Page 121 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

ning, her eyes bright with brutish joy. Only the morning
pained him with its dim memory of dark orgiastic riot, its
keen and humiliating sense of transgression.
He returned to his wanderings. The veiled autum-
nal evenings led him from street to street as they had led
him years before along the quiet avenues of Blackrock. But
no vision of trim front gardens or of kindly lights in the
windows poured a tender influence upon him now. Only
at times, in the pauses of his desire, when the luxury that
was wasting him gave room to a softer languor, the image of
Mercedes traversed the background of his memory. He saw
again the small white house and the garden of rose-bushes
on the road that led to the mountains and he remembered
the sadly proud gesture of refusal which he was to make
there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years
of estrangement and adventure. At those moments the soft
speeches of Claude Melnotte rose to his lips and eased his
unrest. A tender premonition touched him of the tryst he
had then looked forward to and, in spite of the horrible real-
ity which lay between his hope of then and now, of the holy
encounter he had then imagined at which weakness and ti-
midity and inexperience were to fall from him.
Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang
up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticu-
late cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from
his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He
wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into
the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any
sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling

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