— I’ll shut the window. It’s getting cold.
— I hear a snowplow.
— It’s one o’clock.
— Where?
— Here. One hour past midnight in the human soul.
— Then we’re getting on. If I were a dead leaf I would swallow myself.
— Why wait to be a dead leaf.
— Ah, I see, you’re bored, and quite rightly, with this harangue. Poor fellow, that’s the unfortunate duty of analysts, isn’t it? They only sit. I forget my Milton. But, seriously, have you ever found Christ’s hat in your front hall? And his gloves and stick and galoshes? You wonder what to do. You feel — as you should — like an intruder. How can you most tactfully announce your inconsiderate arrival. It would be tactless to go to the bedroom door — don’t you think — and say, Are you there, darling? Or perhaps darlings. It might be better simply to go to the bathroom and pull the chain, which would give them a cheerful warning that father was come home again. But there is this murderous impulse, too — have you ever killed a fly, or thrown a baby out of a window? I have, from time to time. Oh, my God. Look — I see my pulse on the radial side of my wrist, at the joint. I’m a doomed man, thank heaven. This is that blood that brought me where I am. You can throw the hat out of the window, of course — and perhaps that’s the best solution, though not the easiest. Hat equals schaden-freude. Bilingual pun, Bill, which does you credit. But why not open the bedroom door dramatically, and stand there frozen for a moment, eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves? I don’t like the smell of this cushion — I believe you’ve been entertaining young women here, Bill, and I think I recognize — do I recognize — yes, I’ve certainly come across that before. Now where was it?
— It doesn’t matter — go ahead.
— Yes, go ahead. Forward into the untrodden — but that’s an unfortunate suggestion. Do angels fear to tread? Not by a damned sight. And he was such an angel, such a white man, so gentle, so good, so shy — his little mustache is so neatly clipped with his nail scissors, on Tuesdays and Fridays always, and he always blows his nose before going to bed, and every penny he spends he puts down meticulously in his little notebook. Cup of coffee at Liggett’s — five cents. Carfare to Boston and back — twenty cents. Boston Evening Transcript—three cents. But I’m forgetting about Michelangelo. Do you suppose Michelangelo ever saw the sea?
— The sea?
— Yes, the sea. You know, the ocean, the bounding main. That thing that has waves, and bears ships, and laughs unarithmetically at the moon. Did he ever see it? I wonder. I wonder if he wanted to get back to it. What do you think. Don’t sit there and grin at me!
— Go on, let’s get back to it. A little free association, please! While I have a drink and try to catch up with you.
— Oh, my God, I’m a fool, a bloody, bloody fool. Why am I always in such a damned panic, in such a hurry to make decisions, why do I run round in mad circles like a beheaded hen?
— You know pretty well why.
— For six months I’ve been doing it — I’ve done no work — I’ve drunk like a fish and gone from one wild party to another. An unreasoning terror, a terror that had no particular shape — nightmares one after another too, I’d wake up sweating, my heart beating like hell — dreams of falling, dreams of climbing and falling, desperate efforts to carry monstrous loads up broken and rotten ladders, fantastic scaffoldings which fell away beneath me as I climbed — night after night.
— You saw it all coming. You were already aware of the insecurity of your position — perhaps you even wanted all this to happen. Perhaps you were precipitating it. God knows your way of living can’t have made Bertha like you any better, can it. I’m surprised she hasn’t rebelled or broken out before.
— Now be fair about this, Bill, be fair. I admit it wasn’t too good. But I think you go a little too far when you suggest that I wanted this to happen. Does a man deliberately want to cut himself in two? Jesus. Does he deliberately seek to be abandoned? Jesus. Does he carve out his own heart and throw it to the dogs? Jesus. No, I decline the gambit, thank you. Just because I vaguely foresaw and feared the thing doesn’t mean I wanted it. I know I’ve been a damned fool. Why did I get into that rotten affair with Molly? God knows. But even that might not have done any harm if it hadn’t been for the party in Prescott Street, when we all got drunk and took our clothes off and did a Russian ballet, and so on and so on, and that damned fool little Mary Thurston running all over town telling about it, just because some idiot of a Ph.D. student, a philosopher, thought he was a satyr and tore her shirt off. Those are the damned trifles that ruin our lives. Precarious, precarious. But nothing to the precariousness of the mind. I still believe I shall go insane. All of a sudden, my mind stops — goes blank — I can’t either think or feel. I forget the simplest things, names, events — things I’ve known all my life. I carry my laundry into the Western Union telegraph office. Wild fits of shyness come over me, the kind I used to have when I was a kid, and I stand foolish and speechless, leering like an idiot, forgetting where I am and what I’m there for. The other day at the bank I found I couldn’t write — my hand began to shake — God knows why — and I couldn’t even sign my own name. The cashier looked at me in astonishment. I really thought I’d gone mad. I looked out of the window, trying to think of something, saw the sunlight, saw the window of my old room in Gray’s Hall, with my initials still carved on the window sill after all these fifteen years, and the pen shook in my hand, and then I tried again, pretending for the cashier’s benefit that I’d merely been doing a little calculation. Calculation! Good God, I was calculating for my very life. Then I managed by making a series of separate feverish little tremulous strokes to get a few quivering marks on to the paper, which bore no resemblance to my signature at all. Mr. Howe looked at it in surprise, but made no comment. I suspect he thought I was trying deliberately to disguise my handwriting so that the check wouldn’t be charged to my own account. Now what the hell was that all about. I walked out shaking like the well-known aspen leaf, or a stricken doe, or something, and went straight to Molly’s apartment, without even knowing what I was doing. Her door was unlocked and I walked in. She was taking a bath, and yelled at me in alarm from the tub, not knowing who it was. I opened the door and looked at her. She threw a sponge at me. Then I went back to the sitting room and stared at the cactus on the window sill, which had just given birth to a purple blossom. It was very beautiful. She came in and said she was surprised at me. She was obviously rather pleased. We sat down on the couch, she in her kimono, and she expected me to make love to her. Instead, I cried, and she was the most astonished woman you ever saw in your life. When that was over, she gave me a gin and ginger ale, and I told her my dream about the sea. I’m always dreaming about the sea. We all know what that means, don’t we? I’m going to be born again one of these days. Oh, yes, we rise again. Back to the womb, and forth once more we swim, like the mighty hero of the Kalevala, after nine months in submarine caves. We all crowded to the railing on the port side, where the captain was pointing to the masthead of a sunken ship, a masthead from which a pennant still fluttered. It was a sunken galleon. I knew that, even before the tide went out and revealed it to us all — the tide went out in no time, and there, behold, was a little island, submerged at all but low tide, and on its shore was the little galleon. We got out of the ship and walked up the shingle beach to the galleon, and I climbed up on to its deck and it was very strange, it was a little museum of seashells and pearls and precious stones, the decks were lined with glass cases, and all of them filled with beautiful — indescribably beautiful — cowry shells and razor shells and wentletraps and corals and ambergris and black pearls and God knows what. I was enthralled. And to think — I reflected — that these poor fellows, four hundred years ago, after collecting these rare and lovely things from parts of the world and all the oceans, should at last have been overtaken by fate and their marvelous collection buried here with them and forgotten. I examined great scarlet shells like butterflies, and blue shells like dragon-flies, and red sponges, and flying fishes with wings of opal and gold. Never have I seen such concentrated beauty. It was all my childhood dream of treasure-trove come true. All those dreams of finding nests of buried gold coins, marbles made of moonstone, jackstones of silver — you know what I mean. I climbed down again to the beach and walked round to the stern of the ship — and there, what do you think? was a skeleton standing with his hands folded on a rusted musket, standing upright as if to guard the ship with its treasure, and staring with empty sockets at the name of the ship, which I saw, when I looked up, was Everest. Ever rest. Now what do you make of that, Watson. But I had no time to loiter — the tide was rising swiftly again, the captain called us, and back we went to our own ship, and no sooner were we on the decks once more than the tide had risen, the little galleon, with its melancholy guard, was engulfed, and all that remained was the fluttering pennant. And so we sailed away. I told this dream to Molly — oh, yes, I know what it means, I daresay the old fellow is my father — and before she could comment on it I told her we were going to the Greek’s for lunch, and so I helped her to dress, handing her odds and ends of clothing, and I picked the damned little cactus flower, which made her really furious — she stamped her foot and I thought she was going to have a cry herself — but she recovered and we went to town in a yellow taxi. And that was that. And, oh, yes, we went afterwards to a hockey game at the Garden, and she was bored to death, though I gave her a hot dog and a bag of peanuts to keep her happy. I think she thought I’d gone crazy.