Free A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories by Glenway Wescott Page A

spoken without words; so indeed, an hour ago, they had been. They might take the form of a gaze, or of twisted muscles around one mouth or another, or of a change of color—the rainbow whiteness of dead flesh on some living face. A sentence of death might thus be passed—without any blame theoretically, without even intending to hurt—upon a lover, for example, by his beloved: the expression growing in one second old or (worse still) common, and over the eyes which told the truth, the eyelids kindly sinking shut. Or if a few phrases were spoken, they were too conventional, too discourteous, to have the least poetry. Or they were so obscure, depending for their fatal sense upon so remote and complex an entanglement of incidents, of habits of the heart, echoing so many previous faint phrases, that the whole of a book or play, leading up to them, would not suffice to make their burden clear. In the text of humanity, such were the passages of genius. Thus only could the worst be said; thus only could the lesson, the sentence entirely and accurately characterizing mankind, the summary truth, be expressed.
    Then, considering what had happened as a story, he understood that if one added that it had occurred years before, that the babe was now a man, the grandparents dead, the parents old, the uncle (himself) some sort of worn powerful personage, or perhaps a derelict; or if one merely prophesied that in the remote future such things would take place—none of it would be altered fundamentally.
    For time is an unreliable thing, he thought; it does not steadily pass but weaves back and forth. At one manifold moment he had felt himself to be a rebellious babe and its imaginary father, his brother-in-law’s as well as his father’s son, and himself at he knew not what age. He had become a man, but without learning not to feel like a child, not to relapse backward into immaturity for an hour. In a church steeple, alone in the country with its graveyard, past which they drove, he heard ten o’clock strike. So the hour passed; but it would return. Soon he would depart again, to his distant ambitions—the necessary infatuation with himself, the frail glamour of the inappropriate rewards, the remorse incessantly attendant upon his faults—all interrupted here, now, by the experience of his early youth, and all to be interrupted at intervals, always, wherever he was, even by what had happened that day. Always, in an ephemeral western town in himself, in his mind, under a humble roof and as it were amid disunited frustrated elders, there would be the babe weeping, ungratified, bound in its bed, for its own good. The present summer would never quite go by. Time could not be depended upon to sweep him safely, normally, onward; but would be forever letting him fall back into what was over and done with, and letting him, enfevered by the unwanted past, leap weakly ahead into what was to come, to no avail.
    And he thought that he (and all other vain men wishing to be strong, even if they could not be strong) might as well resolve to agree with this busy force which no name suited better than another— time or nature or destiny or god or anonym. Maniacal worker, mad about its art, invisible and uninvited, it went on darkening with wild strokes their lives that were but scattered square inches of its design. Mindreading gambler, it kept playing with them and with facts for unknown stakes. Stern economist, it had meant this part of the West to be poor; and the oppressive forests and sterile hills having been mastered, introduced education and extravagance and optimism and credit to keep living conditions hard as they had been. Just now, as if it had gazed at him personally with its amorous eyes, it had made use of cruel circumstances—poverty and illness and half-incestuous affections—to give him a son, irrespective of his habits and against his will.
    In his mind, as he sat beside his good discouraged father, as they drove some miles away