“Whatever happens ... I am free of those two....”
“But now you are so still. Almost, you are thin.... Yes, I have done this. I have done this. I will continue to do this, poison others with the poison of my wound, so long as I seek to be healed. Do you see? That is what makes the world endlessly hurt the world. It seeks to be healed. Do you see? Each human soul, wounded by another soul, seeks a soul to be healed. And the wound is passed along, endlessly, endlessly. O the vicious circle. And I am in it. God thrust me from home, God drew me as a stone is drawn to the earth ... away and out of the Circle. And I came back and entered it again. O I will try again: I was weak. I was not aware. I will know better. I must not seek to be healed. That is what I have learned. Can you see that, Dear? That is the deadly poison, that is the curse of passing on the poison ... that is the endless circle of a poisoned world. We seek to be well. We crave peace. We crave love. Even I. I came to you with my bloody soul. ‘Heal me!’ I said. And now you are bloody, too. And I no less bleeding. Do you understand just a little, Jonathan? why the peace you gave me, the care and the tenderness you placed into my empty arms ... why all that has been wrong? The hideous joke, this happiness you offered: the cruel wrong, this happiness I seek?
“ ...Yes ... my arms are still empty.” She held them forth as she spoke ... toward him. “They still hunger. O will they never stop aching to hold? aching to be full? My breast is still a woman’s.... But I shall try better now. Do you hear me, God, wherever you are? I was tired. I was broken beyond knowing. I slipped back from falling. I couldn’t go on falling upward upon you. Not then. I shall try again. Another chance, God, will you?... Yes, you will. There is no other way that you can do.... Dear, do you understand?”
His face was before her, crumpled, like a child’s ... lost in the Dark where she had left him, weeping and yet afraid to cry....
* * *
Fanny walked up the street into the Winter sun. It was morning. The sun stood low in the street’s square gap: its heatless dazzle was in her eyes as she walked. She walked with sight blurred by the sun among the men and women walking like her to work. They were the substance of their shadows, long and black upon the sung-glazed City. They swam like wraiths, remnants of warm houses, warm sleep, in the inhuman brilliance of the sun.
Fanny thought: “When I came, what was it that led me to Christopher Johns?”
The comfort of that place, was it curse or splendor lying in her mind? What had it been to Clara? Is Clara there? She had learned quick that there was no place like it. She was unskilled. The one skill she had ... the human one of knowing girls, of managing them well, of a clear head for practical affairs ... who again as she stepped wearying into offices for work would read it in her?
The crowds beat on: the day was going to dim. As the sun went high, these atoms of shadow hording against sun would win. For a day. Till the next morning. Fanny felt that her feet were dark and that they walked on brightness.
—Only my feet. Because they are so tired. I am not black, I am white. In this surge of shadow, Fanny felt wanly white. Her head was dizzy, unpropped by the warm crowds hording against cold sun.