But you have resumed flesh: into the black car we stumble like coal miners, hot and dazed. Absolute silence over the bridge, like a dialogue of the Holy Ghost. The night is thickening.
Out there the familiar world running away towards that playground of concrete where the lights bloom. Hang on my weary arms. Faint line drawing of a face against the window. We are being drawn homeward on the long thread of the music into the meaningless circus peopled with fanatics, fairies, and clergymen. See! Trains running out into the night. The world is bleeding trains. Soft bars of maniac jazz pant from the doorways. The face of the people is a great grinning disc, revolving meaningless as a record. The domes stacked up over our heads. Laughing moustaches in bar-rooms sucking the stacked froth on the glasses. Did you see Anselm come out of the doors of the Lock Hospital, collar turned up, hat over his eyes, fugitive and disguised?
The advertisements warm to life. A bulbed Scotchman drinking a stiff rain of bulbs and winking. Anselm has disappeared down the street, rapt in a player’s hide. In the bar they are lining up at the trough. Come, we will sit in a café over cups of coffee and eat each other alive. Your wrists incandesce when I touch them. Burn a strange white: molten filaments. Eyes mad and meaningless, turning here and there, burning in their little crucibles. Is there a temperature chart to record the rise and declension of this fever? In the hollow station Hilda is waiting, as in the tomb, for the door to be rolled back, and her man to step from the train. The engines whinny, and there is a fire between her legs now, for the signals glow. In a little while Morgan will gather up the pieces, steaming. In the meantime let us try to forget that the bacilli are creeping up on Camden Town. Red-eyed scavengers in millions. Here, devour my fingers one by one. The fingers of buttered toast taste like ashes. There is a drama being played out in our bodies, but what it is I cannot tell. A fury has distorted that white face of yours, which will end in tears. Take my handkerchief. When you weep your nose is drawn back to your skull like a bowstring. Tears burst from nothing. Your mouth hobbles with reproaches. Eyes like rock crystal. I do not have to strike you to make you gush. This is the beginning of my power. My knees are loosened and my ankles are bathed in your blood. Forgive me, I enjoyed it so much.
The music has led us at last back to the very door of the hotel. Tarquin is sitting with the predatory hands, melting his piano down to treacle under the sign of the swinging spirochete. Let us open a nice fat vein and relax in a bathtub to watch the filaments of blood hang between our ribs. You can still hear the cars screaming along the black road outside? The ring of the postman in the empty house? The wires alive with news from all over the world? The housemaids bulging from blind windows? We follow them like dogs, Lobo and I. The salt bitches! At eleven they hang about the letter-boxes in slippers. Yes, as Tarquin says, the only letters they seem to post are french letters. On Saturdays you can see Perez standing up against the wall in the shadow like a dog. On Tuesdays you can see him on all fours, on a table among the rubber-gloved élite of the hospital, whining like a dog. All this is a little remote from your white sleeping face, whether I lie on your breast like a sleeping dragon, or whether I tongue you into surgical shudders, it does not matter much. Admit it. When you look into my eyes are you not appalled by the little meaning there is in them? The double-barrelled microscope offers nothing but a minute iris-image of yourself.
“This is a new beginning,” says Tarquin. “Up to now I have been floundering, I did not know my direction. Now it is all quite different.”
He has discovered that he is a homosexual. After examining his diary, having his horoscope cast, his palm read, his prostate fingered, and the bumps on his great bald cranium interpreted.
“From now on it is going to be different. I am going to sleep with whom I want and not let my conditioned self interfere with me. I have finished with morals, don’t you think? I am that I am, and all that kind of stuff. One must be bold enough to face up to oneself, eh? I am grateful for Science having made it possible. I shall let my female half come out in full view. Untrammelled, what do you say?”
He has bought himself a few cheap powders and face creams, had a false tooth put in where the canine was missing, even wonders whether a wig … Well, we do not discourage him. There is something frightening in the idea of the skinny, epicene man parading about his room with a little rouge on the cheekbone, a touch of eye pencil, and a composition tooth. It is the beginning of the disintegration which he has been announcing for so long. The nymph is bursting from the wrappings. The dance is on! He has already learned a few conventional gestures of the hand, a turkey-like movement of the head and shoulders. He minces down to dinner very prettily these days.
“I shall revise not only my moral but also my intellectual life. From now on I shall commune only with the great pure minds like Strachey, Murry, and Euclid.”
But, as for physical communion, he can find nobody to help him out. Sunday morning is the only time off his Balham cinema attendant can get. He lies on his bed hopelessly and twiddles his thumbs dismally in the counterpane.
“I say, why don’t you try it,” he asks, “why don’t you try being queer? How do you know you don’t need it? Don’t listen to that bloody little womanizer, Lobo. He’s just a damned fool. Look, do you think it would damage our relationship if I sucked you off?”
The gramophone stops in amazement at this proposal. He sighs and feels his head, imagining a luxurious crop of hair that he could toss, my dear.
“I had a lovely policeman on Thursday. Go on. Why don’t you let me? Shut your eyes, you won’t know anything’s happened. It’ll be like being confirmed. Go on. Christ! There’s nobody around here with any guts.”
At other times he is lost in moods of contemplation which last for days. In this he is, as he says, gathering new phenomena. He has become a vast storehouse of scientific formulae, historical data, hieroglyphs, runes, dogma. His bookcase has become a library for the book which he says he may want to write one day.
“One of these days I shall open a nice fat juicy vein, lie down in the bath, and begin the book. No. I don’t know what it’ll be about. I think a huge book of a new philosophy. My philosophy, what? No. I haven’t bothered to work it out. It’ll all come once I start. Sometimes I get all my ideas clear at night, and start to write them down, and then I think … O fuck, what’s the use of it all anyway? And I go to sleep. And next day I’ve got to get a shave, or my lover calls, or something. I never seem to have time.”
He suffers, he says, from the expanding moment. It is always there, and always the same, and whatever he does he never has time to write anything but the vague notes in his diary.
“Wednesday. Laid Dicky as usual. Three times a night is too much. I hold that Sainte-Beuve was blaspheming when he said: La prostate c’est une amygdale dont je ne vois pas la nécessité.”