“My God!” he cried to the unreceptive almond blossoms on the wall-paper. “What genius I had when I wrote that.”
He sat down at the desk and looked severely at the virgin page. No neat rhymes again, no passion tied up in brown paper and looped with string for a finger, no beauty sent home with the first delivery. “This,” he repeated with melancholy grandeur, “is the end.”
And at that directly minute he saw a line form itself in letters of flame along the page, as though a candle wrote it—a lovely line with the sovereign note of Cleopatra’s cry:
“O infinite virtue, comest thou smiling from the world’s great snare uncaught?”
For one wild moment his spirit, overlaid with swathe upon swathe of rubbish, moved upwards to the light. For whatever he was now, he had once been a poet, if only in his hopes. In that luminous instant he almost guessed his failure. “The end,” he muttered; “suppose it were the beginning?” With that the old lines that had suffered defeat resumed their empire. “Yes, the beginning,” he cried, “the beginning,” and radiant he began to write, sure of his inspiration:
“It’s the call of love: ‘Oh follow
where my golden footsteps tread!’
But the call of love is hollow
by the calling of the dead.”
So, with head bent, he continued writing through the night. And while he wrote the other lines turned upon the bastard and drove her into the dark.