“Naps, this way! No, down here ... but hang on to my arm! Soon find a boat....”
“You can’t have no boat!” called the man in shirt-sleeves.
“You get those towels,” said Hugo severely. “The way you talk!”
“Please, your arm,” Iris begged me, husky voice. “Foot hurts. And isn’t it dark!”
“Here you are!” came Venice’s clear boy’s voice from the pit of darkness ahead, beneath us.
We faltered, blind as bats, down the slope of a landing-stage.
“Matches, please!” Shirley’s voice. Oh, trust Shirley and Venice to have the affair well in hand! The pit of darkness ahead was bitten by tiny flames. “Oh, look out, Naps! Ow, God damn you!”
“Naps, you might wipe your feet on your own wife, would you?”
There were uncertainties, holes, fissures of splintered wood. The tiny flames in the pit ahead were like lance-points thrusting the darkness deeper into the eyes.
Iris and I marched slowly as the smoke of our cigarettes in the breathless night. She leaned on my arm, completely. “Foot hurts.” I wished she wouldn’t. I almost said, “don’t.” Her touch confounded, confused. She was tangible, until she touched you. She was finite, until she touched you. She was a woman, until she touched you. Then she became woman, and you water. She became a breath of womanhood clothed in the soft, delicious mystery of the flesh. Touching her, you touched all desire. She was impersonal and infinite, like all desire. She was indifferent to all but her desire, like all desire. She was a breath carved in flesh, like all desire. She was the flower of the plant of all desire. Desire is the name of the plant that Lilith sowed, and every now and then it puts out the flower that in the choir of flowers is the paramour of the mandrake.