Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat and read the Bible. Green waves
died upon each other, like a cohesive fantasy. Each small wave rose as
high as the other and ended in a swan’s neck of white interrogation.
Sunlight blinded the water as style dazes the contents of a poem and
the blue sky lifted itself to symmetrical stupor. The air fell against
one like a soothing religion. The bristling melancholia of pine trees
lined the wide river. But Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat,
reading the Bible. He read the Songs of Solomon, and a sensual
pantomime made a taut stage of his face. When not reading the Songs
of Solomon he was as staidly poised as a monk’s folded arms. He had
borrowed the colours of his life from that spectrum of desire which he
called God. Different shades of green leaves were, to him, the playful
jealousies of a presence; the tossed colours of birds became the
ineffably light gestures of a lost poet.
His Swedish peasant’s face had singed its dimples in a bit of
sophistication but his eyes were undeceived. His heart was a secluded
soliloquy transforming the shouts of the world into tinkling surmises.
His broad nose and long lips were always at ease and his ruddy skin
held the texture of fresh bunting. His eyes knew the unkindled
reticence of a rustic boy.
This man of one mood sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible.
He reached the mouth of the river and drifted out to sea. The sea was
a menacing lethargy of rhythm: green swells sensed his row-boat with
dramatic leisure. A sea gull skimmed over the water, like a haphazard
adventure. Looking up from his Bible Alvin Tor saw the body of a
woman floating beside his boat. With one jerk his face swerved into
blankness. The tip of his tongue met his upper lip as though it were
a fading rim of reality. The fingers of one hand distressed his flaxen
hair.
The woman floated on her back with infinite abandon. Little ripples of
green water died fondling her body. The green swells barely lifting her
were great rhythms disturbed by an inert discord. Sunlight, fumbling at
her body, relinquished its promiscuous desires and became abashed. _Her
wet brown hair had a drugged gentility: its short dark curls hugged
her head with despondent understanding. Her face had been washed to
an imperturbable transparency: it had the whiteness of reclining foam
overcast with a twinge of green--the sea had lent her its skin._ Her
eyes were limply unworried and violated to gray disintegration. In
separated bits of outlines the remains of thinly impudent features were
slipping from her face. The bloated pity of black and white garments
hid her lean body.
As Alvin Tor watched her, tendrils of peace gradually interfered with
the blankness on his face. His lips sustained an unpremeditated repose.
A sensitive compassion dropped the sparks of its coming into his eyes.
His clothes became a jest upon an inhuman body; the earth of him
effortlessly transcended itself in the gesture of his arm flung out to
the woman.
“Impalpable relic of a soul, the spirit you held must have severed
its shadow to preserve you forever from the waves,” he said, his face
blindfolded with ecstasy, “for you grasp the water with immortal
relaxation. You are not a body--you are beauty receding into a
resistless seclusion.”
“Kind fool, musically stifling himself in a row-boat--made kind by the
desperate tenderness of a lie--you are serenading the chopped bodies of
your emotions,” said the woman.
Alvin Tor’s face cracked apart and the incredulously hurrying ghost of
a child nodded a moment and was snuffed out.
“Mermaid of haunting despondency, what are you?” he asked.
“I am the symbol of your emotions,” the woman answered.
“I made them roses stepped upon by God,” said Alvin Tor.
“I am the symbol of your emotions,” said the woman.
Alvin Tor heavily dropped his raised arm, like a man smashing a
trumpet. Restless white hands compressed the ruddy broadness of his
face. The woman slid into the green swells like exhausted magic. Alvin
Tor rowed back to the river.