Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours.
Anthony Bell’s hair was thinly grizzled. His hands were familiar upon the book, his voice well-used to the words of the poets. Vertical lines lay parallel across his cheeks. His mouth was thin-lipped and shut down at the corners with drooping plumes, feathered lines that frayed out upon the skin.
Tramping the slant winds on high
With golden-sandalled feet that glow....
Theodosia thought sometimes, when he read aloud, seeing his moving mouth running perpetually along the channels of song, that he must know some eternals, some truths, some ways unknown to her, and she would yearn with an inner sob of longing that he might impart this thing to her, whatever it might be. It was known to his body rather, to his delicate hands bent lovingly at the edges of a book, his sitting posture, his mouth that rolled out the elegant words and was unafraid of any word or saying. She would sit quietly among these, her elders, trying to understand, gaining a rich exaltation where the words revealed their splendor even if they withheld their thought. She was eleven years old.
These are Jove’s tempest-walking hounds
Whom he gluts on groans and blood....
When the old man spoke suddenly after a period of quiet a tiny spray of spittle would sometimes fly from his ill-balanced teeth. In rest his thin-lipped mouth bent downward at the corners and imposed its angles upon the lower cheeks. She did not know it then, but his mouth had been closed by sorrow. “By God, Shelley was no jackass,” he said, snapping shut the book.
Annie had brought the paper dolls to the doorsill, hinting for play. Theodosia joined her there and began to stand the long, slim ladies in rows against the house, half gravely, half in frolic, wavering between Annie and the men, her grave way belonging to Annie. The hour had been rich and dark with the voices from the poem. Now Annie’s soft child-speech fell high and thin about the matters of the paper images of women and girls, the chirping of some familiar bird.
“I wish you-all had brought the fiddle,” Tom said. “I’m just sick for a little fiddle music myself. Tony, you got no call to come down here without you bring along your music. Next time you come you got to play a double quantity just because you forgot this time to fetch it along.”