Presently he noticed that it was becoming difficult always to distinguish between a sheep and a shrub, and that that meant thunder. With his back to the house and the wood he was being stopped working from the other side. He drew in a tree-shape rather hard. The white haze gathered. The more he looked, the less he saw. Instead, he began to see shapes in his head, not outside it, an exercise he avoided, because it interfered with precision of hand. Unwillingly he felt that he would have to return before he meant to, to a place where there was a martyred ass called Clarence, lying alone for a moment in a verandah, a little distance from a young American, who was keeping remarkably silent. Whom his instincts were against. Not because he disliked him, but because the town-bred contact between them had died. They were all stuck down there in a bewilderment, which had happened because they had forgotten the duties of hospitality and had left it to Scylla to fetch the stranger from Starn. If they had not done that, two of the party would have died of the hedgehogs, or else come straight over to them without raking up a well. Not that he was sorry that it had happened. Then he whistled as he drew, out of tune, but as though he was loving something. No nonsense about being the thing he loved, but like a lover, aware of the presence of what he loved everywhere.
There was a hard, explosive sound. Several mixed noises. A bird tore out of a thicket and crossed an open space, indirectly, frantically, and disappeared. He imitated its call and burst out laughing. “Woodpecker up to his tricks again.” Then he went back to his work, straining his eyes.
In the verandah, Clarence slept. He dreamed that he was walking, at night, on a thin spit of rock across the sea, Picus’s slender height and great weight against his shoulders, in his arms. Picus was dead, and he was glad he was dead and it was over. The difficulty was to get rid of the body, which was coming alive somewhere else and following him. It could only be got rid of at the end of the rock, and he could not go on much longer like that. There were dark hills round the sea, and in them was the living Picus, not his at all, but another, the real one. It was such a bother, his feet were covered with blood. It wasn’t till the dead Picus was in the sea, that the real one would come out of the hills and play with him. No use waiting for day, because it was always dark in that country.
He often went there when he was asleep, often with a dead bird, Picus the Woodpecker, in his hand and in his arms. Sometimes it was an image for Picus. Sometimes him. There came a point when he would say: “This is a play, made out of my wishes and my disappointment. Truth is quite different. I am unhappy because the boy has things wrong with his character, because he has things wrong with his inside. Or, because we all think, somehow, that Picus is a bad lot.” After this correction there would come the final idea that saw behind these images and their rationalisation another truth. He stirred, shifted and fell asleep again, not knowing at all that Carston, awake, was wondering why he seemed so wretched, and why he had dictated them and taken offence at lunch. That Carston liked him, and admired his good looks, who could only see how worn they were beside the American’s ageless set trimness.
He dreamt again: another Picus came walking up the rock-spit, carrying a glass dish which was the cup of the Sanc-Grail, saying: “It’s the
