Vol. 16 No. 1 1949 - page 26

PARTISAN REVIEW
Sometime after dawn
I
woke to find him trying to batter his
way out through the door
I
am always careful to lock. "Why don't
you
try
it open?"
I
said, and then regretting my poor irony, "Are
you all right?"
"All right," he muttered with some effort, and turning the lock,
fell face forward across the sill; but he got up again with astonishing
agility and turned at the head of the stairs.
I
could sense from the
careful adjustment of his body, the slowness of his speech that he
felt himself on the verge of some great revelation. "Man," he said,
"Love-A pansy of the fields. Holy Christ!"
I
do not know how, or indeed if, he ever got home. Needless
to say,
I
never went to another of the discussion meetings, and in a
week or two
I
had achieved again something of myoId equilibrium,
though, to tell the precise truth,
I
have never been able to summon
up quite the old quota of vigor and resolve. Each morning
I
stand
on the stone steps, ascend eagerly to where the tables, long and pol–
ished, await my coming, but
I
am not quite the same. With so mar–
ginal a spiritual economy as mine, such splurges are paid for t.hrough
a lifetime of insufficiency.
Next day
I
discovered, where Noel had taken his last tumble, .a
complete upper plate, which he has never, of course, returned to
claim.
I
use it to
this
day as a somewhat macabre paperweight. The
occasional girls, who, by necessity,
I
bring into my room, are some–
times amused finding the plate, but learning it is not mine, quickly
lose interest. To me, however, the denture is, besides a trophy and
a warning, an unflagging joke, quite real though difficult to define.
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