s a fractured magician for proof. Still-) “How do they call thee, maid?”

 

“Bradamante,” says she; now, the Arabs breed a long-maned horse, and in the distance that silken banner on their necks looks like this maid’s lashes close to.

 

“Well, Bradamante, I owe thee my freedom if not my life. And should I pay the reckoning, what would thee do with them?”

 

Up to me she looks, with a deep calm which destroys my reckless smile; and up past me she looks further; and she says gently, “I would do the Lord’s will with them.”

 

“Call me not Lord!” I cry; this creature embarrasses me.

 

“I was not.” Quiet as ever, her voice, yet somehow she chides me. “I meant the Lord Whom I serve, Who is King of kings.”

 

“Is He now! And what would He have thee do with a belly-hungry, prison-broke hellion of a swordless knight?”

 

“If thou wilt serve Him-”

 

“Hold, lass. Yon wizard told me a tale of thee and me betrothed, and crawling the mud like worms among worms with never a jewel to our cloaks. He said ‘twas my destiny to be freed by thee, and free me thee did. Though I can’t say how.”

 

“I but struck him with my staff.”

 

“Na, lass. Even I could never do that; he could not be touched.”

 

She gives me her hand; I take it and then follow her gaze to it. It wears a simple golden ring. Gently she frees herself and removes the ring. “The Lord sent this my way; who wears it is proof against all enchantments. I need it no longer.” The ring flashes in the sun as she casts it aside; with my quick thumb and forefinger I pluck it out of the air.

 

“But keep it, Bradamante! Thee cannot discard such a treasure!”

 

“It was given me to free thee, and thou art free. As to the future—the Lord will provide.”

 

I slip the ring upon my smallest finger, and though it is thick as her thumb, the ring clasps me like mine own. (Even without it, girl, thee’d have better fortune with an angry basilisk than thee would with me, if thee would persuade me to join thee oh thy rocky pilgrimages. But now-) “This much of my destiny is complete, then, Bradamante, and I am in thy debt. But surely the wizard was wrong about the rest of it.”

 

“It is in the hands of the Lord.”

 

“Thee doesn’t expect me to cast aside my brocades for a scratchy gown like thine, and go with thee among the peasants!”

 

“We do as the Lord directs. We do it freely and with all our hearts, and are saved, or we do it blindly until we end in darkness; but serve Him we shall.”

 

Such confidence is more unnerving than any magic. “I cannot believe that.”

 

“Will not,” she corrects me calmly.

 

“But I’ve choice! Here we stand, Bradamante, and in the next heartbeat I might slay thee or woo thee or bite thee or fall on the earth and gobble grass; and which of these things I do is for me to decide!”

 

Slowly and so surely she shakes her head. “It is in thee to serve the Lord, else I should not have been sent to thee. Choice thee has: Thee may serve Him willingly or thee may serve Him blindly; and none has a third way.”

 

“Thee cannot force-”

 

She puts up her hands. “We do not force. We do not kill. We need not. The Lord-”

 

“Thy Lord let thee kill Atlantes!”

 

“No, Rogero. He is not dead.”

 

I spring to the crumpled magician; and indeed, he is but stunned. I snatch out his own poiniard, and instantly, under its point, Bradamante thrusts her firm brown arm. “The Lord will take him in his own time, Rogero. Spare him.”

 

“Spare him! He would have killed thee!”

 

“But he did not. He too is a servant of God, though unwilling. Spare him.”

 

I fling down the blade so violently that nought but the jewelled knob at the hilt-top shows between the grass-blades. “Then I will; and having done thee the one service, I shall call my debts discharged. Art satisfied, girl?”

 

She makes my head bubble, this quiet creature; and I recall Atlantes’ scoffing words, that this dedicated beetle of a Bradamante shall think more of her faith than of my flesh, and that she shall have more brains than I.

 

Her lashes fall, and “Sobeit,” she says, and not another word.

 

I need my sword, and to get it I must turn my back on her —a good need. So up the slope I go lightly, just as if her very presence were not like a heat on my shoulder blades. I close my eyes as I spring up the smooth grassway, and it does nothing to shut her out.

 

Patience, Rogero! Down the hill, over the rise, and she’ll be forgotten!

 

And in any case, one could come back if one must . . .

 

So I let my eyes come open again, and gasp; for there stands the hippogriff, and he has never let me come so close. If I am to continue upward I must go round him, or I must move him. For a split second I falter, and his great head comes round to me; and oh, I’ve looked in the wells of Kazipon which are bottomless, I’ve followed the light of my torch in the endless caverns of Qual, and I’ve known a night when the stars went out; and never before have I looked into such depths and such reaches as the eyes in his eagle head. True bird’s eyes they are, fierce in their very structure and unreadable. Through them the beast sees—what? A soft sac of blood and bones to be a sheath for that golden beak . . . or a friend ... or a passing insect ... I should flee. I should stand. I should sidle about him and be wary. I should, I should-

 

But I shall ride him!

 

I finish my stride and go straight to him, and when my hand falls on his purple shoulder he swings his head forward and high, and trembles so that from his wings comes a sound like soft rain on a silken tent. My heart leaps so that I must leap with it or lose it, and with a single motion I am on his back and my knees have him. Aiee! such a shout comes from me, it would rival his own; it is full of the joyous taste of terror. With it I fetch him a buffet on the withers which jars me to the very neckbones, and before I can feel the blow as any more than a shock, his wings are open and thrusting, and he rears and leaps ...

 

It is a leap that never will end; fast he flies and faster hurtling higher just at the angle of his leap, and the surges of his body are most strange to a horseman. Only the glint of the golden ring convinces me that we are not involved in an enchantment; for flying sunward warms nothing, curious as it may seem, and the bright air grows cold as the hoary hinges of perdition’s door.

 

I think of poor sod-shackled Bradamante, and look back and down; but by now she is lost in that indeterminate new place between haze and horizon, and there, for all of me, she may stay. I shrug, and find that I have not shrugged away the picture of her face, which is strange, since it is hardly one worth remembering. Surely, Rogero, thou art not smitten?

 

With her? With—that?

 

Ah no, it could not be. There must be something else, something buried in the whole mosaic of our meeting. Of our parting . . . ah; that was it!

 

Atlantes is not dead.

 

That in itself is nothing; Atlantes distant is, to me, as good as Atlantes dead. But Atlantes slowly waking in the meadow, his enchantments all destroyed, his shield and steed gone— and the peaceful author of his ruin doubtless helping him to his feet with her sturdy unwomanly hands . . . this is another matter.

 

But forget it! The sly-tongued termagant could, by the time Atlantes was fully conscious, have him so morassed in debate he would forget to be angry. Bradamante has a most powerful helplessness; she attacks with the irresistible weapon of being unarmed, immobilizes the enemy by surrendering, and at last sits on his feeble form, holding by the great weight of her passivity. I need not fear for Bradamante.

 

But the ring flicks a mote of light into mine eye, and I know I have taken her last defense and left her at the mercy of the merciless, and this is small thanks indeed for what she dared for me.

 

But what else would a knight, a true knight, do?

 

One thing a knight would do, I tell myself bitterly, is to regain his sword if he lost it, and not pleasure himself with a hippogriff, however beautiful. Thou art no knight, Rogero; not yet, not again. Regain thine own holy blade, its very hilt encrusted with thy sacred promises, ere thee call thyself knight again.

 

Back, then, for the sword, and decide then about the maiden; and keep thyself armed with the thought of thy destiny —it is with her, and means soaking in meekness until I am mushy as bread in a milk bowl . . . no! by the heart of the fire in the nethermost pit, I shall get my blade and hew out a new destiny!

 

There are no reins, and I remember that the magician controlled the beast with words. “Enough, my beauty!” I cry. “Back now—take me back!” And somewhere inside a voice sniggers Thee deludes thyself with the matter of the sword; it’s the plight of the maid that drives thee. “No!” I cry, “she shall not have me! Let her King of kings save her, she’s His ward, not mine!” And I thump the hippogriff with my hard-tooled heels: “Back, my beauty, take me back!”

 

And the hippogriff tilts to the wind, and balances and sails as before, for these are not the magic words.

 

“Turn! Turn!” I bellow, rowelling him. I ball my fist and sink half of it in the feathered root of his neck just forward of the shoulder; for by this, if rightly done, one may stagger a horse. “Mule!” I shriek. ‘Turn thy spavined carcass about ere I tie a knot in thy neck!”

 

At this the eagle’s head turns about like an owl’s and the measureless eyes loom over me. Slowly the beak opens that I may see the spear tip and the scissor sides of that frightful weapon. Like a blind animal, the gray-pink tongue shifts and searches and settles again; the tongue itself is adversary enough for any soldier. Fear, however, is an assistant to safety only up to a point, and I am far past it. “Go back, aborted monster, ere I snatch out that ugly horn and crack thine eyeballs together! By the pleasure-bred blood of thy half-bred dam and the-” Thus far I rant, and he strikes. And would he had killed with the one stroke; for instead he has slipped the point of his beak between my saddle and my hams, and I am flipped, unharmed and sore humiliated, high in the air over him. I am spinning like a broken lance, or the earth is circling me head to heel, chased by a blazing band of sun. I see the glory-tinted wings below me, too small and far away; around I go and see them again closer; and again, and this time I must touch, clutch; I claw my hands and flex my legs, and turn again—and the hippogriff slips away to the side to let me plunge past him.

 

I cover my eyes and I scream; I scream till my tendons cannot bear it, sob and scream again fit to startle the starlings off every bank from here to Brookline, Mass. I recant, I’ll accept my destiny and honestly wed the little brown nun, if she’ll have me; ay, and do for her Lord what paltry dog-tricks He’ll ask of me; only make this hippogriff, this lovely, legitimate, honorable beauty of a hippogriff save me. Aiee! and I’ll lie on my back on a scaffold and paint Thee murals, Lord, and I swear never to punch Miss Brandt in the eye, or anywhere else again, if thee’ll but send me a cloud or an eagle or a parachute or a helicopter ... oh holy Pete, what a spot for him to lose his mind in and be me again. I wonder if he knows it won’t take any real time at all, where he is. And there below me the mottled earth pursues a sun-turned-rocket . . . whew. Giles old boy, don’t you shut your eyes again until you have to-”Hullo!”

 

There at the area railing stands a smut-faced urchin and a smaller but female version of himself, all eyeballs and streaky cheeks. “Gee, mister, you all right? You sick?” and the smaller one: “Canchasee, he’s dyne!”

 

“Don’t mind me, kids,” I mumble. “I just fell off a hippogriff.” I find I’m half-kneeling and try to stand, and it seems my hands are locked around the iron uprights of the railing. I stay there stooped and feeling very foolish while they watch me, and I concentrate from my stone-cold marrow up and out until at last my left fingers begin to stir. With a little more effort the hand comes free, and with it I disengage the right, one finger at a time. I straighten up then and look a while at my hands and wiggle them. “He ain’t dyne,” says the boy in a robbed tone, and his cohort says defensively, “Anyway he wuz dyne,” because her ardent hopes had made it her production.

 

Briefly, a sun flashes past, but I ignore it; I’ll be all right now. You get so you know the signs. “Here,” I say, “I’ll try to do better next time,” and I give them money, I don’t know how much but it must be enough; they beat it.

 

I put my elbows on the railing, keeping these spastic hands away from it, and look across the street. The clock hands haven’t moved any that I can see, and Miss Brandt, who was just starting out the door when my addled brains caught up with me, is pausing on the portico, the door just closing behind her. Two seconds, three maybe. My God, what a way to live!

 

Miss Brandt looks up the street and down, descends the shallow steps and turns right toward the old Mayor’s statue. When she has quite gone I cross to the bank and go inside. At the island table I write a check, and take it to the wicket where the fierce-faced man is caged. He takes the paper and turns it over with the same snap Mr. Saffron used, and that is a trick I must learn one day. “You’ll need to get this initialed,” he says. So off I go to Mr. Saffron again, and stand in front of his shiny desk until he looks up at me and makes the pink meaty ridge across and above his narrowed eyes. The man disapproves of me to the point of ecstasy, and I take this as a kindness; for it makes us both feel important. I let the check fall to him, and he looks, snaps, looks, and grunts. “All right, Mr. Ahh,” he says, and squiggles on it with his personal pen. I take the check and stand where I am.

 

“Well?”

 

“I want to know whose money this is.”

 

“Yours.” He has a way of snapping off the margins of his words as if he doesn’t want you to have a whole one.

 

“Yes, but-”

 

“The deposit is in your name; surely that’s sufficient!”

 

I look at the check. “Is there any more left?”

 

He is offended by the whole thing, but he is stuck with it. “There is,” he says.

 

“Much?”

 

“More than you can spend today,” he says. “Or this week.”

 

“Well, dammit, how much?”

 

He sort of spreads his pale-pink hands, which means, I gather, that this is not an account like other accounts and he wishes he could do something about the irregularity but he can’t. He says, “That is the one and final checkbook you get. Aside from that, there doesn’t seem to—ahh—be any upper limit. And now you’ll excuse me, I’ve a great deal to good day Mr. Mmmm.” And down he goes to his papers.

 

Well, I’ve asked enough questions to know there won’t be any answers. I go back to the wicket and slide the fierce one the check. “Half in hundreds and the rest in small bills.” He makes a long snort or a short sigh, clicks the bars between us down tight, lets himself out the back with a key, and is gone for too long, but I don’t mind about that just now. Pretty soon he’s back with a sack. He opens the wicket and starts taking stacks out of the sack and sliding them to me. The sixty hundreds go into my socks; they have elastic tops and pull up high enough. The sixty fifties fan out flat enough to go between my belly and my knit shorts, though they hump up some. Then I spend some time with the hundred and eighty twenties and tens, cramming ‘em into two side and one back pants pocket. By now I’m lumpy as a sofa cushion just out of the wet wash and I’ve collected quite a crowd. The fierce face flutes, “You’re going to run into trouble, carrying all that money that way,” as if it was a wish, and I say “No I won’t. They all think I’m crazy, and there’s no telling what a crazy man will do.” I say it good and loud, and all the people watching stop their buzz-buzz and back off a little. They make a wide empty aisle for me when I start away.

 

“Wait!” cries the teller, and punches some keys on his little machine. Coins slide down the half-spiral chute and pile up in the cup at the bottom with a cast-iron clink. “Wait! Here’s your twenty-eight cents!”

 

“Keep it!” I bellow from the door, and go out feeling a lot happier than I’ve been feeling lately. All my life I’ve wanted to leave twenty-eight cents for a bank teller, who wouldn’t put it in his pocket to save his soul, and who hasn’t got any place for it in his books.

 

Down the street there’s a big men’s shop with little letters over the door and a windowful of somber-colored suits with no creases in the jacket-arms. I look them over until I find the one with the most pockets and then I go inside.

 

It’s like a church in there, but with wall-to-wall broadloom, and the only showcases I can see are two little ones set into mahogany pillars, one with tie-clasps and collar pins, one with four hand-painted silk ties. I go look at the first one. Every velvet box has a humble little card with “the” on it: $200 the set. $850 the pair. I’m on my way to look at the ties when a tall man with a paper carnation steps out of a potted palm and stands where I have to run him down in case I’m not going to stop.

 

“What,” he says, “do you want?” The “you” is a little bigger than the other words and the whole thing sounds like he’s pretty disgusted. I tell him about the suit in the window.

 

He laughs with his mouth. “That is a three-hundred-dollar suit.”

 

“Well, drag it on out.”

 

“I’m rawtha sure we don’t carry your size,” he says, looking at my painting pants.

 

“Then we’ll hack it till it fits,” I tell him. “Come on, buster, quit stalling.”

 

“I’m afraid that-”

 

So I start yelling a little, and he backs off and bleats “Mr. Triggle, Mr. Triggle!” and from somewhere—I guess another potted palm, there’s plenty around—comes another tall man in the same sort of funeral suit, but this one’s got a real carnation. “Here,” he says, “Here-here-here. What’s this, what?”

 

“You’re selling, I’m buying. Only he don’t think so,” I tell the real carnation, pointing at the paper one.

 

The paper one says, “The gentleman—” (dirtiest word I ever heard, the way he says it)— “The gentleman is inquiring after the von Hochmann worsted in the window.”

 

The real carnation nickers. “My good man, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong-” and then I put twenty dollars in his hand. He looks at it and the other one looks at it so I give him one too. They look at each other, so I pass out two more. “Get the suit.”

 

“Won’t you step into the sample room?” says the real carnation, and you wouldn’t know it was the same man. It certainly isn’t the same voice. “We have quite a selection in-”

 

“I don’t want a selection, I want that suit in the window. That very goddam selfsame suit and not one like it.”

 

“Oh but we can’t get a suit out of the-” So I give them each twenty dollars. “Yes, sir!” says the paper one, and dives to the front.

 

“Now let’s see,” says the real carnation, pulling at his chin and trying to imagine me with my face washed. “Once we get the suit out of the way, we’ll look at some cravats, and perhaps an English broadcloth, hmmm? Handmade? Rolled collar, studs? Yes indeedy.”

 

“No indeedy. I got a shirt.” I pluck at the yellow ski-pajama top. This shuts him up without any money changing hands.

 

The other tall man comes back with the suit and we parade into the fitting room which looks more than ever like part of a funeral home, only bigger. The two of them stand in the middle of the room wringing or rubbing their hands while I step into a curtained booth and put the suit on. The pants got no cuffs yet and the coat’s too tight. I come out and they jump all over me like Hansel and Gretel on the gingerbread house. When they get to measuring the pants they find out I still got my old ones on underneath. Forty dollars fixes that up too, before they can say anything.

 

So when they’re finished chalking and pinning they want to know when I want the suit. “Now!” I roar, and before either of them can so much as “But we-” I give them money again. “How many people you got back in there, altering?”

 

“Eight, sir.”

 

“Well, here.” I give him eight twenties. “Give ‘em this and put ‘em all to work on this one suit. You’ve got nine minutes.”

 

“Yes sir,” and off goes paper carnation, breathing hard.

 

The other one says, “You said you were in the movie line?”

 

“I did not.”

 

“Ahh,” he says. “Oil.”

 

“Nup. Ladies’ wear. I put out a line of underskirts with prints of umbrellas and telephones on ‘em. You’ve seen ‘em.”

 

“I—ahh—don’t know that I have.”

 

“What?” I shout, “You never heard of a Freudian slip?”

 

“Why, I-” and after that he shuts up. He keeps looking at me.

 

They don’t get the suit ready in nine minutes but they make it in eleven. As soon as the man shows with the suit over his arm, I tell him, “Hey, I forgot. I want the left sleeve three-eighths of an inch shorter than the right one.” His jaw drops, but the real carnation says “Do it, Hopkinson.” And the other one goes out with the suit, me diving along right behind him. We get to a door about the same time. Inside is a real patchy workroom with bright lights and racks of suits, two old women and six old men. “But sir, you can’t-”

 

“Shut up and give me that,” I say, and snatch the suit. “I didn’t want the sleeve fixed, I just wanted to see these people. Listen,” I say to the whole room, “Did he give you any money just now, this guy with the paper flower?”

 

All those old people stand and blink at me till somebody says “Money?” and then they all shrug their shoulders and wag their heads. Paper flower, all nods and smiles, steps forward and says, “Why, I was going to give it to them just as soon as the suit was satisfactory,” and he takes the eight twenties out of his side pocket. I bang them out of his hand and stick them into my pants. “You were like hell, you crumb.” I go down into my sock and haul out the pack of hundreds and go around the room giving one to each of the old people. The real carnation sticks his head in just then and I tell him, “You better get that guy out of my sight before something happens around here even my money won’t fix.” The paper flower disappears.

 

I go back to the booth and this time I take off the old pants. I spread the money around through all the pockets in the suit —it’s got fourteen—and get dressed. I give the carnation three hundred dollars and my old pants. “You keep ‘em. They should fit pretty good.” I have to admire him; I can see he’s all aquiver inside, but he still walks like a bishop at a coronation as we go to the door, and as he walks he’s carefully folding my old pants, which hasn’t happened since I brought them home from Kresge’s two years ago, until they hang flat as an antimaccassar over his forearm. He opens the door for me and by God, bows. “Thank you so much, and come back to us soon, Mr. Freud.”

 

It’s close to nighttime, eating time. Around the corner and up the street is a restaurant I’ve heard about that used to be a stable. I’m just pushing through the door when in front of me there grows a soft wall made of maroon serge and brass buttons and a monstrous braided golden silk rope. I step back and look up, and it isn’t a wall, but the prow of a commodore-type doorman; and I swear he’s eight feet tall before the hat starts.

 

“Sorry, sir; you can’t go in like that.”

 

The suit, it seems, gets me a “sir” but not any courtesy in the voice. “Like what7”

 

He puts up a hand like a punching bag and taps himself on the Adam’s apple. I put up my hand and touch only my yellow ski pajama top. “Oh, the tie,” I say.

 

“Oh,” he says, “the tie.” Mimicking somebody like that, now that’s for murder; that’s worse than what Rogero called the hippogriff. “Well, you didn’t happen to notice I got no tie.”

 

He pushes out his chest. It looms up and over me like the business end of a hydraulic forging press. “I did happen to notice you got no tie,” he says, still copying my voice and you know? He’s pretty good at it.

 

“You did, for sure?” I say, and give him twenty dollars.

 

“Well, kind of one-eyed I did,” he says in a new voice which wasn’t mine and wasn’t the “sir” voice I first heard, but one which seems to come easiest of all to him. I give him another twenty, and he lets me go on in.

 

A man meets me at the inner door—quite a man, boiled shirt, tailcoat, and the magnificent head you see in college lobbies, the oil painting of the previous Dean. With one flick of his eyes—and mind you, the light’s not too good just there —he does with me what Mr. Saffron does with a check; he reads me, turns me over with a snap, puts his squiggle on me so that the inside man will do what’s absolutely correct. It must be a problem, with the new suit and the worn shoes and the dirty face and the fact that the doorman let me in; but if it bothers him he doesn’t show it. “Good evening, sir,” he says. His tone has the depth of one of those console radios they built in the thirties, when the more money you had, the more bass you bumped your belly with. “Step right this way.”

 

But I knock his elbow. “It bothers you I got no necktie.”

 

“Why—no, sir.”

 

“Yes it does.” I take out a hundred-dollar bill and fold it lengthwise and pleat it good and tight, and then I take a fifty and fold it flat and narrow, and wind it once around the middle of the hundred. Then I take the two pleated ends and spread them so I have a bow, tied in the middle. He stands there waiting for me as if people did this kind of thing all the time. “Now lend me the pin off that flower of yours.” He hands it to me, carrying it the last half inch of the way by a subtle and courteous bow from the waist. I pin the bow to the front of my yellow ski-pajama top. “A tie. Okay with you?”

 

“Quite suitable, sir.”

 

“I thought you’d like it.” I pull it off and hand it to him. “I want a table for eight on the edge of the floor.”

 

“Yes, sir. I have just the one.” Off he goes, and me after him, and sure enough, there’s a big round table. He plucks a subdued ivory Reserved card off it and sits me down. “And when do you expect the rest of your party?”

 

“I’m the rest of the party.”

 

“Very good, sir. And you’re drinking-”

 

“Brandy. Double. The kind that nobody but you knows is the best in the place.”

 

“I have just the year. Water? Soda?”

 

“Yoghurt,” I say. “About half-and-half.”

 

“Right away, sir.”

 

So I have that and a liver and oatmeal sandwich and crepes suzettes with a jubilee sauce made (by four men with three shiny capts) with those little tiny wild French strawberries, and you know? It costs eighty-four bucks to eat in that place.

 

I sit and I watch the show, and I watch the watchers watching the show. And I plan the things I shall do with more money than I can spend. I shall leave here when it is too late to hire anything and I’ll make my money rent a powerboat. I’ll leave twice the price with the owner and I’ll sink it, and never be seen again by him, so he’ll wonder. I’ll buy two islands with two mansions, and on one I’ll pretend to be a prude while through an agent I’ll lease everything but my house to nudists; and the other island I’ll populate with prudes while I go naked. I’ll buy Thomas Moore’s own harp from the Institute and build in a contact microphone and a music box which will play “Red Wing” for forty minutes at double tempo if anyone touches it. I’ll train up a man who can fascinate as many hungry people as Huey Long and as many frightened people as Joe McCarthy, both at the same time, and when he takes over he’ll pull a switch on them all and be as gentle and as poor and as strong as Jesus of Nazareth. And I’ll supply every male teen-ager with a hand-tainted pie, and every female with a totally new orgasmic term to apply to sundaes, convertibles, knobby-faced pop vocalists and shoe straps. For Bradamante a transparent lipstick so she can feel like a woman even if she doesn’t want it to show, and for Atlantes (poor little rich man) the full realization of destiny’s indestructibility.

 

Look yonder: look! There by herself, with a candle on her table, sits the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Her hair is soft sable, long, straight, fine, and thick; her eyes and cheekbones the delicate strong interacting Eurasian arch-sequence. Her nostrils are petal-textured, moving as indetectably as the shift from one aurora-pattern to the next, but sensitively in motion even from her shallow breathing as she sits still, so still . . . and surely she is the saddest woman who ever lived, or a mouth such as hers could not be sleeping so, nor the head turned and held just that way of all ways, nor the shoulders so careless and the hands so forgotten. Is she grieving from loneliness, in the knowledge that never in life can she meet her like? Or has she been hurt by a small someone, and cannot understand?

 

I raise a hand, and the Dean-faced obsolescent console drifts to me. “Who is she?”

 

“I’ll find out for you in a moment, sir.”

 

“No, don’t!” It bursts from me. “Please don’t.” (Now, why not?) “You mustn’t do that.”

 

“Very well, sir,” and as if he senses my distress, “really I won’t.”

 

“Why is she so sad?” And I don’t know I’ve spoken until he answers: “I think she has been disappointed, sir. She has been sitting there alone for a long while.” He bends a little closer, as if to add a great importance to what he has to say. “I think, sir, that she is very young.”

 

And somehow I understand precisely what he means; he means that she is frightened, but will not suggest fear in the burnished security of this moneyed place, of which he is such a piece.

 

Fear . . . there are fears and fears, depending upon one’s origins and sense of value. Seimel, who hunts tigers with a spear, faces death without fear, and I know a man who is struck numb at the sound of a key in a Yale lock; who’s to say which terror is great or small, or that it’s a small thing to be a girl who dare not leave a table because she has no money? “Well, let her go. I’ll take her check.”

 

“Yes, sir.” His glossy finish emits, like an alpha particle, a brief bright flash of approval. “Shall I take her your card?”

 

“Oh God no!” Again the thought of knowing her at all distresses me. “Just say a hippogriff flew by.”

 

Unperturbed he says, “Quite, sir,” and, as a good piece of furniture should, rolls silently and unbendingly away on his casters.

 

I wait, and I wait; and there coming in is a chinchilla coat which will be flung over a chair somewhere just under a light, and yonder a fat face laughs too loudly; the trombone, part of a chord, still gives me two notes exactly right for a girl’s inexpressible loneliness and my feelings about it, and the man with the shiny-cart moves the heel of a silver spoon deftly through the pure transparent heat springing bluely from the bubbling blood of the jubilee . . . and as if by accident, the fine Dean’s- head bows over the girl’s table and he speaks to her.

 

Her face, when she looks up, blinds me for a moment. Or maybe my tears do. She radiates no happiness—some great grief is bred too deeply into this girl’s fine bones—but there is a change which permits hands to be remembered and a mouth to live again. It could have been fear and its removal, an excision which works wonders with dogs and humans, and might, I imagine, even with nations.

 

And so she may turn her head away from sorrow, and when she does, the breath catches in my throat; in the nocturnal texture of her hair lies a single streak of silver, a hue of just the deadness, just the distance of a winter moon. No other color could treat with such precision of an inherent sorrow, and no other creature has been so correctly branded as this girl.

 

I saw motion pictures of a lily growing; shoot to blossom in a brace of seconds; and as it rose and burst, so she rises and shakes back her hair. I saw a strand of spider web drift by and away, streaming; and so she passes. I saw a bird die in the hollow of my hand, its open crystal eyes unchanging; and so I sit now unchanged, except that something is gone out of me.

 

I shall invoke Rogero, and escape from this tomb into terror; I shall not wait for a summons to his world. Better to be falling away through a shining sky with angry wings above me and a sudden quiet below, than to sit here in the meshes of my several madnesses. Insanity is only wisdom of a sort, too deeply driven for the sphincters of the mind to compass; and this is the riddle of the sphinx. Brushless Giles, the ex-painter, is (when you come right down to it) a far wiser person than Swordless Rogero, ex-knight. Put me on a hippogriff without a driver’s license and I won’t sit and bawl “Back, sir!”; I’ll push the buttons and pull the levers and watch what happens until I can back into anybody’s downhill driveway. And if words are the reins, the throttle, and clutch, then words I’ll try, until at last I have a “Gee” for him and a “Haw” for him and above all a big fat “Whoa!” Rogero, now, he’s a fool, and rather healthier than I and therefore more alive; his uncertainties are a little less well-founded in fact than mine. Whoosh! and is that the hot, gentle ignition of brandy over yonder, or the sun passing my feet? Is that polite patter halfhearted applause for the band or is it the wind in the wings of the wheeling beast above me? Catch me, catch me, good knight and I shall die gladly with thee, free of both these insupportable worlds. But I am not falling; I hang here in dusk, supported by a rushing wind, a central point for the looming earth and the hurtling sun as they rotate about me. (And if hanging thou art, why are the crags of Earth larger each time they pass thee?) Aiee, could I but die of foolhardiness, like a Bradamante challenging the powers of evil, and not thus crotch-flung in penance for the silly vapors of my foul mouth, not humiliated and screaming like a whipped serf. (Waiter, bring me an orchestra playing Rampart Street, I have fallen from Grace, who is a hippogriff.)

 

Shining one, can thee not forgive me my temper and my tongue? Is there nothing in thee which recalls the swift romp on Atlantes’ mountain, and thee dancing away from me like a playmate, sharing my joy? That is Rogero, good hippogriff, and not the furious mote who offended thee . . . I’ll beg thee no more, but pray only that thee might escape thy conscience, as I failed to do when I left my sword and my destiny with Bradamante.

 

And he comes, he comes, his wings all but folded, back-bent, beating a very buzz to fly downward faster than I can fall. And faster he is; he looms to me, blasts himself to one side so close he tumbles me anew, so that the sun is still above me, but below the mountains turn like clay on a potters wheel. The hippogriffs wings are wide now, and working weightily, and again he grows in mine eye; and now I can hear him; he is screaming, screaming . . . gods! What a terror-struck cry! Then the screaming stops, and his lion’s voice rumbles with laughter—ah, he mocks me, he mocks me, the son of ... of a mighty gryphon and a blooded mare, most beautiful of creatures. There, hippogriff: mock me, it is thy privilege; let me die, it is thy right.

 

And again the thunder of his humor; he twists his wings, one up, one down, rolling like a summer swallow; and as I fall to meet him he is on his back like a swimmer, and, blessed angel of a hippogriff, he takes me!

 

I hang from his talons like a newt, mine eyes a-pop from the pressure of his holding and the surge of his climb; and climb he must, for he has caught me in a valley, no further aloft than the height of a tall pine tree; the mountains all about are above us. He could not have waited the tenth part of a heartbeat and saved me still. He is confident and beautiful and he has a most cruel sense of humor.

 

I am lifted now to his beak; I face his eyes, and from his open maw his laughter rumbles, and I like a captured puppy plead to be set down. And indeed, had I a tail I’d wag for him; I’d whimper if I felt it would reach him.

 

He dips his head and turns it, and his beak’s about my waist. Now he lifts me, turns his head back to front, lowers me, twists that my feet may go down and my head up—and I am astride him again, perched on his shoulders a forearm’s span away from the saddle. He nudges me back, and I bump my way to the saddle like a babe on a fence-prop, bottom foremost and clumsy with fright. Not until I am firm in the saddle does he release me; indeed, for a moment it occurs to me that, purely in jest, he might bite me in twain once I think I am safe. Through my thighs I sense another thunderous chuckle at my expense. I bite my lip and cast mine eyes down, but there is no escaping his mirth.

 

Now the mountains are behind. The sea is a haze and the sky sea-colored, and where they meet there is no longer a line; by a twist of my mind I may imagine naught but sky around us in an Earthless universe, and a twist again, and it is the sea all about, up and over, my hippogriff and I the sole population of an empty bubble in a universe of water.

 

And it comes to me then, like a sending—words, odd and small; “Gee,” and “Haw,” and “Whoa!” and each carries the nostriled flavor of Giles and the smoke in his mouth. So “Gee!” I murmur—and my hippogriff wheels; “Haw,” say I, and the other way he turns. ... I can ride him, fly him! He is mine, he is mine!

 

But mine too is the humiliation, and the lesson of his laughter, cackling like a conscience. Ahead is the sea, across it adventure and freedom. Behind are the hills, and my sword, my duty, my debt, and a weaponless wench. My steed is silent, as if waiting: “So haw then, and let me be damned to my destiny,” I cry, and he swings about to tuck the distant shore under his golden chin; to take me back to my grubby fate. And grubby or not, I preen; I am a knight who will not be swayed nor turned aside; straight to my sword I will fly, to mine honor, to-

 

But below, a clot of white on the rock takes mine eye, and “Whoa!” I cry with all my heart; and the hippogriff’s bellow of laughter fairly puts whitecaps on the waves below. And down we drop, and down, the roar and crash of beastly laughter in the van, the flanks, the trailing wind of our descent. There is a peal of it for knights without swords, for true courses set and forsaken; there’s a rumbling gust of it for gratitude confessed but unpaid, and one for the man who would plan an escape for himself if he were on time to rescue a maiden in peril, or who would plant a bluebell for her if he were late, if he happened to pass that way. But the shrillest laughter, the one having the most cold gold eagle in it, was for a knight who claimed to value his sword for the vows it carried.

 

I have a moment of shame and one of fury, and then a tortured time of both together. All I need do to cut off this obscene bellowing-—ay, and gain the beast’s respect, I wouldn’t doubt—is to press my heels to his flanks, and straight to Atlantes’ mountain we’d go; to Bradamante; to my sword; to the completion of my promises and the payment of my debts.

 

And it is in the muscles of my legs to draw back those heels; it is in my heart to be humble and accept the beast’s deafening censure and cleanse myself; it is, it is, but once again I look below, and am lost; for chained to the rock is a naked woman of such unearthly beauty she can be compared only with the hooded shield I carry . . . with this difference: that whosoever looks upon this shield is blinded, but who looks upon this woman sees so clearly that he cannot live.

 

Down comes my steed and hovers, searching for a foothold on the windswept rock; and finding it, settles in. Before he is fully earth-borne I am away from him and his subsiding chuckles, slipping and scrambling to the seaward slope. Braced against the iron loops to which she is chained, I cower down close to her, cover mine eyes against that blaze, not of light, but of beauty; and when I can, I peer quickly through my fingers and drink the vision in small and frightened sips.

 

Her ankles are cruelly bound by a single hoop, hinged, hasped by the double chain which anchored it below. A smaller version of the same device was given each slender wrist, and there she lies, stretched tight against the cold rock, wet with spray, and the wind tugging her hair.

 

I touch the shackles, the chains. Anchored as they are, it seems the rock itself would lift from the sea bottom before those loops could be drawn. Turning hopelessly from this examination, I meet her eyes and the impact melts me; I fall to my knees and bow my head.

 

“Who art thou?” she whispers into the shouting wind.

 

“Rogero, a knight, come to save thee. Who has done this to thee, princess? . . . surely thou art princess . . .?

 

“Ay,” she breathes, “Angelica of Cathay, shipwrecked here on the very day the oracle at Ebuda demanded the most beautiful Ebudan maid as a sacrifice to some wrathful god. But since they had me . . .”

 

“Ebuda is that village yonder?”

 

“Ay.” Ah, but she is weary; her voice may be heard at all only because its sound was so very different; it differed, almost, from sound itself. “But go not to the village, good knight; they are barbarians and would tear thee to pieces rather than replace me here with one of their own. Best go whence thee came, and my blessing goes with thee; but I am doomed.”

 

“To die of cold and the pecks of sea eagles? I’ll die here with thee rather!”

 

“Nay, it will be quicker than that,” she murmurs. “Knowest the monster Orc?” Her eyes are calm, seaward now. As the wind tumbles her hair, I see that it is mystically marked with a stripe of cold silver; there has never been anything so lovely and far away as that swath of starshine.

 

“Orc? Oh, ay; a legend, a tale to frighten children. He is big as an island and has scales of iron and the tusks of a boar. And thou art chained here for Orc? The eagles will have thee before such a fable comes.”

 

“But he comes now,” she says calmly; and two things happen to me which will leave their mark for all my days; one, that as she spoke, grave and quite contained, her tears flowed and I knew that I saw a strength here as wondrous as her beauty; but for the tears, she might have been in her garden, half dreaming and at peace, for all her face showed it. And I turn away from her and see the second thing, the monster Orc.

 

With a shout I spin to Angelica, take her prisoned hand and on it slip my golden ring. “This will guard thee, Princess!” I cry, and my heart cries with it, only from my shield, and I stumble to the hippogriff.

 

He is ready, flexed, spread, trembling to be off; I have but one foot in the stirrup as he launches himself. The monster comes, and we fly out to meet it; and when we have flown what seemed far enough at first, there is yet another mile to go. It looms over us like a thundercloud; it rises higher and higher from the water, and there is more and still more of it, shapeless, immeasurable, and blind.

 

Blind! Swordless, lacking pike or halberd, axe or hook, mine only weapon is a giver of blindness; against this, the monster brings the only possible defense; “Blind, it is blind,” I cry, and my mount utters a shriek, part despair, but a fine part challenge, and mounts the sky to get above the creature and be sure.

 

And still it rises until we are but a wasp at a bull’s shoulder, until the black rock below is but a steppingstone to this great living hulk.

 

And the hippogriff, unbidden, folds his wings and we drop, down and down past the upright acres of filthy, streaming iron. I am past thought, incapable of anything except keeping my saddle in the weightless drop. Even my first long fall from the beast’s back had seemed not so long as this. Then out come the wings, and I groan against the pressure inside my doublet. Down we go still, the hippogriff battling the wind of our fall, and checking us at last.

 

We are in a roaring, stinking steam of water and evil fumes, somewhere between Orc’s looming bulk and the black rock. Across, and turn, and back, and turn; steamed and spumed and soaked and splattered with stiff salt slime. And for the second time that day I face death despised by the hippogriff .. .

 

I see his face again, I think for the last time. And had I years of life to give for the ability to read those bright implacable eyes, I would do it, and gladly; but I’ve but a few weary minutes. I gaze up hopelessly, and he brings his shining head closer to me, touches my head with a rough gentleness. With his eyes on mine, he makes a single soft sound, and then it is time to turn again. It seems for a moment he cannot and then he does, bravely, and labors back again. Belatedly I see that his wings are wet, and like Pegasus near death in dragon’s blood, he cannot remain aloft much longer. Ah, to know what it was he tried to tell me! Who would know? Giles? Ah, but I hate what I was, and what I am . . .

 

Together we scream a challenge, and the hippogriff finds strength, somehow, to drive up twice, three times the height of a man and, descending, flutter away a great weight of water from his wings. He passes close to the widening mouth, drives down near the hinge of the jaw just as it emerges. What appears at first as a bony projection from the hinge is suddenly a slimy opal, alight and alive—Orc’s eye, set like a whale’s. The hippogriff must have known, he must have known!

 

His small downward drive gives us speed—almost too much. As if alive, however, the shield trembles under my hands, turns to the sun for a bright beam, and hurls it across and back, on, and into the eye. And then we are past and tilting steeply; once more the hippogriff shivers away a mist of heavy water and fights to rise, and back we come the long, long distance around that mountain of a snout, past and past the yawning great arch of the open mouth, to the eye on the other side.

 

It must be only now that the mighty mass of dim-nerved flesh feels the pain of his dazzle-tattered eye. Something unspeakable moves inside the arch, and a gout of water and ichor shoots skyward. I see it rise, I see it curl; our wings will not survive this, so “Gee!” I cry, the sum total of terror and self-hate, of love for the hippogriff and the enchantment of Angelica; of anger, regret, remorse. His response is instant and beyond his control, and he wheels shoreward as I stand on the saddle, fall toward the monster, and kick back at that purple flank with both legs and all my strength. Even as I fall I look back under one arm, for a flash of Angelica’s body and the sight of my hippogriff flailing down into the water, short of the shore line. One wet wing-elbow rises like a sail and sinks as slowly; his neck, so pathetically thin without the dry golden ruff of feathers, is stretched toward the rock, but not far enough: he has died for me, and his laughter is dead with him; does thee know now, fool knight, what it was he told thee with that touch of his beak? Only that for all his jibes and hurtful scorn, he was ready to die with thee . . . And dying, Rogero, thy steed could not know thee heard, or would ever understand.

 

All this, in the instant of catapult, stretched achingly from my kick, with speed my only wings, my brain racing and my heart wrenched; and before me the magic shield of Atlantes. The shield strikes the water first, and my arrowing body slips under the thundering waterspout as it descends. Like a flat stone the shield skips on its curved face, and my forehead rings it like a gong. It tries to skip again, but my body plops in stingingly at the same instant, and stays it.

 

And at last I squat in the corner of that beastly smile, and all the hate I have ever known pours out of my arms and into the flailing of the shield. Edge and edge, flat and edge again, I belabor that viscid mound just back of my perch. It yields slowly, and at first I must work with my face but an arrows-length away; I feel it is burning me, filling me with a brutal and primitive madness that surely must turn my brain into what one finds in a dryrotted chestnut. But then it ceased to be, and was no more, and surely no less horrid than any part of the beast.

 

How long this pounding? I know not . . . but at length pain reaches it, and a convulsion such as should be impossible to anything so ponderous. My handhold disappears; there is a moment of strangling and a moment of crushing weight, a blow precisely where, earlier, my forehead struck the shield. And then I am thrashing in shallows on black rock, my legs tangled with the limp neck of the hippogriff.

 

The anchor of the Princess’s leg-shackle grinds my small ribs; I shift away from it, clutch it between arm and side, and lock my legs about the neck of the hippogriff, lest his body be swept out to sea. Water runs and runs, tugs and cascades off the rock, and for a long time my sky is full of black specks shifting and twinkling. But I will not let go.

 

When the tugging stops, I raise my head. The water is back to something like normal. More than half the hippogriff’s body is aground. The rock is completely free of litter—the last cascade having swept it clear. Out at sea stands a new mountain: I think it is dead now. It is sinking, ever so slowly, or sliding down some age-old chute it has worn in the ocean floor.

 

“Rogero-”

 

I kick free of the hippogriff’s heavy neck and head, and crawl to her.

 

“Princess!”

 

“’Thou art bravest of knights.”

 

“Nay, Angelica,” I mumble. “I am neither brave, nor a knight. I must free thee.”

 

“A simple matter.”

 

“Ay, had I his strength,” and I nod to the dead hippogriff.

 

“Mourn him not, Rogero,” says the Princess. “Thee stayed by him as he died, and thee will be rewarded.”

 

“Then must we wait on another hippogriff to strike thy chains?”

 

“No. The ring, Rogero; take off the ring.”

 

I stumble up the slope to her shackled hand, and take the ring, while she says, “It is a greater amulet, possibly, than thee knows. I was seeking it when I was shipwrecked here; I never thought to see it again; to have it brought to me makes thee part of a miracle.”

 

“See it again? It is thine?”

 

“It was stolen from my treasure house long ago, and has been on many hands. Its last use, so I was told in the north, was to be by a maiden who wished to free some dolt stupid enough to be entrapped by a magician and too stupid to break free. How came thee by it?”

 

“It was . . . cast aside as worthless.” My ears burn. “Princess, I must free thee.”

 

In her chains, she stretches lazily. “Whenever we like. These bonds mean nothing. Rogero, I am in thy debt.”

 

“No, Princess, for I have seen thee. It is enough.”

 

“Prettily said, and I believe thee.” And it seems she is amused. “Then do as I ask, and thee shall see a new power of the ring. Put the ring in my mouth.”

 

I held it to her parted lips. “Thou art a sweet and somewhat slow-witted man,” she whispers. “Goodbye, Rogero.” She takes the ring.

 

The shackles lie empty, and I crouch there over the black rock which pillowed her, my one hand extended, my mind awhirl at the nearness . . .

 

Nearness? She is gone!

 

Ah, she might have told me of this magic before demonstrating it! Is the world and all its magics leagued against me? Has the universe itself been designed to make me out a fool? “Thou art a sweet and somewhat slow-witted man.” Aiee! I shall have that carven on my tomb!

 

Slowly I mount the rock, and face the rocky spine leading to the mainland, to and through the barbarians; through mountains and hunger and poverty and illness; to aid and be aided along the way, until at last I have won what was given me and what, unearned, was cast aside; afoot, acrawl—to my destiny.

 

* * * *

 

“Are you quite all right, sir?”

 

Now that, old Dean-head, is a question. The music is surf and feathers in all its upbeats, strictly society on the down: scherzophrenic. A hot, transparent, blue flame whuffs out, and suddenly that is a matter of supreme importance, though I can’t think why. Slowly I look up at him. “Me?”

 

“It seemed for a second or two that you weren’t quite— with us, sir.”

 

“A second or two,” I say, “that’s all it takes.” Now I remember: that blue flame on the jubilee tray is the one I was looking at when I went under, or other, or wherever Rogero keeps his world. Surely I know where that is! I look up again. Deans read books. “Listen, what do you know about Atlantes?”

 

“Atlantis, sir?” This guy, you couldn’t ruffle him with a williwaw. “As I recall, it sank under the sea.”

 

“No, Atlantes—a magician.”

 

“Ah. I believe there was a necromancer of that name in Ariosto, somewhere.”

 

I put an accurate forefinger on his second stud and push it triumphantly. “Orlando Furioso! So that’s it! Hey, do you remember what ever happened to Bradamante?”

 

He puts his hands behind his back and looks at the wall meeting the ceiling. Good head on that man; splendid. “As I remember, sir, she married a knight-”

 

“Ex-knight,” I say, and it hurts. “Also, good night.” I give him a whole heap of money and head out.

 

“Good night, sir,” says the doorman.

 

“Oh,” I say, “You. Hey, a girl about so high and so wide with a silver streak in her hair, she left here. How long ago?”

 

He says he doesn’t recall so I give him some money. “About four minutes,” he says. “That way,” and points.

 

“Only four?” I have something in me like a pain. “That way, you’re sure?”

 

“You should be able to catch her,” he says. He closes his eyes and smiles. “Pretty.”

 

“The Grand Canyon,” I say, “it’s cute too.” I run the way he points. It’s to the river.

 

So it’s Orlando all this time, I think, and something has kept me from recognizing it. Atlantes and Bradamante, Angelica, princess of Cathay, the hippogriff and the Orc, all there. And what am I doing, acting it out? Atlantes kept Rogero from being a knight; some sort of magic keeps me from being a painter. Only nowadays they call it a neurosis.

 

So where am I going in such a hurry?

 

Got to save the Princess from the Orc. Orc, variant of urp, a real nauseating beast. Better I should go right back to the studio and mind my own business. Yes, that’s what Rogero kept telling himself. And he landed by the Princess anyway, no matter how his hippogriff laughed. Well laugh then, hippogriff. You’re not long for this world anyway.

 

There she is!

 

Walk now. Get your wind. See what happens to her. She’s chained naked on no rock yet. Or maybe she is . . . analogies being what they are . . .

 

Now cut it out, Giles! You’re all right now. It’s all just a story you read and mooned over when you were a kid. There were others; but did you really live it up with “The Little Lame Prince”; did you referee that go between the firedrake and the remora in Andrew Lang’s book; did you feel the icicle pierce your heart in “Back of the North Wind?” So maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something with Ariosto. Tell you what? To get religion? Or (and this is the idea that feels like pain) that you’re no more a painter than Rogero is a knight, in the long run ... in spite of some initial successes?

 

Go home, go home, and paint the way Miss Brandt wants you to. Go home now and your hippogriff will love you for it; yes, and live, whatever that might mean.

 

But wait; Miss Brandt wants you to be a painter and Bradamante didn’t want Rogero to be a knight. My story doesn’t coincide with his; it just sort of resonates. All the more reason to get out of here, Giles; go home. You’ve got all the money in the world; all the freedom, all the time to go anywhere and do anything. Paint anything. You know what happened to Rogero, his hippogriff, and his magic ring—yes, and his shield too, when he let his bumbling chivalry override his derisive conscience. (Conscience? Since when can a conscience be as beautiful as a hippogriff?)

 

So, go home. But look; look there, she has stopped at the River Road, and stands under a light, her gray silk gone all silver and the margins of her hair sinking a little over her slender shoulders as she raises her face to the sky. What is in that face? I can’t see, I can’t see ... an appeal, a submission rather; such sadness as hers is past hope and therefore past appealing to anything.

 

Princess, what is your rock, what your Orc? What conies, and you helpless; what shows itself without form, grows to fill the sky; what is impregnable, ironclad, and filthy, unspeakable? What fills your world and your short future, and proves at the same time that it shows only its slimy skull, and there is measurelessly more below?

 

You don’t scream, Princess?

 

You are only calm; but I have seen your tears.

 

She crosses the road to the trees, and takes a path toward the water; so laugh, hippogriff. I’ll go to her.

 

But she’s gone in the shadows: hurry, hurry-

 

And there in a quiet place I come on her and, like Rogero on the black rock, I sip the vision; for to gulp it would be more than I could bear.

 

There is a hole in the grove, an empty place by the water to let the night in. Part of a moon floats a train across the water to her as she sinks to a bench. Her head turns and tilts a little, as if to a footfall (does she hear me? Does she know there is more than her sadness in the world?) and she is completely in silhouette except for the single beam cupping a cheekbone, and the silver streak in her hair; with that small shard of cold white, the path on the water has a part of moon at each end!

 

And still more, just a little, her head turns, so her perfect profile lies in liquid moon; and now, if she turns only her eyes, she may see me. She does.

 

“I knew you’d be around.” Her voice ... a bell, a bird, a sound-unlike-sound . . . no. A voice, just a voice. Think about that, Giles; but not now.

 

“May I ... I mean . . .”

 

“Sure,” she says, indicating the bench. “Why not?”

 

I sit timidly at the other end of the bench, watching her as she stares out over the water. Her eyes are hooded and her face a chalice of sadness, brimming. And suddenly I know her Orc.

 

Poverty can be the Orc. Poverty can be the monster visible and nearing, which comes slimy and stinking out of the pit to fill the sky and yet be showing only its smallest part. Poverty can come to one chained, disregard one’s station and one’s virtues, and take one at its leisure.

 

Then I might be Rogero yet, for there is money in my pocket, neat, obedient, omnipotent money. Should I challenge her monster?

 

She might be angry. (Angelica? Angry? No; she bade the knight leave her and save himself.)

 

I look at her, and the sadness in her is greater than the money in my pocket. I see abruptly that my gesture would not anger her after all. She would simply pity me. My effort would be lost in her great need.

 

Then I’ll share what I have. Half what I have is still, effectively, all the money there is.

 

She is looking at the moon, so distant and so dead; she has the mark of distance and death upon her. Rogero offered no part of himself to his princess; he offered it all.

 

All of it? I touch the lapel of the most expensive suit I have ever owned; good new money whispers under my hand of miles and years of color and startlement, tastes and textures and toys; all the things, the thrills I’ve never had because it took too much time to be just Giles.

 

“I wish you wouldn’t stare like that.”

 

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Sorry.”

 

“What’s on your mind?”

 

Only that when tomorrow’s sun comes to you, you might give back to it as much gladness as a daffodil. Just that by giving you all I ever owned, so new that my own hands have not touched it, you might never be afraid again. “Just that I’d like to . . . borrow your pen.”

 

“My—well, I suppose.” She has it in her handbag; finds it and gives it to me.

 

I take my elegant, one and final blue book, and crouching close in the moonlight, Giles, I write, Giles, and Giles, and Giles, until I’ve written on the bottom line of every perforated page.

 

I hold it out to her with the pen. Here (I would say, but I cannot speak) here is all the magic I own, since I lost my shield. Here are my hooves and my talons. Here are my wings.

 

“What’s this?”

 

“Yours,” I croak. “I don’t want it. Any of it.”

 

“God,” she says.

 

She rises like the lily—but now, in the moonlight, more like a cereus—and looks at me. “You’re sure, now.”

 

“Never more sure.”

 

“I thought,” she says, “that you’d turn out to be a lot more fun than this.” And she throws the book into the river.

 

I sit in a dream by the corpse of a dream. It grows cold. Loneliness lives in my very pores as sadness lives in her face. She is gone, the moon is gone, and something else has gone, too. I do not know its name but it once kept me warm.

 

When she left, her leaving a completion of the absent gesture of throwing the book, I said nothing and I did not move; I am not sure that I really saw her leave.

 

Rogero, I think, I need you. I wish I could have a word with you.

 

For when you were stripped and alone, somewhere in yourself you found a way to travel, through wild countries, through poverty and sickness and hardship, certain that they would refine you for your destiny. You see, dear dopple, the twentieth-century man has no destiny; at least, he has no magicians to read it off for him, so he can never quite be sure. But take his amulets away, his spells and cantrips graven with the faces of dead presidents—and he’ll look over no mountains toward an unshakable faith. He’ll stare at nothing but his own terror.

 

Rogero, the universe is indeed leagued together to make fools of us.

 

I leave the bench and the river, not to be a pilgrim, but just to take my misery to familiar surroundings and wrap it up in weariness. And tomorrow I shall wake with the comfort—if such it is—that I am Giles and will continue to be Giles without the intrusion of Signor Ariosto’s parables. It had better be a comfort; I may not even turn my staring white canvas to the wall, now that I think of it; I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to touch it.

 

So I walk and I walk. And then up the long steps and down the long hall, fling open the door which unveils the dirty—

 

But it isn’t a dirty bed, and I have one mad moment of childish panic; I have burst into the wrong place; and then I see the easel, the bright clean easel, and I know I am home.

 

“I hope you don’t mind; the door was open, and I thought ... so to keep myself busy while I waited, I-” She makes a smile, and tries harder and makes another, but smiles over hands which rapidly clasp and unclasp are unconvincing. “I’ll go,” says Miss Brandt, “but I wanted to tell you I think you did a splendid thing.”

 

I look at the clean, shelved dishes and the drum-tight bedclothes, and my paints and brushes sensibly left untouched. But what impresses me is the unthinkable statement that I have done a splendid thing. I sit on the bed and look at her.

 

“How did you ever find out?” she asks. “You weren’t to know, ever.”

 

“I know a lot now,” I tell her. “What specially do you mean?”

 

“About the money. Giving it back.”

 

“I gave it away,” I admit. And, because it’s the truth, “I don’t call that so splendid.”

 

“It was, if . . .” And then, as if she’s had the question held down tight and can’t control it any longer, she flashes a glance at the easel, and asks, “Does it mean you’ll paint again?”

 

My eye follows hers and I shudder. She turns pale as the new light at the window. “Oh,” she says in a very small voice. “I—guess I’ve done the wrong thing.” She snatches up a shiny black pocketbook and runs to the door. But there’s a Giles standing there first, who pushes her back hard so she sits down—plump!—on the bed.

 

I am tired and hurt and disappointed and I want no more wonderments. “You tell me all the things you’ve done, wrong and otherwise, right from the beginning.”

 

“Oh, how it began. Well, I’m her secretary, you know, and we had a sort of quarrel about you. She’s a mean, small, stupid sort of person, Giles, for all her money and the way she looks—she is lovely, isn’t she? In case you want to know (everybody does) that streak of silver is real. Anyway, I-”

 

“You’re her secretary?”

 

“Yes. Well I got so terribly distressed about-” She waves at the easel again, and the miraculous lashes point away, “-you, you know, that I suppose I got on her nerves. She said some mean things about you and I sort of blew up. I said if I had her money I’d see to it that you started painting again.”

 

“Just like that.”

 

“I’m sorry. It was—so important; I couldn’t bear to have you just-”

 

“Go on with the story.”

 

“She said if I had her money and tried to use it that way I’d just make a fool of myself. Well, maybe she was right, but ... it went like that until she swore at me and said if I was so positive, go ahead. Take all the money I wanted and just see how far I’d get.” All the while she talks she is pleading, underneath. I don’t listen to that part of it. “So I came here yesterday and I was to phone her the way you sign your name, and she would call the bank and fix it up.”

 

“Nice of her.”

 

“No it wasn’t. She did it because she thought it would be amusing. She has so much money that it wouldn’t cost her anything. Anything she’d notice. And then you found out about it, I don’t know how, and gave her the checkbook. When she came back last night she was wild. It wasn’t half the fun she thought. All you did was to be amusing in a restaurant for a couple of hours. Please don’t look at me like that. I just did what I could. I—had to. Please—I had to.”

 

I keep on looking at her, thinking. Finally, “Miss Brandt, you said a thing yesterday—my God, was it only yesterday? —about my not being able to paint now because I don’t know why I painted before. Do you know what you were talking about?”

 

“I-” and the lashes go down, the hands busy themselves, “-I only know sort of generally. I mean, if you can do a thing and know how you do it and—and especially why, and then something stops you, I think it’s easy to see the thing that stops you.”

 

So I lean against the door and look at her in the way that makes her squirm (I’m sorry but that’s the way I look when I’m thinking) and I think:

 

Does anyone ask a painter—even the painter himself— why he paints? Now me, I painted . . . used to . . . whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.

 

But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I’ve always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I’m crossing it late.

 

And the simple—child?—artist paints for himself . . . but when he grows up he sees through the eyes of the beholder, and feels through his fingertips, and helps him to see that which the artist is gifted to see. Those who had wept over my work up to now, I used to say, had stolen meanings out of it, against my will. When I grow up, perhaps they will accept what I willingly give them. And because Miss Brandt feels this is worth giving, she has tried to get more of it for people.

 

So I had stopped painting because I had become too discerning, and could find nothing perfect enough to paint. But now it occurs to me that the girl with the silver in her hair can be painted for the beauty she has, regardless of her other ugliness. Atlantes had a magic, and in it one walked the battlements of a bastion—which was only, in truth, a byre. Miss Brandt can paint me, in her mind, as a man who turned back all the money in the world, and, for her, this is a real nobility.

 

The only key to the complexity of living is to understand that this world contains two-and-a-half-billion worlds, each built in a person’s eyes and all different, and all susceptible to beauty and hungry for it.

 

I ran out of things to paint . . . and now, now, there’ll never be enough time to paint beauty! Rogero did a knightly thing on the black rock, because he was not a good knight. I did a manly thing about the money because I was a fool. All successes are accidents in someone’s world ... so: “You tell her it worked, Miss Brandt. I’m going to paint, Miss Brandt; I’m going to paint you, Miss Brandt, because you’re beautiful.”

 

And I paint, and she is, because I paint, because she is.

To Here and the Easel

 

By THEODORE STURGEON

 

 

Up here in the salt mine I’ve got a log jam to break.

 

And that about expresses the whole thing. I mix pigments like I mix metaphors; so why not? Who’s a writer?

 

Trouble is, maybe I’m not a painter. I was a painter, I will be a painter, but I’m not a painter just now. “Jam every other day,” as Alice was told in Wonderland, as through a glass darkly; “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today.” I know what I’ll do, I’ll paint for calendars; isn’t this the ‘54 boom for the 44 bust? I’ll skip the art and do handsprings eternal on the human breast.

 

So quickly: grab the brush, sling the oils; en garde! easel; you’re nothing but a square white window to me; I’ll throw a wad of paint through you so’s we can all take a good long look inside. I’ll start just here with the magenta, or maybe over here, and-

 

And nothing.

 

So down I go on the chair, I look at the canvas, it looks back at me, and we’re right where we started. Didn’t start.

 

Up here in the salt mine, as I began to say, I’ve got a log jam to break. The salt mine is my studio, studio being a name for a furnished room with a palette in it. The log jam is in my head. Why is it I can’t work just because my brains are tied in a knot7 “Giles,” the maestro, the old horse’s tail of a maestro used to say to me, “Giles, don’t paint with your brains. Paint with your glands,” he used to say, “your blood. Sweat is a pigment. Dip your brush in-”

 

Shucks, Maestro! Get me a job in a sign shop. I’ll sell everything else. Ad in the paper: for sale cheap, one set sable-tipped vesicles. One heart: ventricle, sinister; auricle, Delphic. Nine yards plumbing with hot and cold running commentaries, and a bucket of used carmine, suitable for a road-company Bizet-body.

 

Was a painter, will be a painter, ain’t a painter. Make a song of that, Giles, and you can die crazy yelling it like Ravel chanting the Bolero. Ravel, unravel. Giles’s last chants.

 

Ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta pow! Ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta, ain’t a painta now!

 

You better shut up, Giles, you’re going to have another one of those dreams.

 

Well, I’ll have it anyway, won’t I? . . . the dreams, that’s what’s the matter with me. My glands I got, but my brains, they keep running off with me, glands and all. No not running off; more like a jail. I used to be a something, but I’m locked up in my own brains till I’m a nothing. All I have to do is figure a way out.

 

Or maybe somebody’ll come and let me out. Boy, what I wouldn’t do for somebody who’d come let me out. Anything. The way I see it, the other guy, the one in the dream, he’s locked up too. I should figure a way out for him. So maybe he’ll get on the ball and figure a way out for me. He was a knight in shining armor, he will be a knight in shining armor, but he ain’t nothing but a nothing now. There shall be no knight. He got a prison turns night into eternal afternoon, with dancing girls yet.

 

I should get him out of a spot like that? What’s the matter with a castle on a mountain with dancing girls?

 

On the other hand a knight who was a knight and who wants to be a knight is just a nothing, for all his dancing girls, if you lock him up in a magic castle on a magic mountain. I wonder if his brains are working str—

 

* * * *

 

—aight because mine are sore churned. Aiee! and here the echoes roll about amongst the vaults and groinings of this enchanted place. No sword have I, no shield, no horse, nor amulet. He has at least the things he daubs with, ‘prisoned with him. And yet if he would paint, and cannot, is he not disarmed? Ay, ay . . . aiee! we twain are bound, and each of us enchanted; bound together, too, in some strange way, and bound nowhere. And whose the hardest lot? He has a brush; I have no sword, and so it seems his prisoning is less. Yet I may call my jailer by a name, and see a face, and know the hands which hold the iron key. But he, the ‘prisoned painter, languishes inside himself, his scalp his fetters and his skull his cell. And who’s to name his turnkey?

 

Mine I can name; he comes now, soft leather awhisper on marble, his very stride abhorrent magic, the pressures of the unalive against the never-living. Atlantes, hated Atlantes, of the soft eyes and stone mouth, Atlantes who, controlling me, would alter fate itself.

 

“Rogero, is all well with thee? Such a cry . . . like a great wind tearing the rocks.” (His beard is full, he is too wise, he has no soul.)

 

“Ay, all is well!” I tell him scornfully. “Would I were such a wind, to tear and be torn on the rocks, and gladly, under the open sky; and never again to know a slow death of silks and sweets and boredom, the like of this . . . give me my sword.”

 

“Ay, I will. And an enchanted shield to blind thine enemies, and a steed to master earth and air; this castle to shelter thee and all in it for thine own, and my powers for thy convenience—and all for a word.”

 

Atlantes is tall; yet, rising, I may make him lift his beard to face me. Going to him, thunder-furious, I may come close, yet unlike other men he will not flinch. I may not strike him, nor anyone here nor any thing, so cautiously is he bemagicked. “For a word!” My voice stirs the hangings and sets the great stone halls athrum. “You call my faith a word, my fealty, my every drop of blood and all my days. I will never be your knight, Atlantes.”

 

And of all things, I hate his smile. “Thee will, Rogero, unless thy choice is to languish here forever instead. My plans for thee are better ones than fate dictated,” he says, and laughs at me. His voice booms inside my skull as my voice boomed a moment ago within the castle. “This is thy destiny, knight: that a maiden shall free thee, and that through her thou shalt embrace a new faith of sobriety and humility, and spend thy days accursed with earthbound slowness like a tortoise, dressed like a wren-hen; swordless and somber and chained.”

 

I think about this, and look at the carvings, the silks, the aromatic mounds of fabulous fruits. At last, “Maiden?” I ask.

 

“Just the one for such adventures,” he says laughing again, for he has trapped me into responding. “And a just return for thy kind of stubbornness. She shall hold her faith a greater thing than thy flesh; she shall prefer to walk like a peasant rather than be borne like a gentlewoman; she shall scorn satin and lace and cover herself like a winterbound tree earth-hued and hard-barked. And worst of all, she shall have more brains than thee.”

 

“Surely you speak of some afterlife, some penance for a great sin!”

 

“Na, lad! Thine afterlife is in other hands than mine. ‘Tis all thy destiny, lad. Thou may’st not take whatever part of it that pleases thee, and cut the rest to fit thy fancy. The maid will not come here; but should she come here she shall not free thee; but should she free thee, thou wilt indeed finish thy life like a clip-winged hawk, hobbling about amongst the sweating serfs and calling them thine equals.”

 

He reasons right; and fury from inside me pounds my hair-roots. And as the anger mounts, my mind’s aswirl again; I seem to be here in this hall with the wizard, yet there, in the dream, in that dusty box of poverty and miracles inhabited by the painter who may not paint. I fight against it, even clinging to this hated hall, holding to the familiar enchantments like Atlantes’ hippogriff and unbearable shield, his castle set in everlasting afternoon, and the silent and invisible chains by which he holds me; these, to me, are real, for all they are magic, and not beyond understanding like the painter’s chamber with its window overlooking swift horseless chariots, its squat black demon-sculpture which first shrills, then speaks with the voices of people outside the room; its music box no bigger than my two fists, with the glowing golden eye and the sound, sometimes, of a hundred musicians; and all the marvels which are part of his poverty. Again I am he, myself, and he again one, the other, then both, then neither, and again my brains churn in transition. My mouth holds the aftertaste of grapes and mead, then the blue smoke he sucks constantly from his little glowing white sticks; I taste one, the other, both, neither.

 

I turn from Atlantes and his hated smile and throw myself across the yielding mound of silks and furs. And far away I hear the golden clarion of a bell, the great gong of the castle’s magic gate. I hear Atlantes’ odd gasp, half surprise, half pleasure; I hear his soft feet on the hard marble. Who comes, who comes a-ringing, challenging, and unwanted—and unafraid of this castle and its many devils? If I am the knight, Rogero, I will watch from the window; if I am Giles, the painter, and I think I am, I will let the goddam doorbell ring. Whoever heard of a doorbell in a magic castle? What magic castle?

 

Here’s a dirty bed, and there a dirty window, and over yonder the cleanest canvas yet; now wait, wait—Giles is my name, paint is my trade, if I was a knight, I’d have me a blade. Give me my sword!

 

What sword? Will you for God’s sake get away from that doorbell so I can hear myself think? I almost had it then, that business about the knight, whoever he is—or is he me?—and his magic mountain, or is that really a furnished room? Ah, shaddap with that doorbell already!

 

“Whaddayewant?”

 

All it does, it rings.

 

“Who is it?”

 

Ring, ring.

 

All right, you asked for it, I’m going to snatch that door open, I’m going to haul off, no questions asked, and punch the nose that’s ringing my doorbell. Twist the knob, snatch the door, knock the ringer, to the floor. Blam, a dead ringer.

 

So sometimes a tenth of a second is as long as a paragraph or your arm. The door is open and I’m standing still and tight like a kid looking through a knothole, being with and of the ball game but standing quiet, watching. I watch my hand fly through the door, making a fist on the way, I watch it reach her cheekbone and curl and compact there, pudgy and hard. Back she goes, not falling but standing straight, across the narrow lighted hall and against the wall, wump-thump! She is a little brown thing with hair unwonderful, beautiful lashes opening now to make her eyes round and glazed, and that’s about all there is to her. “Mmmmmm,” she says, and slowly slides down the wall to sit, slowly bends her head to one side, the hair ahang like a broken wing. “Well I told you to get away, ringing that bell!” “Mmmm,” she breathes.

 

So I scoop her up, and up she comes, light as a leg o’ lamb and common as cabbage, and I kick the door closed and I throw her on the dirty bed, akimbo-crumpled and immodest as a dropped doll, and who cares?—not the artist, who’s seen better and wastes no time on the likes of this; not the man, for he is, as the saying goes, not quite himself just now. Here’s a dry paint rag to be wet at the sink and wrung out, and pressed against the smooth beige-brown brow over the smooth lids with the ‘tender row of feathers over the seal . . . lashes, I will admit, lashes she has. She has damn-all else but my God! those lashes.

 

And the rag, coming away, leaves a stain on the brow, verdigris. One can pretend she is a brazen head, skinned with old silk, and the bronze staining through. But only until her eyes open; then there is no pretense, but only a dowdy girl on my bed, a pallor ‘pon my unpalatable pallet. She gazes past the green-brown stain and the anger of her brutalized cheek, and she has no fear, but a sadness. “Still nothing?” she murmurs, and I turn and look with her, and it’s my empty canvas she is sad for and “Still nothing,” half whispering about.

 

“I am going to punch your face again.” It is a faithful promise.

 

“All right, if you will paint.”

 

“I’ll paint or not, whatever I feel like,” I am saying in a way that makes my throat hurt. Such a noise it makes, a Day-Glo fluorescent dazzle of a noise. “Giles is my name and paint is my trade, and you keep your nose out of it. Your nose,” I say, “looks like a piece of inner tube and you got no more side-silhouette than a Coca-Cola bottle. What you want to be ringing my doorbell for?”

 

“Can I sit up?”

 

By which I discover I am hanging over her close, popping and spitting as I bellow and peal. “Get up, get out!” I touch my neck and the scarlet swelling of an artery there, I spin to the easel to strike it but cannot touch it, so go on to the wall and drive my fist against it. It is better than a cheekbone which hardly leaves a mark.

 

“Oh please, don’t hurt yourself. Don’t,” she says, her voice high and soft-textured around the edges, like light through a hole in worn velvet, “don’t!” all pitying, all caring, “don’t be angry . . .”

 

“Angry I am not,” I say, and hit the wall again, “angry; I’m a devil and dangerous to boot, so don’t boot me. You,” I say, pointing at her, and there is blood on my hand, “are a draggletail; bad lines, wrong tone, foreground distracting—” (that would be my easel)—”background unappetizing.” (That would be my bed). “The whole thing’s not composed, it’s—it’s —decomposed. Where’d you get that awful dress?”

 

She plucks at it, looks at her hand plucking, makes a faint brief frown, trying to remember. She can’t remember, and she is not afraid, she is only trying to answer my question.

 

“Well don’t bother; I don’t care where you got the dress. What do you want?”

 

Up come the lashes. “I want you to paint again.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Don’t, don’t,” she whispers. “You’ll hurt your throat. I know everything you’ve painted. You’re getting good; you’re getting great. But you don’t paint any more.”

 

“I asked you why; you didn’t say why, you just said what happened.” She looks at me, still not afraid, still puzzled. This girl, I think, is not only homely, she is stupid. “I asked you why—why? What do you care?”

 

“But I told you!” she cries. “You were going to be great, and you stopped. Isn’t that enough?”

 

“No, not for people. People don’t want things like that, greatness, goodness.” I begin to be more angry at people than angry at myself. Much better, Giles—much better. “People want their work done easily. People want kisses and to feel important. People want to be amused and to be excited safely. People want money. Do you want money? Here’s a quarter. Here’s forty cents, even. Get out of here, people.”

 

“I don’t want money. I just want you to paint again.”

 

“Why?”

 

Down go the lashes, away goes the voice like a distant wind. “I saw them clustered around your Spanish picture, Candlelight Malaga—two young people, holding hands very hard, very quiet; and an old man, smiling; and there was a little boy tugging at a woman’s sleeve: ‘Ma? Ma?’ and when she said, ‘Yes, dear,’ she kept her eyes on the picture so he cried. I saw a man come away from Garret’s, where your Smoke was hanging, and he laughed and said to all the strangers, ‘All I have to do is tell her: she’ll love me, it’s right there in the picture.’ “ She spreads her square unwomanly hands to say, “That’s what I mean, it’s proved.”

 

I don’t care about the people, the crying child, the man who speaks to strangers, and all the rest of them. I never painted for them, I painted for—for—but it wasn’t for them. So they’re all intruders, and for them I’ve done enough, too much already. If what they have taken was really in the pictures, they have robbed me. If what they took was not there, they are fools. Must I paint for thieves and fools?

 

All this comes to me clearly, but there is no way to say it to the girl. “It’s for those things,” she says, as if my silence means I am agreeing with her. “So paint again.”

 

“Paint, how can I paint?”

 

“Why not? What’s the matter?”

 

“It’s my head:” I hold it, hard. My elbows knock together; I speak at her, peek at her through the wedge. “I’ll tell you because it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll tell you,” I say painfully, “because you don’t make any difference.” (And oh, no, she wouldn’t wince.) “When I painted, I was Giles, Giles yesterday and Giles today, so that where I stopped I could start, and even find the stopping place by tomorrow. And tomorrow I’d be Giles, and knew it so well I never thought about it. Now . . . now I’m Giles. Before that I was— somebody else, and before that I was Giles again. And being Giles now doesn’t matter, because soon I’ll be someone else again, and after that, Giles. You don’t understand that.”

 

“No,” she says. “Neither do you.”

 

“Right, so right; the first right thing you’ve said, no compliments intended, whatever’s-your-name.”

 

“Brandt.”

 

“Brandt. Miss Brandt, surely, there being limits beyond which the most foolish of men will not go. Painting, Miss Brandt, is a thing having a beginning, a middle, and an end; and the beginning is part of the end of the painting before, and the end is part of the beginning of the next picture. I am Giles, and being Giles I suppose I could paint; but before—an hour or a while ago—say when you were ringing my doorbell, you and your fat nerve—I was somebody else. And soon my brains will scramble and words will mean two things or three, and yonder is either a naked canvas or a far granite wall, and under me a dirty bed or a mound of silks and furs, and what I want will be to paint or to regain my sword; I will be Rogero and Giles, one, the other, both neither; until suddenly Giles is gone, the easel, the painting—no, not gone, but like a dream, not really remembered because not really real.”

 

“Let Rogero paint,” says the fool girl as if she believes me.

 

There’s a noise like one-third of a scream, one-half of a howl, and it’s mine. “Rogero paint? He can’t paint! He couldn’t believe in it, couldn’t think it, wouldn’t know a tint from a T square. Listen, you; listen to me: can you imagine me as a knight, imprisoned on a magic mountain, surrounded by spells I not only believe in—I must because they’re real—jailed by a magician who rides a hippogriff? A hippogriff, Miss Unimportant Q. Brandt, you hear? A shining hippogriff whose dam was a brood mare and whose sire was a gryphon—a gryphon whose mother was a lion and whose father was an eagle. This hippogriff is real, real as the spells, real as the magic mountain, real as the knight that you, Miss Interfering W. Brandt, can’t imagine me being.” (Have I been climbing, running? I am out of breath.) “To that knight,” I say when I can, “my telephone and my radio are laughable wonders without foundation in fact, my inability to paint is of no importance except to give me his sympathy; he too is captured and fettered. He can do as little with my brushes as I might do with his sword. And you, Miss Unbeautiful Brandt, could only be the most piddling of small nastinesses intruding into his unbelievable fantasy. Now you know; now I’ve told you. There’s nothing you can do, nothing you can believe, and your coming here or not coming means nothing. If you came to help, you’ve failed. If you came to fight something, you’re beaten.” 

 

There is a time for wondering, wondering what someone will say, and this is it, and it is good. Good as anything could be now, where that is real or this is real, never both. For I lie under a weight and I cannot move it, and when it disappears I am no longer myself, and it is good to defeat someone, something, even an unimportant, unlovely girl; even when in the defeat there can be no victory for me, nor a lessening of the weight. So I wait, wondering in which of several possible ways she will acknowledge her defeat; and here it comes from the usual lips and the eyes behind the unusual lashes; here:

 

“May I use your phone?”

 

Because I said she doesn’t matter, I may not let this matter either; I step away from the phone and turn my back, and soft footsteps pass me and soft fingers take up the hard phone; there’s a chorus of clicks, composed in syncopes, seven measures long. And a ring, and a ring.

 

What portals open to this lady’s ringing, this Brandt for the burning? What dilates to this dialling, this braw, bricht, moonlicht nictitation? My God, my God, here it comes again, the words like lyings in their layers, and I am he, and he is—either or, both, neither. Of these, “or” is king; I wear a coat d’or, that dry, exclusive little word. For we are desiccated to the preposition that all men are created sequels. The “or” is golden but my heart has been read, my mind has been lead; read, lead; just the color of Floradora orange-youth.

 

“Hello,” says the telephone tinily because it can speak two syllables without moving its open mouth; “Giles,” says Miss Brandt, “just Giles,” and the telephone laughs and says, “Okay.”

 

Soft footsteps on the wooden, or is it marble floor, and the ring has been answered with a shout of laughter; and soft-footed, swift, Atlantes strides to the casement and the curtains of cloud leave the court, the mist melts away from the meadow below, the great golden gate is agleam in the sun, and gone is the gloaming. “Rogero!” he cries (but am I not Giles, imprisoned in a dream, who says he is where a felon needs a friend? Aiee! Sharper than a serpent’s truth is an ungrateful Giles!) “Rogero, come and see thy destiny!” and in Atlantes’ laugh lies such a triumph, such a scorn, I can only come and see. I go to stand beside him.

 

To either hand are buttresses of weather-hammered stele; before me the castellated wall like a cliff, like a sea becalmed and stood on edge, falls to the courtyard. Away and down and away rolls the magic meadow to its lower margin, mighty walls patrolled by poisoned gnomes. And when I see the gate I am myself again; Rogero, ‘prisoned knight, hungering for that craggy path beyond the gate.

 

“Thy destiny, knight—you see it?”

 

I look again; and there like a mole under a monument is a small brown person, dun and dowdy. In one hand is a crooked staff little changed from its soil-sprung origins, and it is this which now again strikes the golden bell and sends its clang and hum to shake the shining air. “My destiny?”

 

He laughs again; there is battle in such laughter. “Look again!” With thumb and finger he makes a circle, and thrusts the hand before my face, and through that circle I see the gate —but not from the mountaintop, but as if I stood but twenty paces away. And though his magic is despicable to me, I yet must look.

 

Silently, for a long time I gaze. At last I say, “Of all you have told me of my destiny, magician, I see but one thing to bear you out, and that is, that yonder mudball is a maiden, for it is unthinkable that such a one could be anything else. As to the rest, it is not possible that fate should have stored for me anything so . . . unadorned.”

 

“Ah, then thee need only swear fealty to me, and we will squash this beetle together.” The bell rings again. “If not, I must do it myself, and keep thee bound as thou art. But one or the other must be done, for that rude clanging is indeed the voice of thy fate, and that barefoot damsel has come as fate dictates, to challenge me and set thee free.”

 

“She challenges you!”

 

“Ay, lad, with nothing but that crooked staff and the homespun cassock beneath which she generously hides her uninteresting limbs. Oh, and a piddling faith in some unimportant system of gods.”

 

“The staff is enchanted, then.”

 

“No.”

 

“She’s mad!”

 

“She is.” He laughs. “So tell me, good fool: wouldst go to her and spend thy days with her, swordless, horseless, tending the plaguey brats of peasants and slaves? Or wouldst thou ride with me and turn her into a damp spot on the meadow, and after, own the earth?”

 

“I’ll choose, wizard, but a choice of mine own devising. I’ll not go to her nor ride with you. I shall stay here and watch thy bravery and thine historic victory over that little brown she-monk, with her dried tree-branch arrayed against nothing but thy magic steed, thy mighty armaments, and thine army of gnomes. And when she is vanquished-”

 

“Thee would see her vanquished?” he mocks. “Thy last chance to be free? Thy destiny contains no other savior.”

 

“When she is vanquished, come back to me that may spit in thy face and tell thee that of my three possible hells, I choose the one which can give thee no pleasure.”

 

He shrugs and turns away from me. At the door he gives me his evil smile. “I knew that one day thee’d call me ‘thou,’ Rogero.”

 

I snatch up a heavy censer and hurl it. With a crash it stops in mid-air before him and, broken, falls at his feet. His smile is a laugh now. “Be certain, wizard, that I use not the ‘thou’ of an intimate, but that of an animal,” I roar, and he laughs again; and surely one day, when I find a way, I shall kill this clever creature. I go to the casement.

 

Far below, I can still see the gate and the shining wall. The gnomes file away and down out of sight; and there, one fragile hand on the golden bars, the other holding the staff, the girl clings peering. Her courage is too foolhardy to be admired and her strength too small to be considered at all; surely Atlantes need only laugh once (that thunder of evil) or raise his brows, to shrivel up this audacious sparrow.

 

There on the brow of the flying buttress stands Atlantes, the wind whipping his figured mantle, the sun all startled by his jewels.

 

He raises a hand and turns it, and the gate, so far below, so far away, stands open. Nothing as massive as those golden bars should move so swiftly and noiselessly; the tiny figure at the entrance nearly falls. The girl stands in emptiness, the gate looming about her, the rocky hill behind her, and high and massive over her, Atlantes’ castle crowned by the glittering magician himself. She is very small and very alone as she begins to mount the slope.

 

Atlantes, laughing, claps his hands twice-

 

And from a copse in the meadow comes a thunder of wings, and a glory. There with an eagle’s cruel head and the foreclaws of the mightiest of lions; with the splendid haunches of a stallion and golden hooves—there rises, there floats, there hurtles the hippogriff. His cry ripples the grass; it is a clarion, a roar, and a scream, and through it and through it is a thing which makes my heart melt as never a woman could do, and mine eyes are scalded with pity and fellowship. For he, even he, the hippogriff is enthralled; and with all his soul he hates his master!

 

I am glad there is no one by, for I weep like a child. I am a knight, and I know my merits; yet everything splendid is behind me. My shackles may not be broken, and my very destiny is without beauty. Yet here before me is beauty crystallized, shaking the world with its piteous, powerful protest . . . crystallized? Nay, alive, alive as a man could never be. See the sun on his golden plumes, oh see his purple flanks ... he is more than I can bear to look on, to think on ... I shall have him, mount him!

 

But if he sees me, knows my heart, I know not, for he sweeps past and hovers, and the top of the buttress takes him like a cupped palm. From the parapet Atlantes takes a curious shield, with its cover of soft bat skins cleverly pieced. He buckles it to the hippogriff’s harness, then with a hand on the parapet and a hand on the shield, he climbs to the great beast’s back; and oh! I am proud that the steed kneels not for him.

 

Atlantes leans forward and speaks, and what his word is I may not hear, but the animal’s sweet, strong pinions spread and flick the stone but once, and skyward they ride.

 

In a great circle the hippogriff wheels, with Atlantes leaning from the saddle. His piercing eyes, and all his magic to aid him, must discover any invisible armament she might have; and she must have none, for I hear his distant laughter as he leans over his steed’s neck to speak another secret command. The wings go up together and hold like a great wedge, and down they drop just to the height of her head, and with a single thrust and the sound of soft thunder, their speed is checked and they are meadow-borne. Fifty paces away, the girl drops her staff and waits, weaponless.

 

Tiny and evil, Atlantes’ mirth comes to me on the wind. He swings down from the beast’s broad back, unbuckles his shield, and with a deft twist casts off its cover.

 

Now, he stands between me and the girl so that the shield faces away from me. Were it any other way, I should have seen nothing; this I knew when I saw the blaze of light which fanned out and down; when I saw birds swing and flutter and fall, and a stag turn away and blunder into a tree trunk. I had heard of this shield, but until now I had not seen it. In unspeakable ways, its gilded surface had been polished until it struck blind any who saw it. This, then, and the hippogriff, are what Atlantes brings to bear against one girl’s fragile madness. Ah, a mighty magician he, and confident.

 

Beaten and dazzled, she stands frozen, waiting for—no, not mercy; she cannot expect that. Waiting, then, for him.

 

The work of the shield is done. He covers it and confidently he strides down the slope to her. If he speaks, I cannot hear; I doubt he does, for he knows I am watching, and he will want me to understand. He stoops to pick up the useless staff she has dropped, and thrusts it into her hand; he takes her by the shoulders and turns her about to face the gate; he steps back, then throws up his shaggy head and bellows with laughter. Such dismissal of the blind thing might have been predicted; instant death would have been, for him, too gentle a thing. And so he stands, laughing, impregnable even to such strength as mine, with the invisible wall his spells have built about him; cruel and victorious—ah, a mighty magician indeed!

 

So, defeated, she moves toward the door . . . door? the gate of gold . . . but no, it is not longer a meadow, but a room where I keep my easel and my . . . and now I see them both, the room and the meadow, as if one were painted upon glass and through it I saw the other; and which? which the painting? Aiee! my brains are mixed and muddled again, I am one, the other, both, neither. I see a curtain of sky with mountains for its ragged hem ... a dirty wall, with one small bright spatter of my blood where I struck it, and the dazed dun maiden raising her staff, which is a small blue book with gold letters on it. “But you’re blind!”

 

Miss Brandt has a twisted smile. Her teeth are no better and no worse than the rest of her, and not to be compared with her lashes. “I’ve been told that before, but I don’t think I am. This is for you—here!” and she gives me the book.

 

Before or behind my eyes there’s a flash, too bright; I think it’s a hippogriff. Up here in the salt mines I stand and shiver until the crazy thing passes; I open my eyes slowly and secretively so that I can snatch a reality and make it real. And Miss Brandt is here (or still here, I forget which) and the meadow and the hippogriff become a memory again (or maybe a dream.)

 

“Are you all right?” Her voice and her hand touch me together.

 

“Stay away from me! I’m crazy, don’t you know that?” (Her lashes are up.) “You better get out of here. I’m liable to do practically anything. Look, you’re already getting a black eye.” I’m yelling again. “Aren’t you afraid? Damn you, be afraid!”

 

“No.”

 

It’s a very puzzling thing, the way she should be dressed like a monk, and be holding a crooked stick; but that was a small blue book—that’s right. I’m shaking my head, or is it a shudder; the girl and the wall and the door blur by me and my teeth are side-sliding, making a switch-frog sound. It can be halted by holding the heels of the hands on the halves of the head very hard . . . and slowly saliva is swallowed . . . libation, libration, liberation, and quiet at last. In that moment of stillness, when at last I am here altogether, I know that my . . . dream, the Rogero thing, whatever it is . . . takes no time at all. For she was at the phone when it began, that last time, and all those things had happened to Rogero while she hung up and took two steps behind me . . . yes, and I heard the steps. So when I become Rogero again, no matter what happens here, how many hours it takes, I shall see Atlantes and the vanquished maid, down and away below, and she fumbling the dry rough stick, blind, defeated destiny of mine.

 

So open your eyes to here and the easel and Miss Brandt who is not afraid. Hold out the hand with the book. “What’s this?”

 

“Money.”

 

It’s a checkbook, sky-green and very disciplined and trackless inside, and sturdy and blue outside. “Blank checks.”

 

“Cartes blanches,” she smiles; and this is no place for smiling. So just wait, and the smile will go away. Ah. Unsmiling, she says, “It’s money; all you want. Just fill in a check and sign it.”

 

“You’re crazy.” But she shakes her head gravely.

 

So: “Why bring me money?”

 

“You can do whatever you want now.”

 

“I can’t paint. Do you think you can make me paint by giving me money?”

 

When her tongue touches her lips, they are the same color. No one, no woman, should be like that. Such a mouth could taste nothing, take nothing. It says, “Not if you don’t want to. But you can do all the other things you want to do—all you have ever wanted to do.”

 

What else have I ever wanted to do but paint? There must be something. Oh, there is, there is; I never had a chance to— to—and then my hand is crushing the book, the book of excellent quality which yields only slightly and, when my hand opens, is bland again. “It’s just paper.”

 

“It’s money. Don’t you believe me? Come with me. Come to the bank. Write out a check and see.”

 

“Money. How much money?”

 

Again: “All you want.” She is so very certain.

 

“What for?”

 

“Whatever you like. Anything.”

 

“I didn’t mean that.” Things are becoming real as real now. “When you take money you give something; you always give something, a painting or a promise or-”

 

Her head turns briefly, a little, right, left, right, her eyes steady on me, so sliding between the lashes. “Not this money.”

 

“Why are you giving me money?” (You know, Giles, you’re frightened?) “What I can do for money mostly is paint. But not now. Not now.”

 

“You don’t have to paint. Not unless you want to, and then not for me. Giles, maybe you can’t paint because you want to do other things. Well, do them. Do them all; finish them until they’re all done and there’s only one thing left. Maybe then you can work again.”

 

“Then the money’s for painting!”

 

Oh, she is so patient; oh, how I hate anyone as patient as that. “No. It’s just for you. Do whatever you want. I don’t want the money and I don’t ever want it back. It isn’t mine to begin with, so why should I care about it?”

 

“But you’d care if I didn’t paint again.”

 

The fringes fall, the lashes hide the ordinary eyes. “I care about that now. I’ll always care.” And now she has the door open. “Come to the bank. Come get your money. Then you’ll believe me.”

 

“The bank, yes, and then what? Go with you, I suppose, and you’ll tell me what to buy and where to go and how to-”

 

“It’s yours to do as you please. Now will you come? I’ll leave you at the bank if you like.”

 

“I like.”

 

But no, this doesn’t hurt her, and no, she is not angry; there’s only one thing that touches her, and that one thing reaches through the closed door as we walk in the corridor, stretches down the stairs and past the lintels and the newels and the curbs and cabs and garbage all the way down to the bank; and that one thing is my white, clean, blind square eye of canvas.

 

I wonder if she knows; I wonder. Wondering under the polyglot columns corralling the bank (Doric they are, with Corinthian capitals, yes but the door is not Doric but arched and Byzantine, closed with a fanlight. I’d say from Virginia). “I wonder if you know.”

 

“If I know what?” she says, still patient.

 

“Why I can’t paint.”

 

“Oh yes,” she says, “I know.”

 

“Well I don’t, Miss Brandt. I really don’t.”

 

“It’s because you don’t know why you can paint,” she says, and her eyes are no longer patient, but waiting. It is very different.

 

And when I shake my head (because that is no answer) her eyes are patient again. “Come,” she says; and in we go from the portico, and wouldn’t you know the ceiling is red with ropes of gilded plaster draped in altogether Moorish squares.

 

And here in a low wall made of glazed marble, and flat-topped with marbleized glass, is a little black gate that swings both ways. On the other side is a polished desk and a polished pate bearing polished glasses: “Mr. Saffron,” says Miss Brandt; “Mr. Saffron” says the chock-shaped sign on his desk, gold on black.

 

Mr. Saffron’s glittering glasses tilt up; then straight and slowly he rises, like the Lady of the Lake. When he stands, his glasses lose some high lights, and I can see his eyes. They are blue and shiny—not polished, but wet; turned to Miss Brandt they are so round they go pale; turned to me they are slits gone all dark, with a little eave of pink flesh all the way across over both of them. And here is a man who is astonished by Miss Brandt and repelled by me; what a wonderful way he has of showing it, over and over again: round-pale, slit-dark, the whole time.

 

“This is Giles.”

 

Mr. Saffron gives his slits to my brush-wipe khaki pants, and to my yellow shirt with russet cuffs which is really the top of my ski-pajamas, and to my face. “You’re quite sure, Miss Brandt?”

 

“Of course!”

 

“If you say so,” says Mr. Saffron, and sits. “We’re quite ready. Will you sign this, Mr. Ahhh?” I hear a drawer move but I am sure he pulls the white card from his spotless stomach. With the shiny pen from his desk-set I write Giles.

 

“First name?” says Mr. Saffron to the card, another shiny pen in hand.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Last name?”

 

“Yes,” I say again; and up come the glasses. “That’s his name, just Giles,” Miss Brandt says quickly. And then she recites my address. Mr. Saffron writes it, putting no more of his boiled-veal fingers on the card than he has to.

 

Miss Brandt says, “You want to cash a check now?”

 

“Oh sure.” I fumble around and get the book. Miss Brandt comes close with a finger. “You write the date there, and the-” But I just sit there looking up at her until she goes away. What’s the matter, does she think I don’t know how to write a check? I write the check.

 

Mr. Saffron takes the check by its two ends and it flips softly like a little trampolin. He turns it over with a brittle snap and does a squiggle with his pen. “Sixty-eight dollars. All right, the cashier will give you your money.” From his drawer he takes a yellow, ruled pad and curls down over it as if there were sudden fire in his watch pocket. Out we go through the little black gate, and when I look back he is not busy with his paper at all, but staring after us the round-pale way.

 

“Is that all you want—sixty-eight dollars?”

 

I look at her. “What would I do with more than sixty-eight dollars?”

 

Patient, patient she says, “Anything, Giles. Anything.”

 

So we go to a cage and a fierce face says in a sweet voice, “How do you want it?”

 

“Cash.”

 

“Any way at all,” says Miss Brandt.

 

So he gives me the money and we go to a marble table in the middle of the bank while I look at it. Miss Brandt says, “Is that right?”

 

“What?”

 

“Is it all there? Weren’t you counting it?”

 

“Oh no. I was just looking at it. It really is real money.”

 

“I told you.”

 

“Is there more?”

 

Again she says, “All you want.”

 

“Okay, good. Well, Miss Brandt, you can stay here or go do whatever you want.”

 

“All right.”

 

I walk away and when I get to the big door with the fanlight I look back. Miss Brandt is standing there by the table, not exactly looking my way. I come walking back. I have a feeling inside that makes the base of my nose hurt. I stop by her and look at her while I wet my lips. She has a real sunset of a shiner by now but the lashes are all right. So I tell her, “You just don’t care what happens to me now.”

 

“You know I do.”

 

“Well, why didn’t you try to stop me if you cared so much?”

 

She says, “You’re not going to do anything important just now.”

 

“With all this money? How do you know?”

 

She doesn’t say.

 

“I guess you want me to come running back to you so you can take care of me.”

 

“No, Giles, truly,” she says in that absolutely certain way. “You don’t understand. I’m not important. I’m not trying to be important. I just don’t matter in any of this.”

 

“Not to me.” Why does she make me so mad anyway? “So what is important?”

 

“Why you could paint. Why you can’t paint. That’s all.”

 

“Well, the hell with that for now. Well—maybe I’ll see you around.”

 

She sort of shrugs. I just go. Maybe I want to turn around but I don’t. There’s something in my head about how do I get in touch with her if I should want to, but the hell with that too.

 

By all the paint pots of perdition, nobody’s ever going to make Giles admit he’s a part of the works, like she does. People like her, all they do is go around believing in something and trying to trap other people into believing it too. “I just don’t matter in any of this.” What kind of a way to get along is that, the silly bitch?

 

I get out of line of the bank door and then go across the street and stand in a low areaway where I can watch her when she comes out. From now on by God my business is my business. Who does she think she’s brushing off?

 

It’s getting chilly out, but who cares? I’ve got lots of time. Lots of money. Lots of patience. Miss Brandt, now, she’s really got patience. On the other hand, all God’s chillun got patience. Will you look at that bank, now; those big fat pillars are doing just what? Holding up a pseudo-Parthenonic frieze, that’s what. That’s really patience. Year in, year out they stand there holding it up and nobody knows it’s there but the starlings. Patience—look at the work that went into carving all those figures, that fat, baggy nude in the middle clear down to the chow dogs or lions or whatever they are at the ends. Stiacciato, they call that work, the lowest form of relief, and that fat one in the center, she sure would be. So they in turn are patient, the hodgepodge of Hermes and Demeters and blind Justices, holding still for the starlings. And when it’s cold the starlings freeze on the marble stool, and when it’s warm they stool on the marble frieze, and the meek shall inhibit the earth.

 

Oh holy Pete what’s happening to my head . . . listen, Giles, hold on to this area rail and keep your wall eyes on that bank and don’t go off into no magic mountains. Watch that clock over the door. Watch it? I can hear it! Well listen to it then and keep your head in the here and now and don’t let yourself go splitting the definitive. That, now, is a sick clock, it must be three hours slow, and listen to it moan. Oh I know a bank where the wild time groans . . . Hang on, Giles boy; think of something else, like San Francisco where the second-story men from across the Bay are called berkelers, and the Golden G— no! Think of the statue down the block, the Mayor’s father on a horse, that’s in the papers every other day should they move it or not . . . My father’s horse has many mentions . . . and in the bank, now, Miss Brandt is leaving, see the gate is open and agleam in the sun as she stumbles on stones; it is as if Atlantes’ mirth alone were bending her down to be crushed like a tree in a thunder-wind. And across the street—but meadow, meadow’s the word—the blue-black helmets of the beastly gnomes show as they watch this . . .could it be called a challenge? Ay; but a battle, no; only a defeat.

 

All this in a flash of stern anger, and then—yea, she is sinking, twisting about as if to fall at his feet . . . then up she comes in a whirl, her crude staff invisible, lost in speed, and with a whip’s crack, the staff . . . Aiee!

 

For a moment I cling to the casement, scrabbling like a cat half-fallen from a wall; in that incredible moment I have leaned forward to shout and have all but pitched out through the window; and what of my destiny then?

 

Back at last and looking outward:

 

And the gate is lead, and shrunken, and the gnomes but a herd of goats; I stand not on a mighty parapet, but on the roof of a byre. Gone are the swan pools, the great gray halls, the soft-footed dancers and the grape-girls. Atlantes, mighty Atlantes, lies on his back with his eyes glazed and the bright blood flowing from his broken head . . . lying, aiee! like a goatherd after a bottle-fight on market day. And his steed— but horror itself! has she then turned the hippogriff into a milch cow? May the mandrake curdle her bowels if she’s harmed my hippogriff!

 

Ah but no; there he stands, the blazing beauty, and throws back his eagle’s head, and hurls his joy away to the farthest mountains. I mingle my shout with his, leap free of the wall, and run and tumble down the meadow.

 

In a transport I stretch myself against the unenchanted grass, and twist and turn in it until I can smell its sweet green ichor; and in just such a turning mine eyes fall upon her who stands meekly by, her two hands folded about the piece of her broken staff, her eyes downcast—but not so far they see me not.

 

“But ‘tis thee, my warrior-maid!” I roar. “Here to me lass, and I’ll buss thee well for thy trouble!”

 

But she stands where she is, so I must go to her. That at least I can do; has she not set me free?

 

(Or is she here to imprison me again? Destiny, now, is not fragile; yonder’s a fractured magician for proof. Still-) “How do they call thee, maid?”

 

“Bradamante,” says she; now, the Arabs breed a long-maned horse, and in the distance that silken banner on their necks looks like this maid’s lashes close to.

 

“Well, Bradamante, I owe thee my freedom if not my life. And should I pay the reckoning, what would thee do with them?”

 

Up to me she looks, with a deep calm which destroys my reckless smile; and up past me she looks further; and she says gently, “I would do the Lord’s will with them.”

 

“Call me not Lord!” I cry; this creature embarrasses me.

 

“I was not.” Quiet as ever, her voice, yet somehow she chides me. “I meant the Lord Whom I serve, Who is King of kings.”

 

“Is He now! And what would He have thee do with a belly-hungry, prison-broke hellion of a swordless knight?”

 

“If thou wilt serve Him-”

 

“Hold, lass. Yon wizard told me a tale of thee and me betrothed, and crawling the mud like worms among worms with never a jewel to our cloaks. He said ‘twas my destiny to be freed by thee, and free me thee did. Though I can’t say how.”

 

“I but struck him with my staff.”

 

“Na, lass. Even I could never do that; he could not be touched.”

 

She gives me her hand; I take it and then follow her gaze to it. It wears a simple golden ring. Gently she frees herself and removes the ring. “The Lord sent this my way; who wears it is proof against all enchantments. I need it no longer.” The ring flashes in the sun as she casts it aside; with my quick thumb and forefinger I pluck it out of the air.

 

“But keep it, Bradamante! Thee cannot discard such a treasure!”

 

“It was given me to free thee, and thou art free. As to the future—the Lord will provide.”

 

I slip the ring upon my smallest finger, and though it is thick as her thumb, the ring clasps me like mine own. (Even without it, girl, thee’d have better fortune with an angry basilisk than thee would with me, if thee would persuade me to join thee oh thy rocky pilgrimages. But now-) “This much of my destiny is complete, then, Bradamante, and I am in thy debt. But surely the wizard was wrong about the rest of it.”

 

“It is in the hands of the Lord.”

 

“Thee doesn’t expect me to cast aside my brocades for a scratchy gown like thine, and go with thee among the peasants!”

 

“We do as the Lord directs. We do it freely and with all our hearts, and are saved, or we do it blindly until we end in darkness; but serve Him we shall.”

 

Such confidence is more unnerving than any magic. “I cannot believe that.”

 

“Will not,” she corrects me calmly.

 

“But I’ve choice! Here we stand, Bradamante, and in the next heartbeat I might slay thee or woo thee or bite thee or fall on the earth and gobble grass; and which of these things I do is for me to decide!”

 

Slowly and so surely she shakes her head. “It is in thee to serve the Lord, else I should not have been sent to thee. Choice thee has: Thee may serve Him willingly or thee may serve Him blindly; and none has a third way.”

 

“Thee cannot force-”

 

She puts up her hands. “We do not force. We do not kill. We need not. The Lord-”

 

“Thy Lord let thee kill Atlantes!”

 

“No, Rogero. He is not dead.”

 

I spring to the crumpled magician; and indeed, he is but stunned. I snatch out his own poiniard, and instantly, under its point, Bradamante thrusts her firm brown arm. “The Lord will take him in his own time, Rogero. Spare him.”

 

“Spare him! He would have killed thee!”

 

“But he did not. He too is a servant of God, though unwilling. Spare him.”

 

I fling down the blade so violently that nought but the jewelled knob at the hilt-top shows between the grass-blades. “Then I will; and having done thee the one service, I shall call my debts discharged. Art satisfied, girl?”

 

She makes my head bubble, this quiet creature; and I recall Atlantes’ scoffing words, that this dedicated beetle of a Bradamante shall think more of her faith than of my flesh, and that she shall have more brains than I.

 

Her lashes fall, and “Sobeit,” she says, and not another word.

 

I need my sword, and to get it I must turn my back on her —a good need. So up the slope I go lightly, just as if her very presence were not like a heat on my shoulder blades. I close my eyes as I spring up the smooth grassway, and it does nothing to shut her out.

 

Patience, Rogero! Down the hill, over the rise, and she’ll be forgotten!

 

And in any case, one could come back if one must . . .

 

So I let my eyes come open again, and gasp; for there stands the hippogriff, and he has never let me come so close. If I am to continue upward I must go round him, or I must move him. For a split second I falter, and his great head comes round to me; and oh, I’ve looked in the wells of Kazipon which are bottomless, I’ve followed the light of my torch in the endless caverns of Qual, and I’ve known a night when the stars went out; and never before have I looked into such depths and such reaches as the eyes in his eagle head. True bird’s eyes they are, fierce in their very structure and unreadable. Through them the beast sees—what? A soft sac of blood and bones to be a sheath for that golden beak . . . or a friend ... or a passing insect ... I should flee. I should stand. I should sidle about him and be wary. I should, I should-

 

But I shall ride him!

 

I finish my stride and go straight to him, and when my hand falls on his purple shoulder he swings his head forward and high, and trembles so that from his wings comes a sound like soft rain on a silken tent. My heart leaps so that I must leap with it or lose it, and with a single motion I am on his back and my knees have him. Aiee! such a shout comes from me, it would rival his own; it is full of the joyous taste of terror. With it I fetch him a buffet on the withers which jars me to the very neckbones, and before I can feel the blow as any more than a shock, his wings are open and thrusting, and he rears and leaps ...

 

It is a leap that never will end; fast he flies and faster hurtling higher just at the angle of his leap, and the surges of his body are most strange to a horseman. Only the glint of the golden ring convinces me that we are not involved in an enchantment; for flying sunward warms nothing, curious as it may seem, and the bright air grows cold as the hoary hinges of perdition’s door.

 

I think of poor sod-shackled Bradamante, and look back and down; but by now she is lost in that indeterminate new place between haze and horizon, and there, for all of me, she may stay. I shrug, and find that I have not shrugged away the picture of her face, which is strange, since it is hardly one worth remembering. Surely, Rogero, thou art not smitten?

 

With her? With—that?

 

Ah no, it could not be. There must be something else, something buried in the whole mosaic of our meeting. Of our parting . . . ah; that was it!

 

Atlantes is not dead.

 

That in itself is nothing; Atlantes distant is, to me, as good as Atlantes dead. But Atlantes slowly waking in the meadow, his enchantments all destroyed, his shield and steed gone— and the peaceful author of his ruin doubtless helping him to his feet with her sturdy unwomanly hands . . . this is another matter.

 

But forget it! The sly-tongued termagant could, by the time Atlantes was fully conscious, have him so morassed in debate he would forget to be angry. Bradamante has a most powerful helplessness; she attacks with the irresistible weapon of being unarmed, immobilizes the enemy by surrendering, and at last sits on his feeble form, holding by the great weight of her passivity. I need not fear for Bradamante.

 

But the ring flicks a mote of light into mine eye, and I know I have taken her last defense and left her at the mercy of the merciless, and this is small thanks indeed for what she dared for me.

 

But what else would a knight, a true knight, do?

 

One thing a knight would do, I tell myself bitterly, is to regain his sword if he lost it, and not pleasure himself with a hippogriff, however beautiful. Thou art no knight, Rogero; not yet, not again. Regain thine own holy blade, its very hilt encrusted with thy sacred promises, ere thee call thyself knight again.

 

Back, then, for the sword, and decide then about the maiden; and keep thyself armed with the thought of thy destiny —it is with her, and means soaking in meekness until I am mushy as bread in a milk bowl . . . no! by the heart of the fire in the nethermost pit, I shall get my blade and hew out a new destiny!

 

There are no reins, and I remember that the magician controlled the beast with words. “Enough, my beauty!” I cry. “Back now—take me back!” And somewhere inside a voice sniggers Thee deludes thyself with the matter of the sword; it’s the plight of the maid that drives thee. “No!” I cry, “she shall not have me! Let her King of kings save her, she’s His ward, not mine!” And I thump the hippogriff with my hard-tooled heels: “Back, my beauty, take me back!”

 

And the hippogriff tilts to the wind, and balances and sails as before, for these are not the magic words.

 

“Turn! Turn!” I bellow, rowelling him. I ball my fist and sink half of it in the feathered root of his neck just forward of the shoulder; for by this, if rightly done, one may stagger a horse. “Mule!” I shriek. ‘Turn thy spavined carcass about ere I tie a knot in thy neck!”

 

At this the eagle’s head turns about like an owl’s and the measureless eyes loom over me. Slowly the beak opens that I may see the spear tip and the scissor sides of that frightful weapon. Like a blind animal, the gray-pink tongue shifts and searches and settles again; the tongue itself is adversary enough for any soldier. Fear, however, is an assistant to safety only up to a point, and I am far past it. “Go back, aborted monster, ere I snatch out that ugly horn and crack thine eyeballs together! By the pleasure-bred blood of thy half-bred dam and the-” Thus far I rant, and he strikes. And would he had killed with the one stroke; for instead he has slipped the point of his beak between my saddle and my hams, and I am flipped, unharmed and sore humiliated, high in the air over him. I am spinning like a broken lance, or the earth is circling me head to heel, chased by a blazing band of sun. I see the glory-tinted wings below me, too small and far away; around I go and see them again closer; and again, and this time I must touch, clutch; I claw my hands and flex my legs, and turn again—and the hippogriff slips away to the side to let me plunge past him.

 

I cover my eyes and I scream; I scream till my tendons cannot bear it, sob and scream again fit to startle the starlings off every bank from here to Brookline, Mass. I recant, I’ll accept my destiny and honestly wed the little brown nun, if she’ll have me; ay, and do for her Lord what paltry dog-tricks He’ll ask of me; only make this hippogriff, this lovely, legitimate, honorable beauty of a hippogriff save me. Aiee! and I’ll lie on my back on a scaffold and paint Thee murals, Lord, and I swear never to punch Miss Brandt in the eye, or anywhere else again, if thee’ll but send me a cloud or an eagle or a parachute or a helicopter ... oh holy Pete, what a spot for him to lose his mind in and be me again. I wonder if he knows it won’t take any real time at all, where he is. And there below me the mottled earth pursues a sun-turned-rocket . . . whew. Giles old boy, don’t you shut your eyes again until you have to-”Hullo!”

 

There at the area railing stands a smut-faced urchin and a smaller but female version of himself, all eyeballs and streaky cheeks. “Gee, mister, you all right? You sick?” and the smaller one: “Canchasee, he’s dyne!”

 

“Don’t mind me, kids,” I mumble. “I just fell off a hippogriff.” I find I’m half-kneeling and try to stand, and it seems my hands are locked around the iron uprights of the railing. I stay there stooped and feeling very foolish while they watch me, and I concentrate from my stone-cold marrow up and out until at last my left fingers begin to stir. With a little more effort the hand comes free, and with it I disengage the right, one finger at a time. I straighten up then and look a while at my hands and wiggle them. “He ain’t dyne,” says the boy in a robbed tone, and his cohort says defensively, “Anyway he wuz dyne,” because her ardent hopes had made it her production.

 

Briefly, a sun flashes past, but I ignore it; I’ll be all right now. You get so you know the signs. “Here,” I say, “I’ll try to do better next time,” and I give them money, I don’t know how much but it must be enough; they beat it.

 

I put my elbows on the railing, keeping these spastic hands away from it, and look across the street. The clock hands haven’t moved any that I can see, and Miss Brandt, who was just starting out the door when my addled brains caught up with me, is pausing on the portico, the door just closing behind her. Two seconds, three maybe. My God, what a way to live!

 

Miss Brandt looks up the street and down, descends the shallow steps and turns right toward the old Mayor’s statue. When she has quite gone I cross to the bank and go inside. At the island table I write a check, and take it to the wicket where the fierce-faced man is caged. He takes the paper and turns it over with the same snap Mr. Saffron used, and that is a trick I must learn one day. “You’ll need to get this initialed,” he says. So off I go to Mr. Saffron again, and stand in front of his shiny desk until he looks up at me and makes the pink meaty ridge across and above his narrowed eyes. The man disapproves of me to the point of ecstasy, and I take this as a kindness; for it makes us both feel important. I let the check fall to him, and he looks, snaps, looks, and grunts. “All right, Mr. Ahh,” he says, and squiggles on it with his personal pen. I take the check and stand where I am.

 

“Well?”

 

“I want to know whose money this is.”

 

“Yours.” He has a way of snapping off the margins of his words as if he doesn’t want you to have a whole one.

 

“Yes, but-”

 

“The deposit is in your name; surely that’s sufficient!”

 

I look at the check. “Is there any more left?”

 

He is offended by the whole thing, but he is stuck with it. “There is,” he says.

 

“Much?”

 

“More than you can spend today,” he says. “Or this week.”

 

“Well, dammit, how much?”

 

He sort of spreads his pale-pink hands, which means, I gather, that this is not an account like other accounts and he wishes he could do something about the irregularity but he can’t. He says, “That is the one and final checkbook you get. Aside from that, there doesn’t seem to—ahh—be any upper limit. And now you’ll excuse me, I’ve a great deal to good day Mr. Mmmm.” And down he goes to his papers.

 

Well, I’ve asked enough questions to know there won’t be any answers. I go back to the wicket and slide the fierce one the check. “Half in hundreds and the rest in small bills.” He makes a long snort or a short sigh, clicks the bars between us down tight, lets himself out the back with a key, and is gone for too long, but I don’t mind about that just now. Pretty soon he’s back with a sack. He opens the wicket and starts taking stacks out of the sack and sliding them to me. The sixty hundreds go into my socks; they have elastic tops and pull up high enough. The sixty fifties fan out flat enough to go between my belly and my knit shorts, though they hump up some. Then I spend some time with the hundred and eighty twenties and tens, cramming ‘em into two side and one back pants pocket. By now I’m lumpy as a sofa cushion just out of the wet wash and I’ve collected quite a crowd. The fierce face flutes, “You’re going to run into trouble, carrying all that money that way,” as if it was a wish, and I say “No I won’t. They all think I’m crazy, and there’s no telling what a crazy man will do.” I say it good and loud, and all the people watching stop their buzz-buzz and back off a little. They make a wide empty aisle for me when I start away.

 

“Wait!” cries the teller, and punches some keys on his little machine. Coins slide down the half-spiral chute and pile up in the cup at the bottom with a cast-iron clink. “Wait! Here’s your twenty-eight cents!”

 

“Keep it!” I bellow from the door, and go out feeling a lot happier than I’ve been feeling lately. All my life I’ve wanted to leave twenty-eight cents for a bank teller, who wouldn’t put it in his pocket to save his soul, and who hasn’t got any place for it in his books.

 

Down the street there’s a big men’s shop with little letters over the door and a windowful of somber-colored suits with no creases in the jacket-arms. I look them over until I find the one with the most pockets and then I go inside.

 

It’s like a church in there, but with wall-to-wall broadloom, and the only showcases I can see are two little ones set into mahogany pillars, one with tie-clasps and collar pins, one with four hand-painted silk ties. I go look at the first one. Every velvet box has a humble little card with “the” on it: $200 the set. $850 the pair. I’m on my way to look at the ties when a tall man with a paper carnation steps out of a potted palm and stands where I have to run him down in case I’m not going to stop.

 

“What,” he says, “do you want?” The “you” is a little bigger than the other words and the whole thing sounds like he’s pretty disgusted. I tell him about the suit in the window.

 

He laughs with his mouth. “That is a three-hundred-dollar suit.”

 

“Well, drag it on out.”

 

“I’m rawtha sure we don’t carry your size,” he says, looking at my painting pants.

 

“Then we’ll hack it till it fits,” I tell him. “Come on, buster, quit stalling.”

 

“I’m afraid that-”

 

So I start yelling a little, and he backs off and bleats “Mr. Triggle, Mr. Triggle!” and from somewhere—I guess another potted palm, there’s plenty around—comes another tall man in the same sort of funeral suit, but this one’s got a real carnation. “Here,” he says, “Here-here-here. What’s this, what?”

 

“You’re selling, I’m buying. Only he don’t think so,” I tell the real carnation, pointing at the paper one.

 

The paper one says, “The gentleman—” (dirtiest word I ever heard, the way he says it)— “The gentleman is inquiring after the von Hochmann worsted in the window.”

 

The real carnation nickers. “My good man, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong-” and then I put twenty dollars in his hand. He looks at it and the other one looks at it so I give him one too. They look at each other, so I pass out two more. “Get the suit.”

 

“Won’t you step into the sample room?” says the real carnation, and you wouldn’t know it was the same man. It certainly isn’t the same voice. “We have quite a selection in-”

 

“I don’t want a selection, I want that suit in the window. That very goddam selfsame suit and not one like it.”

 

“Oh but we can’t get a suit out of the-” So I give them each twenty dollars. “Yes, sir!” says the paper one, and dives to the front.

 

“Now let’s see,” says the real carnation, pulling at his chin and trying to imagine me with my face washed. “Once we get the suit out of the way, we’ll look at some cravats, and perhaps an English broadcloth, hmmm? Handmade? Rolled collar, studs? Yes indeedy.”

 

“No indeedy. I got a shirt.” I pluck at the yellow ski-pajama top. This shuts him up without any money changing hands.

 

The other tall man comes back with the suit and we parade into the fitting room which looks more than ever like part of a funeral home, only bigger. The two of them stand in the middle of the room wringing or rubbing their hands while I step into a curtained booth and put the suit on. The pants got no cuffs yet and the coat’s too tight. I come out and they jump all over me like Hansel and Gretel on the gingerbread house. When they get to measuring the pants they find out I still got my old ones on underneath. Forty dollars fixes that up too, before they can say anything.

 

So when they’re finished chalking and pinning they want to know when I want the suit. “Now!” I roar, and before either of them can so much as “But we-” I give them money again. “How many people you got back in there, altering?”

 

“Eight, sir.”

 

“Well, here.” I give him eight twenties. “Give ‘em this and put ‘em all to work on this one suit. You’ve got nine minutes.”

 

“Yes sir,” and off goes paper carnation, breathing hard.

 

The other one says, “You said you were in the movie line?”

 

“I did not.”

 

“Ahh,” he says. “Oil.”

 

“Nup. Ladies’ wear. I put out a line of underskirts with prints of umbrellas and telephones on ‘em. You’ve seen ‘em.”

 

“I—ahh—don’t know that I have.”

 

“What?” I shout, “You never heard of a Freudian slip?”

 

“Why, I-” and after that he shuts up. He keeps looking at me.

 

They don’t get the suit ready in nine minutes but they make it in eleven. As soon as the man shows with the suit over his arm, I tell him, “Hey, I forgot. I want the left sleeve three-eighths of an inch shorter than the right one.” His jaw drops, but the real carnation says “Do it, Hopkinson.” And the other one goes out with the suit, me diving along right behind him. We get to a door about the same time. Inside is a real patchy workroom with bright lights and racks of suits, two old women and six old men. “But sir, you can’t-”

 

“Shut up and give me that,” I say, and snatch the suit. “I didn’t want the sleeve fixed, I just wanted to see these people. Listen,” I say to the whole room, “Did he give you any money just now, this guy with the paper flower?”

 

All those old people stand and blink at me till somebody says “Money?” and then they all shrug their shoulders and wag their heads. Paper flower, all nods and smiles, steps forward and says, “Why, I was going to give it to them just as soon as the suit was satisfactory,” and he takes the eight twenties out of his side pocket. I bang them out of his hand and stick them into my pants. “You were like hell, you crumb.” I go down into my sock and haul out the pack of hundreds and go around the room giving one to each of the old people. The real carnation sticks his head in just then and I tell him, “You better get that guy out of my sight before something happens around here even my money won’t fix.” The paper flower disappears.

 

I go back to the booth and this time I take off the old pants. I spread the money around through all the pockets in the suit —it’s got fourteen—and get dressed. I give the carnation three hundred dollars and my old pants. “You keep ‘em. They should fit pretty good.” I have to admire him; I can see he’s all aquiver inside, but he still walks like a bishop at a coronation as we go to the door, and as he walks he’s carefully folding my old pants, which hasn’t happened since I brought them home from Kresge’s two years ago, until they hang flat as an antimaccassar over his forearm. He opens the door for me and by God, bows. “Thank you so much, and come back to us soon, Mr. Freud.”

 

It’s close to nighttime, eating time. Around the corner and up the street is a restaurant I’ve heard about that used to be a stable. I’m just pushing through the door when in front of me there grows a soft wall made of maroon serge and brass buttons and a monstrous braided golden silk rope. I step back and look up, and it isn’t a wall, but the prow of a commodore-type doorman; and I swear he’s eight feet tall before the hat starts.

 

“Sorry, sir; you can’t go in like that.”

 

The suit, it seems, gets me a “sir” but not any courtesy in the voice. “Like what7”

 

He puts up a hand like a punching bag and taps himself on the Adam’s apple. I put up my hand and touch only my yellow ski pajama top. “Oh, the tie,” I say.

 

“Oh,” he says, “the tie.” Mimicking somebody like that, now that’s for murder; that’s worse than what Rogero called the hippogriff. “Well, you didn’t happen to notice I got no tie.”

 

He pushes out his chest. It looms up and over me like the business end of a hydraulic forging press. “I did happen to notice you got no tie,” he says, still copying my voice and you know? He’s pretty good at it.

 

“You did, for sure?” I say, and give him twenty dollars.

 

“Well, kind of one-eyed I did,” he says in a new voice which wasn’t mine and wasn’t the “sir” voice I first heard, but one which seems to come easiest of all to him. I give him another twenty, and he lets me go on in.

 

A man meets me at the inner door—quite a man, boiled shirt, tailcoat, and the magnificent head you see in college lobbies, the oil painting of the previous Dean. With one flick of his eyes—and mind you, the light’s not too good just there —he does with me what Mr. Saffron does with a check; he reads me, turns me over with a snap, puts his squiggle on me so that the inside man will do what’s absolutely correct. It must be a problem, with the new suit and the worn shoes and the dirty face and the fact that the doorman let me in; but if it bothers him he doesn’t show it. “Good evening, sir,” he says. His tone has the depth of one of those console radios they built in the thirties, when the more money you had, the more bass you bumped your belly with. “Step right this way.”

 

But I knock his elbow. “It bothers you I got no necktie.”

 

“Why—no, sir.”

 

“Yes it does.” I take out a hundred-dollar bill and fold it lengthwise and pleat it good and tight, and then I take a fifty and fold it flat and narrow, and wind it once around the middle of the hundred. Then I take the two pleated ends and spread them so I have a bow, tied in the middle. He stands there waiting for me as if people did this kind of thing all the time. “Now lend me the pin off that flower of yours.” He hands it to me, carrying it the last half inch of the way by a subtle and courteous bow from the waist. I pin the bow to the front of my yellow ski-pajama top. “A tie. Okay with you?”

 

“Quite suitable, sir.”

 

“I thought you’d like it.” I pull it off and hand it to him. “I want a table for eight on the edge of the floor.”

 

“Yes, sir. I have just the one.” Off he goes, and me after him, and sure enough, there’s a big round table. He plucks a subdued ivory Reserved card off it and sits me down. “And when do you expect the rest of your party?”

 

“I’m the rest of the party.”

 

“Very good, sir. And you’re drinking-”

 

“Brandy. Double. The kind that nobody but you knows is the best in the place.”

 

“I have just the year. Water? Soda?”

 

“Yoghurt,” I say. “About half-and-half.”

 

“Right away, sir.”

 

So I have that and a liver and oatmeal sandwich and crepes suzettes with a jubilee sauce made (by four men with three shiny capts) with those little tiny wild French strawberries, and you know? It costs eighty-four bucks to eat in that place.

 

I sit and I watch the show, and I watch the watchers watching the show. And I plan the things I shall do with more money than I can spend. I shall leave here when it is too late to hire anything and I’ll make my money rent a powerboat. I’ll leave twice the price with the owner and I’ll sink it, and never be seen again by him, so he’ll wonder. I’ll buy two islands with two mansions, and on one I’ll pretend to be a prude while through an agent I’ll lease everything but my house to nudists; and the other island I’ll populate with prudes while I go naked. I’ll buy Thomas Moore’s own harp from the Institute and build in a contact microphone and a music box which will play “Red Wing” for forty minutes at double tempo if anyone touches it. I’ll train up a man who can fascinate as many hungry people as Huey Long and as many frightened people as Joe McCarthy, both at the same time, and when he takes over he’ll pull a switch on them all and be as gentle and as poor and as strong as Jesus of Nazareth. And I’ll supply every male teen-ager with a hand-tainted pie, and every female with a totally new orgasmic term to apply to sundaes, convertibles, knobby-faced pop vocalists and shoe straps. For Bradamante a transparent lipstick so she can feel like a woman even if she doesn’t want it to show, and for Atlantes (poor little rich man) the full realization of destiny’s indestructibility.

 

Look yonder: look! There by herself, with a candle on her table, sits the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Her hair is soft sable, long, straight, fine, and thick; her eyes and cheekbones the delicate strong interacting Eurasian arch-sequence. Her nostrils are petal-textured, moving as indetectably as the shift from one aurora-pattern to the next, but sensitively in motion even from her shallow breathing as she sits still, so still . . . and surely she is the saddest woman who ever lived, or a mouth such as hers could not be sleeping so, nor the head turned and held just that way of all ways, nor the shoulders so careless and the hands so forgotten. Is she grieving from loneliness, in the knowledge that never in life can she meet her like? Or has she been hurt by a small someone, and cannot understand?

 

I raise a hand, and the Dean-faced obsolescent console drifts to me. “Who is she?”

 

“I’ll find out for you in a moment, sir.”

 

“No, don’t!” It bursts from me. “Please don’t.” (Now, why not?) “You mustn’t do that.”

 

“Very well, sir,” and as if he senses my distress, “really I won’t.”

 

“Why is she so sad?” And I don’t know I’ve spoken until he answers: “I think she has been disappointed, sir. She has been sitting there alone for a long while.” He bends a little closer, as if to add a great importance to what he has to say. “I think, sir, that she is very young.”

 

And somehow I understand precisely what he means; he means that she is frightened, but will not suggest fear in the burnished security of this moneyed place, of which he is such a piece.

 

Fear . . . there are fears and fears, depending upon one’s origins and sense of value. Seimel, who hunts tigers with a spear, faces death without fear, and I know a man who is struck numb at the sound of a key in a Yale lock; who’s to say which terror is great or small, or that it’s a small thing to be a girl who dare not leave a table because she has no money? “Well, let her go. I’ll take her check.”

 

“Yes, sir.” His glossy finish emits, like an alpha particle, a brief bright flash of approval. “Shall I take her your card?”

 

“Oh God no!” Again the thought of knowing her at all distresses me. “Just say a hippogriff flew by.”

 

Unperturbed he says, “Quite, sir,” and, as a good piece of furniture should, rolls silently and unbendingly away on his casters.

 

I wait, and I wait; and there coming in is a chinchilla coat which will be flung over a chair somewhere just under a light, and yonder a fat face laughs too loudly; the trombone, part of a chord, still gives me two notes exactly right for a girl’s inexpressible loneliness and my feelings about it, and the man with the shiny-cart moves the heel of a silver spoon deftly through the pure transparent heat springing bluely from the bubbling blood of the jubilee . . . and as if by accident, the fine Dean’s- head bows over the girl’s table and he speaks to her.

 

Her face, when she looks up, blinds me for a moment. Or maybe my tears do. She radiates no happiness—some great grief is bred too deeply into this girl’s fine bones—but there is a change which permits hands to be remembered and a mouth to live again. It could have been fear and its removal, an excision which works wonders with dogs and humans, and might, I imagine, even with nations.

 

And so she may turn her head away from sorrow, and when she does, the breath catches in my throat; in the nocturnal texture of her hair lies a single streak of silver, a hue of just the deadness, just the distance of a winter moon. No other color could treat with such precision of an inherent sorrow, and no other creature has been so correctly branded as this girl.

 

I saw motion pictures of a lily growing; shoot to blossom in a brace of seconds; and as it rose and burst, so she rises and shakes back her hair. I saw a strand of spider web drift by and away, streaming; and so she passes. I saw a bird die in the hollow of my hand, its open crystal eyes unchanging; and so I sit now unchanged, except that something is gone out of me.

 

I shall invoke Rogero, and escape from this tomb into terror; I shall not wait for a summons to his world. Better to be falling away through a shining sky with angry wings above me and a sudden quiet below, than to sit here in the meshes of my several madnesses. Insanity is only wisdom of a sort, too deeply driven for the sphincters of the mind to compass; and this is the riddle of the sphinx. Brushless Giles, the ex-painter, is (when you come right down to it) a far wiser person than Swordless Rogero, ex-knight. Put me on a hippogriff without a driver’s license and I won’t sit and bawl “Back, sir!”; I’ll push the buttons and pull the levers and watch what happens until I can back into anybody’s downhill driveway. And if words are the reins, the throttle, and clutch, then words I’ll try, until at last I have a “Gee” for him and a “Haw” for him and above all a big fat “Whoa!” Rogero, now, he’s a fool, and rather healthier than I and therefore more alive; his uncertainties are a little less well-founded in fact than mine. Whoosh! and is that the hot, gentle ignition of brandy over yonder, or the sun passing my feet? Is that polite patter halfhearted applause for the band or is it the wind in the wings of the wheeling beast above me? Catch me, catch me, good knight and I shall die gladly with thee, free of both these insupportable worlds. But I am not falling; I hang here in dusk, supported by a rushing wind, a central point for the looming earth and the hurtling sun as they rotate about me. (And if hanging thou art, why are the crags of Earth larger each time they pass thee?) Aiee, could I but die of foolhardiness, like a Bradamante challenging the powers of evil, and not thus crotch-flung in penance for the silly vapors of my foul mouth, not humiliated and screaming like a whipped serf. (Waiter, bring me an orchestra playing Rampart Street, I have fallen from Grace, who is a hippogriff.)

 

Shining one, can thee not forgive me my temper and my tongue? Is there nothing in thee which recalls the swift romp on Atlantes’ mountain, and thee dancing away from me like a playmate, sharing my joy? That is Rogero, good hippogriff, and not the furious mote who offended thee . . . I’ll beg thee no more, but pray only that thee might escape thy conscience, as I failed to do when I left my sword and my destiny with Bradamante.

 

And he comes, he comes, his wings all but folded, back-bent, beating a very buzz to fly downward faster than I can fall. And faster he is; he looms to me, blasts himself to one side so close he tumbles me anew, so that the sun is still above me, but below the mountains turn like clay on a potters wheel. The hippogriffs wings are wide now, and working weightily, and again he grows in mine eye; and now I can hear him; he is screaming, screaming . . . gods! What a terror-struck cry! Then the screaming stops, and his lion’s voice rumbles with laughter—ah, he mocks me, he mocks me, the son of ... of a mighty gryphon and a blooded mare, most beautiful of creatures. There, hippogriff: mock me, it is thy privilege; let me die, it is thy right.

 

And again the thunder of his humor; he twists his wings, one up, one down, rolling like a summer swallow; and as I fall to meet him he is on his back like a swimmer, and, blessed angel of a hippogriff, he takes me!

 

I hang from his talons like a newt, mine eyes a-pop from the pressure of his holding and the surge of his climb; and climb he must, for he has caught me in a valley, no further aloft than the height of a tall pine tree; the mountains all about are above us. He could not have waited the tenth part of a heartbeat and saved me still. He is confident and beautiful and he has a most cruel sense of humor.

 

I am lifted now to his beak; I face his eyes, and from his open maw his laughter rumbles, and I like a captured puppy plead to be set down. And indeed, had I a tail I’d wag for him; I’d whimper if I felt it would reach him.

 

He dips his head and turns it, and his beak’s about my waist. Now he lifts me, turns his head back to front, lowers me, twists that my feet may go down and my head up—and I am astride him again, perched on his shoulders a forearm’s span away from the saddle. He nudges me back, and I bump my way to the saddle like a babe on a fence-prop, bottom foremost and clumsy with fright. Not until I am firm in the saddle does he release me; indeed, for a moment it occurs to me that, purely in jest, he might bite me in twain once I think I am safe. Through my thighs I sense another thunderous chuckle at my expense. I bite my lip and cast mine eyes down, but there is no escaping his mirth.

 

Now the mountains are behind. The sea is a haze and the sky sea-colored, and where they meet there is no longer a line; by a twist of my mind I may imagine naught but sky around us in an Earthless universe, and a twist again, and it is the sea all about, up and over, my hippogriff and I the sole population of an empty bubble in a universe of water.

 

And it comes to me then, like a sending—words, odd and small; “Gee,” and “Haw,” and “Whoa!” and each carries the nostriled flavor of Giles and the smoke in his mouth. So “Gee!” I murmur—and my hippogriff wheels; “Haw,” say I, and the other way he turns. ... I can ride him, fly him! He is mine, he is mine!

 

But mine too is the humiliation, and the lesson of his laughter, cackling like a conscience. Ahead is the sea, across it adventure and freedom. Behind are the hills, and my sword, my duty, my debt, and a weaponless wench. My steed is silent, as if waiting: “So haw then, and let me be damned to my destiny,” I cry, and he swings about to tuck the distant shore under his golden chin; to take me back to my grubby fate. And grubby or not, I preen; I am a knight who will not be swayed nor turned aside; straight to my sword I will fly, to mine honor, to-

 

But below, a clot of white on the rock takes mine eye, and “Whoa!” I cry with all my heart; and the hippogriff’s bellow of laughter fairly puts whitecaps on the waves below. And down we drop, and down, the roar and crash of beastly laughter in the van, the flanks, the trailing wind of our descent. There is a peal of it for knights without swords, for true courses set and forsaken; there’s a rumbling gust of it for gratitude confessed but unpaid, and one for the man who would plan an escape for himself if he were on time to rescue a maiden in peril, or who would plant a bluebell for her if he were late, if he happened to pass that way. But the shrillest laughter, the one having the most cold gold eagle in it, was for a knight who claimed to value his sword for the vows it carried.

 

I have a moment of shame and one of fury, and then a tortured time of both together. All I need do to cut off this obscene bellowing-—ay, and gain the beast’s respect, I wouldn’t doubt—is to press my heels to his flanks, and straight to Atlantes’ mountain we’d go; to Bradamante; to my sword; to the completion of my promises and the payment of my debts.

 

And it is in the muscles of my legs to draw back those heels; it is in my heart to be humble and accept the beast’s deafening censure and cleanse myself; it is, it is, but once again I look below, and am lost; for chained to the rock is a naked woman of such unearthly beauty she can be compared only with the hooded shield I carry . . . with this difference: that whosoever looks upon this shield is blinded, but who looks upon this woman sees so clearly that he cannot live.

 

Down comes my steed and hovers, searching for a foothold on the windswept rock; and finding it, settles in. Before he is fully earth-borne I am away from him and his subsiding chuckles, slipping and scrambling to the seaward slope. Braced against the iron loops to which she is chained, I cower down close to her, cover mine eyes against that blaze, not of light, but of beauty; and when I can, I peer quickly through my fingers and drink the vision in small and frightened sips.

 

Her ankles are cruelly bound by a single hoop, hinged, hasped by the double chain which anchored it below. A smaller version of the same device was given each slender wrist, and there she lies, stretched tight against the cold rock, wet with spray, and the wind tugging her hair.

 

I touch the shackles, the chains. Anchored as they are, it seems the rock itself would lift from the sea bottom before those loops could be drawn. Turning hopelessly from this examination, I meet her eyes and the impact melts me; I fall to my knees and bow my head.

 

“Who art thou?” she whispers into the shouting wind.

 

“Rogero, a knight, come to save thee. Who has done this to thee, princess? . . . surely thou art princess . . .?

 

“Ay,” she breathes, “Angelica of Cathay, shipwrecked here on the very day the oracle at Ebuda demanded the most beautiful Ebudan maid as a sacrifice to some wrathful god. But since they had me . . .”

 

“Ebuda is that village yonder?”

 

“Ay.” Ah, but she is weary; her voice may be heard at all only because its sound was so very different; it differed, almost, from sound itself. “But go not to the village, good knight; they are barbarians and would tear thee to pieces rather than replace me here with one of their own. Best go whence thee came, and my blessing goes with thee; but I am doomed.”

 

“To die of cold and the pecks of sea eagles? I’ll die here with thee rather!”

 

“Nay, it will be quicker than that,” she murmurs. “Knowest the monster Orc?” Her eyes are calm, seaward now. As the wind tumbles her hair, I see that it is mystically marked with a stripe of cold silver; there has never been anything so lovely and far away as that swath of starshine.

 

“Orc? Oh, ay; a legend, a tale to frighten children. He is big as an island and has scales of iron and the tusks of a boar. And thou art chained here for Orc? The eagles will have thee before such a fable comes.”

 

“But he comes now,” she says calmly; and two things happen to me which will leave their mark for all my days; one, that as she spoke, grave and quite contained, her tears flowed and I knew that I saw a strength here as wondrous as her beauty; but for the tears, she might have been in her garden, half dreaming and at peace, for all her face showed it. And I turn away from her and see the second thing, the monster Orc.

 

With a shout I spin to Angelica, take her prisoned hand and on it slip my golden ring. “This will guard thee, Princess!” I cry, and my heart cries with it, only from my shield, and I stumble to the hippogriff.

 

He is ready, flexed, spread, trembling to be off; I have but one foot in the stirrup as he launches himself. The monster comes, and we fly out to meet it; and when we have flown what seemed far enough at first, there is yet another mile to go. It looms over us like a thundercloud; it rises higher and higher from the water, and there is more and still more of it, shapeless, immeasurable, and blind.

 

Blind! Swordless, lacking pike or halberd, axe or hook, mine only weapon is a giver of blindness; against this, the monster brings the only possible defense; “Blind, it is blind,” I cry, and my mount utters a shriek, part despair, but a fine part challenge, and mounts the sky to get above the creature and be sure.

 

And still it rises until we are but a wasp at a bull’s shoulder, until the black rock below is but a steppingstone to this great living hulk.

 

And the hippogriff, unbidden, folds his wings and we drop, down and down past the upright acres of filthy, streaming iron. I am past thought, incapable of anything except keeping my saddle in the weightless drop. Even my first long fall from the beast’s back had seemed not so long as this. Then out come the wings, and I groan against the pressure inside my doublet. Down we go still, the hippogriff battling the wind of our fall, and checking us at last.

 

We are in a roaring, stinking steam of water and evil fumes, somewhere between Orc’s looming bulk and the black rock. Across, and turn, and back, and turn; steamed and spumed and soaked and splattered with stiff salt slime. And for the second time that day I face death despised by the hippogriff .. .

 

I see his face again, I think for the last time. And had I years of life to give for the ability to read those bright implacable eyes, I would do it, and gladly; but I’ve but a few weary minutes. I gaze up hopelessly, and he brings his shining head closer to me, touches my head with a rough gentleness. With his eyes on mine, he makes a single soft sound, and then it is time to turn again. It seems for a moment he cannot and then he does, bravely, and labors back again. Belatedly I see that his wings are wet, and like Pegasus near death in dragon’s blood, he cannot remain aloft much longer. Ah, to know what it was he tried to tell me! Who would know? Giles? Ah, but I hate what I was, and what I am . . .

 

Together we scream a challenge, and the hippogriff finds strength, somehow, to drive up twice, three times the height of a man and, descending, flutter away a great weight of water from his wings. He passes close to the widening mouth, drives down near the hinge of the jaw just as it emerges. What appears at first as a bony projection from the hinge is suddenly a slimy opal, alight and alive—Orc’s eye, set like a whale’s. The hippogriff must have known, he must have known!

 

His small downward drive gives us speed—almost too much. As if alive, however, the shield trembles under my hands, turns to the sun for a bright beam, and hurls it across and back, on, and into the eye. And then we are past and tilting steeply; once more the hippogriff shivers away a mist of heavy water and fights to rise, and back we come the long, long distance around that mountain of a snout, past and past the yawning great arch of the open mouth, to the eye on the other side.

 

It must be only now that the mighty mass of dim-nerved flesh feels the pain of his dazzle-tattered eye. Something unspeakable moves inside the arch, and a gout of water and ichor shoots skyward. I see it rise, I see it curl; our wings will not survive this, so “Gee!” I cry, the sum total of terror and self-hate, of love for the hippogriff and the enchantment of Angelica; of anger, regret, remorse. His response is instant and beyond his control, and he wheels shoreward as I stand on the saddle, fall toward the monster, and kick back at that purple flank with both legs and all my strength. Even as I fall I look back under one arm, for a flash of Angelica’s body and the sight of my hippogriff flailing down into the water, short of the shore line. One wet wing-elbow rises like a sail and sinks as slowly; his neck, so pathetically thin without the dry golden ruff of feathers, is stretched toward the rock, but not far enough: he has died for me, and his laughter is dead with him; does thee know now, fool knight, what it was he told thee with that touch of his beak? Only that for all his jibes and hurtful scorn, he was ready to die with thee . . . And dying, Rogero, thy steed could not know thee heard, or would ever understand.

 

All this, in the instant of catapult, stretched achingly from my kick, with speed my only wings, my brain racing and my heart wrenched; and before me the magic shield of Atlantes. The shield strikes the water first, and my arrowing body slips under the thundering waterspout as it descends. Like a flat stone the shield skips on its curved face, and my forehead rings it like a gong. It tries to skip again, but my body plops in stingingly at the same instant, and stays it.

 

And at last I squat in the corner of that beastly smile, and all the hate I have ever known pours out of my arms and into the flailing of the shield. Edge and edge, flat and edge again, I belabor that viscid mound just back of my perch. It yields slowly, and at first I must work with my face but an arrows-length away; I feel it is burning me, filling me with a brutal and primitive madness that surely must turn my brain into what one finds in a dryrotted chestnut. But then it ceased to be, and was no more, and surely no less horrid than any part of the beast.

 

How long this pounding? I know not . . . but at length pain reaches it, and a convulsion such as should be impossible to anything so ponderous. My handhold disappears; there is a moment of strangling and a moment of crushing weight, a blow precisely where, earlier, my forehead struck the shield. And then I am thrashing in shallows on black rock, my legs tangled with the limp neck of the hippogriff.

 

The anchor of the Princess’s leg-shackle grinds my small ribs; I shift away from it, clutch it between arm and side, and lock my legs about the neck of the hippogriff, lest his body be swept out to sea. Water runs and runs, tugs and cascades off the rock, and for a long time my sky is full of black specks shifting and twinkling. But I will not let go.

 

When the tugging stops, I raise my head. The water is back to something like normal. More than half the hippogriff’s body is aground. The rock is completely free of litter—the last cascade having swept it clear. Out at sea stands a new mountain: I think it is dead now. It is sinking, ever so slowly, or sliding down some age-old chute it has worn in the ocean floor.

 

“Rogero-”

 

I kick free of the hippogriff’s heavy neck and head, and crawl to her.

 

“Princess!”

 

“’Thou art bravest of knights.”

 

“Nay, Angelica,” I mumble. “I am neither brave, nor a knight. I must free thee.”

 

“A simple matter.”

 

“Ay, had I his strength,” and I nod to the dead hippogriff.

 

“Mourn him not, Rogero,” says the Princess. “Thee stayed by him as he died, and thee will be rewarded.”

 

“Then must we wait on another hippogriff to strike thy chains?”

 

“No. The ring, Rogero; take off the ring.”

 

I stumble up the slope to her shackled hand, and take the ring, while she says, “It is a greater amulet, possibly, than thee knows. I was seeking it when I was shipwrecked here; I never thought to see it again; to have it brought to me makes thee part of a miracle.”

 

“See it again? It is thine?”

 

“It was stolen from my treasure house long ago, and has been on many hands. Its last use, so I was told in the north, was to be by a maiden who wished to free some dolt stupid enough to be entrapped by a magician and too stupid to break free. How came thee by it?”

 

“It was . . . cast aside as worthless.” My ears burn. “Princess, I must free thee.”

 

In her chains, she stretches lazily. “Whenever we like. These bonds mean nothing. Rogero, I am in thy debt.”

 

“No, Princess, for I have seen thee. It is enough.”

 

“Prettily said, and I believe thee.” And it seems she is amused. “Then do as I ask, and thee shall see a new power of the ring. Put the ring in my mouth.”

 

I held it to her parted lips. “Thou art a sweet and somewhat slow-witted man,” she whispers. “Goodbye, Rogero.” She takes the ring.

 

The shackles lie empty, and I crouch there over the black rock which pillowed her, my one hand extended, my mind awhirl at the nearness . . .

 

Nearness? She is gone!

 

Ah, she might have told me of this magic before demonstrating it! Is the world and all its magics leagued against me? Has the universe itself been designed to make me out a fool? “Thou art a sweet and somewhat slow-witted man.” Aiee! I shall have that carven on my tomb!

 

Slowly I mount the rock, and face the rocky spine leading to the mainland, to and through the barbarians; through mountains and hunger and poverty and illness; to aid and be aided along the way, until at last I have won what was given me and what, unearned, was cast aside; afoot, acrawl—to my destiny.

 

* * * *

 

“Are you quite all right, sir?”

 

Now that, old Dean-head, is a question. The music is surf and feathers in all its upbeats, strictly society on the down: scherzophrenic. A hot, transparent, blue flame whuffs out, and suddenly that is a matter of supreme importance, though I can’t think why. Slowly I look up at him. “Me?”

 

“It seemed for a second or two that you weren’t quite— with us, sir.”

 

“A second or two,” I say, “that’s all it takes.” Now I remember: that blue flame on the jubilee tray is the one I was looking at when I went under, or other, or wherever Rogero keeps his world. Surely I know where that is! I look up again. Deans read books. “Listen, what do you know about Atlantes?”

 

“Atlantis, sir?” This guy, you couldn’t ruffle him with a williwaw. “As I recall, it sank under the sea.”

 

“No, Atlantes—a magician.”

 

“Ah. I believe there was a necromancer of that name in Ariosto, somewhere.”

 

I put an accurate forefinger on his second stud and push it triumphantly. “Orlando Furioso! So that’s it! Hey, do you remember what ever happened to Bradamante?”

 

He puts his hands behind his back and looks at the wall meeting the ceiling. Good head on that man; splendid. “As I remember, sir, she married a knight-”

 

“Ex-knight,” I say, and it hurts. “Also, good night.” I give him a whole heap of money and head out.

 

“Good night, sir,” says the doorman.

 

“Oh,” I say, “You. Hey, a girl about so high and so wide with a silver streak in her hair, she left here. How long ago?”

 

He says he doesn’t recall so I give him some money. “About four minutes,” he says. “That way,” and points.

 

“Only four?” I have something in me like a pain. “That way, you’re sure?”

 

“You should be able to catch her,” he says. He closes his eyes and smiles. “Pretty.”

 

“The Grand Canyon,” I say, “it’s cute too.” I run the way he points. It’s to the river.

 

So it’s Orlando all this time, I think, and something has kept me from recognizing it. Atlantes and Bradamante, Angelica, princess of Cathay, the hippogriff and the Orc, all there. And what am I doing, acting it out? Atlantes kept Rogero from being a knight; some sort of magic keeps me from being a painter. Only nowadays they call it a neurosis.

 

So where am I going in such a hurry?

 

Got to save the Princess from the Orc. Orc, variant of urp, a real nauseating beast. Better I should go right back to the studio and mind my own business. Yes, that’s what Rogero kept telling himself. And he landed by the Princess anyway, no matter how his hippogriff laughed. Well laugh then, hippogriff. You’re not long for this world anyway.

 

There she is!

 

Walk now. Get your wind. See what happens to her. She’s chained naked on no rock yet. Or maybe she is . . . analogies being what they are . . .

 

Now cut it out, Giles! You’re all right now. It’s all just a story you read and mooned over when you were a kid. There were others; but did you really live it up with “The Little Lame Prince”; did you referee that go between the firedrake and the remora in Andrew Lang’s book; did you feel the icicle pierce your heart in “Back of the North Wind?” So maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something with Ariosto. Tell you what? To get religion? Or (and this is the idea that feels like pain) that you’re no more a painter than Rogero is a knight, in the long run ... in spite of some initial successes?

 

Go home, go home, and paint the way Miss Brandt wants you to. Go home now and your hippogriff will love you for it; yes, and live, whatever that might mean.

 

But wait; Miss Brandt wants you to be a painter and Bradamante didn’t want Rogero to be a knight. My story doesn’t coincide with his; it just sort of resonates. All the more reason to get out of here, Giles; go home. You’ve got all the money in the world; all the freedom, all the time to go anywhere and do anything. Paint anything. You know what happened to Rogero, his hippogriff, and his magic ring—yes, and his shield too, when he let his bumbling chivalry override his derisive conscience. (Conscience? Since when can a conscience be as beautiful as a hippogriff?)

 

So, go home. But look; look there, she has stopped at the River Road, and stands under a light, her gray silk gone all silver and the margins of her hair sinking a little over her slender shoulders as she raises her face to the sky. What is in that face? I can’t see, I can’t see ... an appeal, a submission rather; such sadness as hers is past hope and therefore past appealing to anything.

 

Princess, what is your rock, what your Orc? What conies, and you helpless; what shows itself without form, grows to fill the sky; what is impregnable, ironclad, and filthy, unspeakable? What fills your world and your short future, and proves at the same time that it shows only its slimy skull, and there is measurelessly more below?

 

You don’t scream, Princess?

 

You are only calm; but I have seen your tears.

 

She crosses the road to the trees, and takes a path toward the water; so laugh, hippogriff. I’ll go to her.

 

But she’s gone in the shadows: hurry, hurry-

 

And there in a quiet place I come on her and, like Rogero on the black rock, I sip the vision; for to gulp it would be more than I could bear.

 

There is a hole in the grove, an empty place by the water to let the night in. Part of a moon floats a train across the water to her as she sinks to a bench. Her head turns and tilts a little, as if to a footfall (does she hear me? Does she know there is more than her sadness in the world?) and she is completely in silhouette except for the single beam cupping a cheekbone, and the silver streak in her hair; with that small shard of cold white, the path on the water has a part of moon at each end!

 

And still more, just a little, her head turns, so her perfect profile lies in liquid moon; and now, if she turns only her eyes, she may see me. She does.

 

“I knew you’d be around.” Her voice ... a bell, a bird, a sound-unlike-sound . . . no. A voice, just a voice. Think about that, Giles; but not now.

 

“May I ... I mean . . .”

 

“Sure,” she says, indicating the bench. “Why not?”

 

I sit timidly at the other end of the bench, watching her as she stares out over the water. Her eyes are hooded and her face a chalice of sadness, brimming. And suddenly I know her Orc.

 

Poverty can be the Orc. Poverty can be the monster visible and nearing, which comes slimy and stinking out of the pit to fill the sky and yet be showing only its smallest part. Poverty can come to one chained, disregard one’s station and one’s virtues, and take one at its leisure.

 

Then I might be Rogero yet, for there is money in my pocket, neat, obedient, omnipotent money. Should I challenge her monster?

 

She might be angry. (Angelica? Angry? No; she bade the knight leave her and save himself.)

 

I look at her, and the sadness in her is greater than the money in my pocket. I see abruptly that my gesture would not anger her after all. She would simply pity me. My effort would be lost in her great need.

 

Then I’ll share what I have. Half what I have is still, effectively, all the money there is.

 

She is looking at the moon, so distant and so dead; she has the mark of distance and death upon her. Rogero offered no part of himself to his princess; he offered it all.

 

All of it? I touch the lapel of the most expensive suit I have ever owned; good new money whispers under my hand of miles and years of color and startlement, tastes and textures and toys; all the things, the thrills I’ve never had because it took too much time to be just Giles.

 

“I wish you wouldn’t stare like that.”

 

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Sorry.”

 

“What’s on your mind?”

 

Only that when tomorrow’s sun comes to you, you might give back to it as much gladness as a daffodil. Just that by giving you all I ever owned, so new that my own hands have not touched it, you might never be afraid again. “Just that I’d like to . . . borrow your pen.”

 

“My—well, I suppose.” She has it in her handbag; finds it and gives it to me.

 

I take my elegant, one and final blue book, and crouching close in the moonlight, Giles, I write, Giles, and Giles, and Giles, until I’ve written on the bottom line of every perforated page.

 

I hold it out to her with the pen. Here (I would say, but I cannot speak) here is all the magic I own, since I lost my shield. Here are my hooves and my talons. Here are my wings.

 

“What’s this?”

 

“Yours,” I croak. “I don’t want it. Any of it.”

 

“God,” she says.

 

She rises like the lily—but now, in the moonlight, more like a cereus—and looks at me. “You’re sure, now.”

 

“Never more sure.”

 

“I thought,” she says, “that you’d turn out to be a lot more fun than this.” And she throws the book into the river.

 

I sit in a dream by the corpse of a dream. It grows cold. Loneliness lives in my very pores as sadness lives in her face. She is gone, the moon is gone, and something else has gone, too. I do not know its name but it once kept me warm.

 

When she left, her leaving a completion of the absent gesture of throwing the book, I said nothing and I did not move; I am not sure that I really saw her leave.

 

Rogero, I think, I need you. I wish I could have a word with you.

 

For when you were stripped and alone, somewhere in yourself you found a way to travel, through wild countries, through poverty and sickness and hardship, certain that they would refine you for your destiny. You see, dear dopple, the twentieth-century man has no destiny; at least, he has no magicians to read it off for him, so he can never quite be sure. But take his amulets away, his spells and cantrips graven with the faces of dead presidents—and he’ll look over no mountains toward an unshakable faith. He’ll stare at nothing but his own terror.

 

Rogero, the universe is indeed leagued together to make fools of us.

 

I leave the bench and the river, not to be a pilgrim, but just to take my misery to familiar surroundings and wrap it up in weariness. And tomorrow I shall wake with the comfort—if such it is—that I am Giles and will continue to be Giles without the intrusion of Signor Ariosto’s parables. It had better be a comfort; I may not even turn my staring white canvas to the wall, now that I think of it; I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to touch it.

 

So I walk and I walk. And then up the long steps and down the long hall, fling open the door which unveils the dirty—

 

But it isn’t a dirty bed, and I have one mad moment of childish panic; I have burst into the wrong place; and then I see the easel, the bright clean easel, and I know I am home.

 

“I hope you don’t mind; the door was open, and I thought ... so to keep myself busy while I waited, I-” She makes a smile, and tries harder and makes another, but smiles over hands which rapidly clasp and unclasp are unconvincing. “I’ll go,” says Miss Brandt, “but I wanted to tell you I think you did a splendid thing.”

 

I look at the clean, shelved dishes and the drum-tight bedclothes, and my paints and brushes sensibly left untouched. But what impresses me is the unthinkable statement that I have done a splendid thing. I sit on the bed and look at her.

 

“How did you ever find out?” she asks. “You weren’t to know, ever.”

 

“I know a lot now,” I tell her. “What specially do you mean?”

 

“About the money. Giving it back.”

 

“I gave it away,” I admit. And, because it’s the truth, “I don’t call that so splendid.”

 

“It was, if . . .” And then, as if she’s had the question held down tight and can’t control it any longer, she flashes a glance at the easel, and asks, “Does it mean you’ll paint again?”

 

My eye follows hers and I shudder. She turns pale as the new light at the window. “Oh,” she says in a very small voice. “I—guess I’ve done the wrong thing.” She snatches up a shiny black pocketbook and runs to the door. But there’s a Giles standing there first, who pushes her back hard so she sits down—plump!—on the bed.

 

I am tired and hurt and disappointed and I want no more wonderments. “You tell me all the things you’ve done, wrong and otherwise, right from the beginning.”

 

“Oh, how it began. Well, I’m her secretary, you know, and we had a sort of quarrel about you. She’s a mean, small, stupid sort of person, Giles, for all her money and the way she looks—she is lovely, isn’t she? In case you want to know (everybody does) that streak of silver is real. Anyway, I-”

 

“You’re her secretary?”

 

“Yes. Well I got so terribly distressed about-” She waves at the easel again, and the miraculous lashes point away, “-you, you know, that I suppose I got on her nerves. She said some mean things about you and I sort of blew up. I said if I had her money I’d see to it that you started painting again.”

 

“Just like that.”

 

“I’m sorry. It was—so important; I couldn’t bear to have you just-”

 

“Go on with the story.”

 

“She said if I had her money and tried to use it that way I’d just make a fool of myself. Well, maybe she was right, but ... it went like that until she swore at me and said if I was so positive, go ahead. Take all the money I wanted and just see how far I’d get.” All the while she talks she is pleading, underneath. I don’t listen to that part of it. “So I came here yesterday and I was to phone her the way you sign your name, and she would call the bank and fix it up.”

 

“Nice of her.”

 

“No it wasn’t. She did it because she thought it would be amusing. She has so much money that it wouldn’t cost her anything. Anything she’d notice. And then you found out about it, I don’t know how, and gave her the checkbook. When she came back last night she was wild. It wasn’t half the fun she thought. All you did was to be amusing in a restaurant for a couple of hours. Please don’t look at me like that. I just did what I could. I—had to. Please—I had to.”

 

I keep on looking at her, thinking. Finally, “Miss Brandt, you said a thing yesterday—my God, was it only yesterday? —about my not being able to paint now because I don’t know why I painted before. Do you know what you were talking about?”

 

“I-” and the lashes go down, the hands busy themselves, “-I only know sort of generally. I mean, if you can do a thing and know how you do it and—and especially why, and then something stops you, I think it’s easy to see the thing that stops you.”

 

So I lean against the door and look at her in the way that makes her squirm (I’m sorry but that’s the way I look when I’m thinking) and I think:

 

Does anyone ask a painter—even the painter himself— why he paints? Now me, I painted . . . used to . . . whatever I saw that was beautiful. It had to be beautiful to me, through and through, before I would paint it. And I used to be a pretty simple fellow, and found many completely beautiful things to paint.

 

But the older you get the fewer completely beautiful things you see. Every flower has a brown spot somewhere, and a hippogriff has evil laughter. So at some point in his development an artist has to paint, not what he sees (which is what I’ve always done) but the beauty in what he sees. Most painters, I think, cross this line early; I’m crossing it late.

 

And the simple—child?—artist paints for himself . . . but when he grows up he sees through the eyes of the beholder, and feels through his fingertips, and helps him to see that which the artist is gifted to see. Those who had wept over my work up to now, I used to say, had stolen meanings out of it, against my will. When I grow up, perhaps they will accept what I willingly give them. And because Miss Brandt feels this is worth giving, she has tried to get more of it for people.

 

So I had stopped painting because I had become too discerning, and could find nothing perfect enough to paint. But now it occurs to me that the girl with the silver in her hair can be painted for the beauty she has, regardless of her other ugliness. Atlantes had a magic, and in it one walked the battlements of a bastion—which was only, in truth, a byre. Miss Brandt can paint me, in her mind, as a man who turned back all the money in the world, and, for her, this is a real nobility.

 

The only key to the complexity of living is to understand that this world contains two-and-a-half-billion worlds, each built in a person’s eyes and all different, and all susceptible to beauty and hungry for it.

 

I ran out of things to paint . . . and now, now, there’ll never be enough time to paint beauty! Rogero did a knightly thing on the black rock, because he was not a good knight. I did a manly thing about the money because I was a fool. All successes are accidents in someone’s world ... so: “You tell her it worked, Miss Brandt. I’m going to paint, Miss Brandt; I’m going to paint you, Miss Brandt, because you’re beautiful.”

 

And I paint, and she is, because I paint, because she is.