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

from their troubled home, these exaggerated ideas sounded by turns like a harsh Te Deum and a lullaby and a prayerful plea. Could his sister recover? Was the babe, his theoretical son, in good hands, sufficiently strong and not too blundering hands? Mind your own business, he said to himself; God will provide.
    The old moon rose; and by its light along the road, he saw, as he had never seen it before, the glacier-built West, electrical in atmosphere, hard at heart: the hills without any consoling vineyards, without placid groups of sheep, and the weedy fields of ripening foods. Whatever had made him think, with vulgar images, when he first returned, that this was an abundant land? It was wondrously poor. Heaven itself might have formed it to be its opposite, a place in which to think of it with desperate longing, with virile love. In the weak moonlight the earth and the air had an appearance of painted clapboards and shaky turrets: dwellings for souls that were untamed and immature. He understood that in spite of changes it was a mystery still, a wilderness, vain and ashamed, waiting its turn to be a good place. And in it, with his dubious abilities and yet rudimentary desires, the baby that he loved, by this time, was asleep.

A Visit to Priapus
    Occasionally last winter Allen Porter would mention a young man of sonorous name and address, Mr. Jaris Hawthorn of Clamariscassett, Maine, who as a lover had briefly amused but not satisfied him at all, and who thereafter bored him as a friend. He said that he would not think of introducing him to any of us because (a) he is a bad painter and a pseudo-intellectual, and so obtuse and pushing and clinging as to make any merely social relationship with him a nuisance; and (b) his sex is so monstrously large that sexual intercourse with him is practically impossible. I must say that neither the report of his monstrosity nor of his ambitious and sentimental spirit really dismayed me. For Allen in bed is easily affrighted; and when it comes to talk of art, excesses of friendliness, etc., he has less patience than anyone. With his lively and improper sense of humor, Allen presented this phenomenal fellow to Pavlik, on account of the obscene way Pavlik talks and the freakish pictures he has painted. But nothing came of that, he believed. Pavlik as a rule is unwilling to risk getting caught in such misdemeanor by his darling, Charles, who, I presume, would simply feel authorized by it to go and do likewise or worse.
    When Allen heard of my trip to Maine he suggested that I see Hawthorn,
quand meme;
we talked some sense and some nonsense about it, and I promised; but evidently he thought me too proud or prudent to do any such thing. Having taken stock of Sorrento and looked at the map, I wrote Hawthorn and proposed our meeting somewhere halfway. He did not reply promptly; and meanwhile Monroe had written that George’s keeping company with young Chitwood worried him; so I had begun to worry again, to dream despairingly of Ignazio, and to write those above-mentioned letters. At last an answer came from Hawthorn, matter-of-fact and cordial: he would meet me on the verandah of the Windsor Hotel in Belfast at ten a.m. on Wednesday. I ruefully thought that I was no longer quite in the mood or in the pink of condition for such a meeting; but I did not let myself think much, one way or the other. For it might well turn out to be the sort of folly that I owe it to myself and even others to stoop to upon occasion, according to the rule of my health and my particular morality. And, even if no healthful pleasure was to be had of him at journey’s end, no doubt the journey would be of interest. I should see some sea-captains’ houses and some variations of the Maine landscape. And it seemed to me that I might turn to stone in Sorrento, to stone or to wood, if I did not go somewhere else, do something.
    On Wednesday, Ernest, the bright youth who tends Frances’ furnaces, woke me at daybreak; and I