148
PARTISAN REVIEW
domestic flowers, cold jonquils, crowds of them, greenish with chill or
butter yellow or flaming gold, and clear narcissus, reaching, bowing,
staring, fainting in vases and jars of metal and glass and clay and
in drinking glasses and mason jars and in small and large
tin
cans, all
these each in their kind and sufferance bore witness before God
while they might. Few of these early flowers have strong fragrance,
or any, yet the heat and brightness and the fragrance brought forth
by the burning wax and tallow and by the heat in the closed room, all
one wall of dizzying dazzle, were such that it was at first almost as
difficult to breathe the freighted air as to
breath~
water, and this air
was enriched the more by the devotions of those who knelt subsumed
within the trembling light; and at the instant of stepping into this
hot and fragrant gold, going upon one knee and gazing upon the
blind rondure of the monstrance and the thousand-pointed blossom–
ing of fire and flower, his heart was lifted up and turned vague and
shy as the words broke within him, upon each other, God: Death; so
that the two were one. Death: Dead, the word prevailed; and be–
fore
him,
still beyond all other stillness, he saw as freshly as six years
before his father's prostrate head and, through the efforts to hide it,
the mortal blue dent in the impatient chin. He remembered within
this
instant how for the first time he had been convinced, and how
eternally convincing it had been, when he saw how through that first
full minute of looking his father had neither stirred nor spoken, and
how the powerful right hand had lain half open against the exact
center of his body; the cloth of his coat was not moved by any
breathing and it was as
if
the hand were only a magically expert
imitation of a hanQ, a hand of wax and, now looking again at the
head, lips and a face of wax, a dent of wax, a head of wax immense
upon
this
whole rich waxen air. Dead, the word came again, and
shutting his eyes he prayed swiftly for his father the prayer of all his
childhood, God bless daddy and keep him close to Thee and may light
perpetual shine upon him, Amen; and casually, obliviously, as a
trout into shadow, the image and memory vanished. It is Our Lord's
death today, he said to himself, but at this moment he could see
neither face, that of his father, or that of his Lord; only the words
returned, God: Death.
No praying-benches were available at first, and they knelt where
they entered, the waxed floor brutal against their bones. In the
