_a_
Morning and Spring pour into my room.--My room ... my bed ... my self.
I have slept in my bed as usual, this is Spring. Bright resilient
Spring, you’re a red-cheeked girl laughing into my room! Mysterious
Spring, for you are real! Marvel of that: this volute swelling bloom
within my window. How wide do you go? How deep?...--At the ruddy heart
of Spring a spot gray and harsh. I lie in bed and grow aware of myself
as a canker in the morning.--Can we both be real? This carnival of
light does not destroy the canker: all gayety sets off a gray moment
that is I. Which then is the real I must dwell in, since I know that I
am not this Spring?...
--Why am I this gray thing, lying in the Spring?
--What is the matter with me? Where have I been?
--Morning ... _John Mark_. Does the name construct a world? Oh, there’s
a larval world of dream that no sun has scattered. But what is a world
of dream against May’s wooing? Spring pearls over larval worlds of
dream with its iridescent dance. Yes, there is that darkling realm: let
the sun then spill it over ... limekilns and autumnal grass and murder,
murdered by the Spring. But they come in! Which now is the dream, which
the real? Spring, can’t you reach the canker?... It protrudes, it
invades. Murder ... _John Mark_!
Under the hall door there will be the daily paper. What balm do I seek
of that, wanting it now for my eyes? I lie in bed, I seek a balm of
denial.
--In the paper you will learn what is real and what is dreamed. Go for
your daily paper and watch the dark dream die. It will say “Clear and
warm to-day,” and your window says it. Spring there, sitting on your
window-sill, says what your paper will say. So Spring is real. _What
else will it say?_
I draw my legs from the covers. Pain. _Then that is true?_ My hand in a
search that makes its moving to my ankle a deep rent of some sleep in
my mind, touches the swollen flesh of a larval truth.
--That ankle and its pain: the limekiln and the man with the white
head: my parents: Philip: Mildred! The low house on the mountain? The
other room? How should I know what is true? Perhaps there is no falsity
at all. If all is true, will horror go away? Spring tides into my room,
_my ankle scorched against the limekiln slant_. I am John Mark, _Philip
LaMotte is dead_. I love you, Mildred, _read what the paper says about
the death of your parents_.... How many things can there be true at
once?
An instant I have lain quiet in my bed. Three volute worlds spin from
a spot of my mind in threefold spaces, touching one another only at
myself. One world has a surface of shimmering sunny waves. One world
is an opaque clot colored like blood. One world is pale, a white
transparency, and at its heart little filaments ultra-violet, fixed,
while the misty surface spins.
The instant is gone. Painfully with my swollen ankle, I make a way from
the bed to where, under the door of the living room, I see the tip of
the paper. I knew then how I had marched that night through the bleak
field, away from the limekiln which lived in it like a sultry evil eye:
how I had reached a suburb where the houses stood soiled between the
night and the day, and how a cab had taken me home.
The black letters spoke to me:
MR. AND MRS. CLAYTON MARK
DIE IN STRANGE MOTOR MISHAP
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