"Buy you laudanum, no. No and always no. Do not expect me to weaken on this. Back into bed with you."
John lay again, sweating coldly, cursing quietly in the monotone of liturgy. Severn tended his fire, which began to chew languidly at green pine. Then he sat on a plain green rickety chair by the fire, his hands loosely joined, praying, fearful eyes on John. John's eyes were on the pale flowers of the wallpaper. "They do not know," he said, "any of them, what mischief they do when they bring a child into the world. They allow themselves to be driven to clasping and colling and kissing and then he is on to her, panting, to pump in a thimbleload of seed. And in the devil's due time, which is three moons by three, a morris of Hecates, comes the child, and he grows and grows to hope from life, and then the smiting. It can be at any time. In my student days I saw children die at three days, and they were lucky, they had not grown to a day of hope. But I saw Tom die too, not twenty. And Chatterton died at seventeen. And here is the little poet Jack Keats dying at twenty-five, one of the luckier, for he has made bad poetry and seen something of the world. But it is the hope that is the curse, to be given hope and then hear the laughter."
"No curse, John. It is the second of the three great things, hope. Charity, which is the greatest, you have shown in abundance. It's only faith you lack. Hope that faith may come, hope for the sight of heaven."
"Severn," John said with calm quiet, "I will, I swear, gain enough strength to kill you if you spurt this sewage out at me. I have faith enough of my own, and it is faith in beauty that is eternal, so long as there are eyes to see it. I do not mean my own eyes, I have neither faith nor hope that these eyes will see a beauty not of the earth nor of the imagination. The earth and the heart and the imagination are all, and I am to have no more part in them. Oh, I may wake tomorrow and have hope that all will be well again, I feel better, I have appetite, the blood courses in its proper channels. But I do not wish more hope so that it may be cruelly quelled. Do you not understand me? There is neither virtue nor use in suffering. If the end is to come, let us have it, and not have the fiends of time at their game. But I will not ask again for a poor blessed twopenny engine of the end. I will lie here and see my body as nothing of mine. This hand I try to lift, see how cunningly fashioned, and it ploughdrove a pen once that scrawled bad hymns to beauty. But it is something now impertinently fastened to me and no longer anything of mine. I am something altogether apart from this machine. Yours, while this machine is to him. Shakespeare knew it all."
"Forgive me, John, do not be angry if I say you speak now more like a Christian. The soul, I mean. It is your soul you are thinking of now. Please, please, no anger, I say no more, but you must admit the truth of it."
"I do not mean that." John rolled his head feebly on the pillow. "Nor anything like that. For what you call my soul is the sparking of this machine. The brain too is the body. It is a fine and cunning trelliswork, but we may eat brain as we eat feet and flanks. But there is one thing that is not to be eaten and that is the little fire saying I am I am I am."
"That is God, that is the name God himself gave to Moses."
"And that little fire you have made there, no burning bush, that says it, and my fountain out there will say it long after this I is no more. So I will consign my own I elsewhere before it is wholly buried in this body that was named John Keats."
"John Keats is more than a body, as you know. Is not the imagination part of the soul? Forgive me again, I try not to speak too much like a Christian."
"It's all in decay, Severn. It was a clever machine, with the tongue and the teeth and the lips clacking and cooing most clever clusters of noises, and the noises long by common acceptance attached to things and thoughts and eager to be juggled in pretty poesy. But at the end there is only this I, shapeless and without memory or intelligence unless I consign it elsewhere. So for the moment I join it to the I of that singing water in the piazza and lose even my name. Or, if you will, write that name on water and hear the water gurgle on uncaring singing I, I, I."
"I wish I could understand you."
"Don't try, Severn. I'm not converting you to Keatsism – God forgive me and you forgive the empty formula, I-ism I would say. All of this machine is tired now, and the I, though never tired, must be courteous and lie quiet with it. I'll sleep back some blood." To Severn's surprise he sank instantly into sleep, and Severn thanked God. Then he tiptoed about the entire apartment, picking up razors, scissors, forks and table knives, and he locked all those death dealers in his trunk. But, he saw sadly, a man intent on his quietus could always find the bodkin: a sliver of windowpane, that firm lamphook there in the ceiling with the noose of his own bedsheet, the bodkin itself long mislaid by a long-dead seamstress. Severn went sadly to the black hole where the jakes was, then came back to John's bedroom to drink milk and gobble a hunk of yesterday's bread. As though he had awaited the return of his audience John started back to waking. He spoke quietly, saying: "Charles Jeremiah Wells is behind it."
"Wells? Wells behind what?" Severn choked on crust and coughed. John looked at him with calm eyes.
"Your cough is good and dry, Severn. It is not the fanfare heralding the princess in purple. I dreamed just now of that water outside, and there was a grinning man poisoning it. Wells poisoning wells. Did I not say I would poison him? He knew, you see, and now it is he does the poisoning. He is clever. All the way from London he sends his poison."
"John, you must not talk so. You know this is not possible."
"He was and is pure malignity. Why else should he hoax poor Tom with the dream of a foreign lady in love with him and drive poor Tom to desperation and death? I saw the letters he wrote about this lady. Tom dead of the phthisis, they said, but you and I know it was of a broken heart. But Wells will not let me too die of a broken heart. He began his poisoning before we left England. He contrives now to have the poisoning go on here in Rome. How is it done, all the way over the land and sea? He has his engines, Severn."
"You and I eat the same food. I am not poisoned."
"Ah no, he is above mere Renaissance subtleties. He is the Napoleonic poisoner and makes use of the telegraphic semaphore. You must exorcise with your Christian mumbo jumbo. But no, you have thrown out the devil, since gentle Jesus has not the Michelangelo muscles to fight him. He must not exist, the devil, and all must be pink froth of sweet goodness. Well, there are burly priests enow here and eke Latin. Stabat mater dolorosa. Their Christ here is the stiff standing prick, Signor Cristo Cazzuto. Dum pendebat filius."
Severn was distressed. "John, we cannot have this. It is very unreasonable. Your mind is too busy. Let me read to you."
"What will you read – the Holy Bible? I approve the style but condemn the content. God's name, making man sinful so he could play with his hopes and terrors, has God nothing better to do? I figuratively cack on your Holy Bible, Severn." A bell started outside. "All gone already, the morning? Is that the Angelus?"
"It's too early for the Angelus. They toll the single bell."
"Well, not for me, not for the dirty Protestant. The filthy atheistical English poet. You know, Severn, when the time comes I must be buried at night? Belli told me that. Only the sons of the True Church may be earth-committed in daylight."
"You must not speak so, John. You must rest and be calm and get well again."
"Get Wells again. Isaac Marmaduke said he would kill Wells for me, but I think it will have been put out of his mind by other things. An unfairness about somewhere. Elton was to have done my dying for me." Then: "Severn, buy me laudanum."