The Rainbow

He would say during the daytime: "To-night I shall know the little hollow under her ankle,

where the blue vein crosses." And the thought of it, and the

desire for it, made a thick darkness of anticipation.

He would go all the day waiting for the night to come, when

he could give himself to the enjoyment of some luxurious

absolute of beauty in her. The thought of the hidden resources

of her, the undiscovered beauties and ecstatic places of delight

in her body, waiting, only waiting for him to discover them,

sent him slightly insane. He was obsessed. If he did not

discover and make known to himself these delights, they might be

lost for ever. He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with

which to enjoy her. [He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a

rough, grating, lascivious tongue. He wanted to wallow in her,

bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over with her flesh.] And she, separate, with a strange, dangerous, glistening look

in her eyes received all his activities upon her as if they were

expected by her, and provoked him when he was quiet to more,

till sometimes he was ready to perish for sheer inability to be

satisfied of her, inability to have had enough of her.

Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in

the darkness and death of their own sensual activities.

Sometimes he felt he was going mad with a sense of Absolute

Beauty, perceived by him in her through his senses. It was

something too much for him. And in everything, was this same,

almost sinister, terrifying beauty. But in the revelations of

her body through contact with his body, was the ultimate beauty,

to know which was almost death in itself, and yet for the

knowledge of which he would have undergone endless torture. He

would have forfeited anything, anything, rather than forego his

right even to the instep of her foot, and the place from which

the toes radiated out, the little, miraculous white plain from

which ran the little hillocks of the toes, and the folded,

dimpling hollows between the toes. He felt he would have died

rather than forfeit this.

This was what their love had become, a sensuality violent and

extreme as death. They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness

of love. It was all the lust and the infinite, maddening

intoxication of the sense, a passion of death.

He had always, all his life, had a secret dread of Absolute

Beauty. It had always been like a fetish to him, something to

fear, really. For it was immoral and against mankind. So he had

turned to the Gothic form, which always asserted the broken

desire of mankind in its pointed arches, escaping the rolling,

absolute beauty of the round arch.