Free The Dead Seagull by George Barker Page A

prayed, for the moment when she became a mirage and the wilderness a discarded illusion.
    But I saw in her face, instead, the heavens at night, silent, full of the birth of new stars, glittering with incipient miracles, dark with possibilities, an infinitesimal world of millions blazing at the end of an eyelash, all human happiness and misery rocked in the hammock of a cheek, all the glory of love in the sunset of her lips as she moistened them over each other. And I leaned my head downward into this universe of a single life and heard the silence in between the expressible antinomies speak in the voice of Francisco de Ossuma: “The greater Love is, the less it has need of words. Because Love, if it is true, is unable to seek the exercise of subtle reasonings, but works great things in silence.”
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    The evening looped its cloths about the bedroom and the glass of milk on a small table looked like a huge pearl. In the distance the hollow echo arose of a workman plying a hammer on wood; but this ceased in a short time and there was no sound in the cottage. Marsden stood gazing into space out of the window. I looked long at that face that has smiled at me from the frames of famous pictures in every great gallery, that face of the mistress of all the great masters. I saw again, and more deeply, a face in which fruits and cherubs sought to conceal the orgies of egoism taking place in a cave behind them; a face in which the suicide or the devotee, casting himself in the hope of drowning, would find, instead, dynamos that slowly cut him into pieces. I saw in this face rocks with mannequins combing their hair. The face of an Ischia where the wave is smiling; the beauties, combing their hair, utter the inveiglings of her conversations, and out of view, not heard, feared but not suspected, the sty of victims, fatuously happy and irrecoverably degraded, slewing about in the juice of infatuation. The face of the mother of mysteries that should remain forever unrealised.
    As I looked at her, the silence of the bedroom, with the dying figure on the bed, the big breasted beauty at the window, the first personal singular half way between them, I sensed that the nature of the silence suddenly changed: then it was charged, in a moment, with what was about to happen. This anticipation struck me quite still, as nature is fixed and rooted the moment before the eruption or the earthquake. Marsden, at the window, seemed to turn to stone. The silence overwhelmed everything with its consciousness of the climax that was to follow: and in this silence, where only Theresa’s heavy breathing existed, I heard, distantly, a voice, quite different from Marsden’s, speak no more than a couple of words.
    But because I knew that this was an hallucination I made no sign that I had heard anyone speak. Then Marsden, trembling, turned to me from the window, her eyes glittering and splendid with self-examination, an expression upon her face of daemonic elation and uncomprehending inevitability, and in a louder voice repeated the sentence that opened her womb and revealed the child curled inside it.
    “Yes,” she said sharply, closing her eyes, “yes. It is true.”
    The face of the figure on the bed, white and smiling, seemed to me then to violate the laws of physics and detach itself from the body whose sufferings it at once showed and concealed from the world. And I thought that it hung suspended in the air in front of me, like a bird about to enter its tree. The lips, discoloured, parted to speak, but I heard no sound. It looked at me with trust and gentleness and truth. Then, wailing and moaning, it fell spinning down away from me, and the word that it moaned was the verb of love.
    I knelt by the bedside and took Theresa’s hand where it lay upon the cover. Marsden, at the window, stared down in pride and deference at life and death. Theresa turned her head slowly away from me towards the window. Exaggerated by shadows, Marsden stood like