406
PARTISAN REVIEW
a son of a bitch
if
I'm going to stand up and whistle you in today."
Some of the others said about the same thing-wore out the
hortatory "stick close" before they shut down. Then we slept a while.
In a grimpen, in a maremma, rain slicking the mossgrown stones,
legs and rolling wheels were sunken columns, arcs sucked out of
motion, trapped at the mired bottom of the earth. We slept a while
in November and December's mud was the end of life. I had fear
in my boot. When we crossed the Borger (75, 105, 155; 150, 210,
310; 225, 315, 46O-crows, blind beasts, in the air over that
hill),
my heel seemed loose in the boot. That was
.a
great terror. To look,
to conceive, was beyond-that
hill.
I did not look and soon my
foot, then my ankle went to stone. Upwards and upwards and all.
I said always as we went:
"The legs of a man who needs them; hence let us celebrate the
natural thing."
But the Hun broke at the lake and left nothing to pound. We
stopped there, gasping in the fog. And I looked. The leg was whole
and the foot needed only to
be
worked. I slept a while then. I had no
fear.
Douglas liked also to speak
in
other voices. There was ex–
hilaration even when he did no more than sense forms of speech
proper to many, unique to another, but far from his own. But if
Flint had no voice, no speech which was individual, still he had means
of impressing
himself
upon the fact. He addressed the particular but
he drank with meanings. And he took Douglas with
him
where he
went.
In the mind Douglas traveled now, alone. Waiting across the
hall, seated in the window, would be, very likely, the writer of the
incident he read. Alien,
0.,
tallest when the great bell burst the
morning and swept up the classroom's horizontal line-Oliver Allen,
conference at two. He will knock at the door with the fact and I shall
make answer. Vouch for the sins of the child with the compurgation
of the academy.
o
my childer-here was Flint's voice if he had had one.
0
my childer what have ye done that ye know so little and fear so
much? Come unto my door with all things sa've the will and I will
tell you that the beginning is not unbelief but belief in unbelief. We
