402
PARTISAN REVIEW
or perhaps only to own that the
stube
behind the bookshop in Balti–
more was a place worthy of a statement out of the penetralia of the
self, he had made the absurd commitment. And built on it.
The
stube,
he acknowledged at last, was on all grounds un–
worthy: it stood in no relation to any of the substantial content of
his life or of Flint's. Chimerical afternoon-why
had
he been in that
town? Why had Flint called, chosen that place for porter?
Vinum
daemonum
because it filleth the imagination yet it is with but the
shadow of a lie. But Flint never lied for rhyme, wrote the wars, knew
that nothing ended at the fact.
In
all
events, Flint had been stopped at the words, had thrown
up his enormous hands, the gesture occasioning a sudden, rigid
scream from the dachshund who rested upon the table of the only
other drinker in the place.
This sound and Douglas'S response to it could have brought
the
stube
through the northern miles and fixed it in the field of
revulsion that grew dense now in his office: the sound-a mere
scream of surprise-still moved in the memory as precisely as the
words he had uttered. But that it did only limned the truth that his
revulsion was not simple; he drew back from no corruption in the
words themselves-Hat the edge of things the rest of my time."
If
he had permitted them to remain what they were, if he had not
raised them upwards and upwards until they became the sacrament
and calendar of his progress, the promised opening of the dungeon
at sundown, they would not now have seemed diseased. Where lies
wretchedness in the simple pretense (over porter and for the defense
of the craft) that a single death can overcome a room and a situation?
Nowhere. Hence it was no matter that he had been unable to allow
for the intolerable pressure of the present situation; it was of no
moment that he sat in an office, in a room with many bookshelves
that bore nothing save his own poems, since these were the only
duplicate volumes in
his
library and the bareness of the room had
necessarily to be cut. Not the bell, nor the student, nor the circum–
stance that on this day, involved in the death of his friend
in
the
wars, he would read edges of the experience of the generation which
could not yet have had a communicable experience to bring except
out of the war-none of the turns, none of the complexities, were of
account. He had not been false because he had failed to foresee them.
