MORNING and Spring pour into my room.—My room ... my bed ... my self. I have slept in my bed as usual, this is Spring. Bright resilient Spring, you’re a red-cheeked girl laughing into my room! Mysterious Spring, for you are real! Marvel of that: this volute swelling bloom within my window. How wide do you go? How deep?...—At the ruddy heart of Spring a spot gray and harsh. I lie in bed and grow aware of myself as a canker in the morning.—Can we both be real? This carnival of light does not destroy the canker: all gayety sets off a gray moment that is I. Which then is the real I must dwell in, since I know that I am not this Spring?...
—Why am I this gray thing, lying in the Spring?
—What is the matter with me? Where have I been?
—Morning ... John Mark. Does the name construct a world? Oh, there’s a larval world of dream that no sun has scattered. But what is a world of dream against May’s wooing? Spring pearls over larval worlds of dream with its iridescent dance. Yes, there is that darkling realm: let the sun then spill it over ... limekilns and autumnal grass and murder, murdered by the Spring. But they come in! Which now is the dream, which the real? Spring, can’t you reach the canker?... It protrudes, it invades. Murder ... John Mark!
Under the hall door there will be the daily paper. What balm do I seek of that, wanting it now for my eyes? I lie in bed, I seek a balm of denial.
—In the paper you will learn what is real and what is dreamed. Go for your daily paper and watch the dark dream die. It will say “Clear and warm to-day,” and your window says it. Spring there, sitting on your window-sill, says what your paper will say. So Spring is real. What else will it say?
I draw my legs from the covers. Pain. Then that is true? My hand in a search that makes its moving to my ankle a deep rent of some sleep in my mind, touches the swollen flesh of a larval truth.
—That ankle and its pain: the limekiln and the man with the white head: my parents: Philip: Mildred! The low house on the mountain? The other room? How should I know what is true? Perhaps there is no falsity at all. If all is true, will horror go away? Spring tides into my room, my ankle scorched against the limekiln slant. I am John Mark, Philip LaMotte is dead. I love you, Mildred, read what the paper says about the death of your parents.... How many things can there be true at once?
An instant I have lain quiet in my bed. Three volute worlds spin from a spot of my mind in threefold spaces, touching one another only at myself. One world has a surface of shimmering sunny waves. One world is an opaque clot colored like blood. One world is pale, a white transparency, and at its heart little filaments ultra-violet, fixed, while the misty surface spins.
The instant is gone. Painfully with my swollen ankle, I make a way from the bed to where, under the door of the living room, I see the tip of the paper. I knew then how I had marched that night through the bleak field, away from the limekiln which lived in it like a sultry evil eye: how I had reached a suburb where the houses stood soiled between the night and the day, and how a cab had taken me home.