Then his face expressed pain. He put up his hands to his head and pressed them in. In a kind of despair, he turned and dug his nails in the wax of Scylla’s flesh.
Carston came upstairs to wash, bewildered by the dark stair, the corridor crossed with sun motes. He walked into Picus’s room by mistake. There he saw him, very gracious, in a room shabbier than his own, making the portrait of Scylla in wax. He saw brightness, nakedness, a toy. A liveliness of colour to remind him that she was a young woman alone among young men.
“I don’t like it,” said Picus, and broke it.—“I’ll make another after tea.” Carston could have cried. The waste of richness, the shocking petulance, a toy that excited him shown and taken away. For a moment he had embraced Scylla. Another of the little things they did in their spare time.
Pushed out of his politeness, he said:
“You’re the one who discovered the cup, aren’t you?”
“No,” said Picus, “I only thought of the spear to poke about with. It was Felix’s find.”
“Miss Taverner’s brother seems a bit upset about it.”
“Does he?”
“You shouldn’t have broken that statue.”
Picus covered up both statements like a perfect young gentleman, rather a stupid one. It occurred to Carston that he was stupid; also that perhaps it had scandalised him to have shown Scylla naked to a stranger, and hoped it was that.
They went down to lunch. It was his first lunch, but he felt as though never in his life had he done anything but eat there. Once he had lived in America, once he had come to Europe, but that did not count any more. That theatre was as another earth, and the plays were not the prologue to his play. For this play there had been no rehearsal and he did not know his part. Or, if he had a part, he had to improvise it, and it must be a good part. Lost in a green transparent world, he was blind. Beginning to see in a new way he disliked, a seeing like jealousy, without arrangement; principally a sensibility about Scylla, likely to become a fury of desire. He remembered its modest beginnings the night before, his rejection of it on further acquaintance with her brother. That it had started again in Picus. Somebody said: “What do we do this afternoon?” The heat answered that. Laid down on the verandah in a wicker chair like a shell, he lay still, face to face with the wood. One by one the others disappeared.
Ross went up the hill, carrying his painting things. The place he wanted could not be seen from any shade there was on the down-top. He planted his easel in the full light.
The cliffs down the coast were too good-looking. He chose the somberest patch of barn and field in the next valley and drew it hard, his shirtsleeves rolled up his amber arms, his back square to the house in the wood, several hundred feet together.
Presently he noticed that it was becoming difficult always to distinguish between a sheep and a shrub, and that that meant thunder. With his back to the house and the wood he was being stopped working from the other side. He drew in a tree-shape rather hard. The white haze gathered. The more he looked, the less he saw. Instead, he began to see shapes in his head, not outside it, an exercise he avoided, because it interfered with precision of hand. Unwillingly he felt that he would have to return before he meant to, to a place where there was a martyred ass called Clarence, lying alone for a moment in a verandah, a little distance from a young American, who was keeping remarkably silent. Whom his instincts were against. Not because he disliked him, but because the town-bred contact between them had died. They were all stuck down there in a bewilderment, which had happened because they had forgotten the duties of hospitality and had left it to Scylla to fetch the stranger from Starn. If they had not done that, two of the party would have died of the hedgehogs, or else come straight over to them without raking up a well. Not that he was sorry that it had happened. Then he whistled as he drew, out of tune, but as though he was loving something. No nonsense about being the thing he loved, but like a lover, aware of the presence of what he loved everywhere.
There was a hard, explosive sound. Several mixed noises. A bird tore out of a thicket and crossed an open space, indirectly, frantically, and disappeared. He imitated its call and burst out laughing. “Woodpecker up to his tricks again.” Then he went back to his work, straining his eyes.
In the verandah, Clarence slept. He dreamed that he was walking, at night, on a thin spit of rock across the sea, Picus’s slender height and great weight against his shoulders, in his arms. Picus was dead, and he was glad he was dead and it was over. The difficulty was to get rid of the body, which was coming alive somewhere else and following him. It could only be got rid of at the end of the rock, and he could not go on much longer like that. There were dark hills round the sea, and in them was the living Picus, not his at all, but another, the real one. It was such a bother, his feet were covered with blood. It wasn’t till the dead Picus was in the sea, that the real one would come out of the hills and play with him. No use waiting for day, because it was always dark in that country.
He often went there when he was asleep, often
