With downcast head, I turned homewards. Already
I could discern the black outlines of the willows
on the pond’s edge, and the light in my window
peeped out at me through the apple-trees in the orchard—peeped
at me, and hid again, like the eye of some man keeping
watch on me—when suddenly I heard behind
me the faint swish of the rapidly parted air, and something
at once embraced and snatched me upward, as a buzzard
pounces on and snatches up a quail.... It was
Alice sweeping down upon me. I felt her cheek
against my cheek, her enfolding arm about my body,
and like a cutting cold her whisper pierced to my
ear, ‘Here I am.’ I was frightened
and delighted both at once.... We flew at no
great height above the ground.
‘You did not mean to come to-day?’ I said.
‘And you were dull without me? You love
me? Oh, you are mine!’
The last words of Alice confused me.... I did
not know what to say.
‘I was kept,’ she went on; ‘I was
watched.’
‘Who could keep you?’
‘Where would you like to go?’ inquired
Alice, as usual not answering my question.
‘Take me to Italy—to that lake, you
remember.’
Alice turned a little away, and shook her head in
refusal. At that point I noticed for the first
time that she had ceased to be transparent. And
her face seemed tinged with colour; there was a faint
glow of red over its misty whiteness. I glanced
at her eyes ... and felt a pang of dread; in those
eyes something was astir—with the slow,
continuous, malignant movement of the benumbed snake,
twisting and turning as the sun begins to thaw it.
‘Alice,’ I cried, ‘who are you?
Tell me who you are.’
Alice simply shrugged her shoulders.
I felt angry ... I longed to punish her; and
suddenly the idea occurred to me to tell her to fly
with me to Paris. ’That’s the place
for you to be jealous,’ I thought. ‘Alice,’
I said aloud, ’you are not afraid of big towns—Paris,
for instance?’
‘No.’
‘Not even those parts where it is as light as
in the boulevards?’
‘It is not the light of day.’
‘Good; then take me at once to the Boulevard
des Italiens.’
Alice wrapped the end of her long hanging sleeve about
my head. I was at once enfolded in a sort of
white vapour full of the drowsy fragrance of the poppy.
Everything disappeared at once; every light, every
sound, and almost consciousness itself. Only
the sense of being alive remained, and that was not
unpleasant.
Suddenly the vapour vanished; Alice took her sleeve
from my head, and I saw at my feet a huge mass of
closely—packed buildings, brilliant light,
movement, noisy traffic.... I saw Paris.
