Lucifer Before Sunrise Read Online Free Page A

choking, coughing, retching, screaming. Voice crying O my God. I could not find my hands. Another voice shouting, Shut up that bloody row. No panic! Lights from masked torches moved about feebly.Candles lit. I turned my head, relieved that I could move it. Where was I hit? I was on the floor, covered by plaster and wood dust. A table was on my legs. I turned sideways, moved my legs, first one then the other. I heaved up on elbows, moved my legs again. Tried to speak, mouth dry with dust. An electric light moved. It was a bright naked bulb. I saw dust in one of the champagne glasses on the next table. A hand reached up, I tried to say, ‘Don’t drink that wine, it may be full of powdered glass. My father was covered with it from a Zeppelin bomb in the first war.’ But no words came from my mouth. I remembered Melissa. I crawled to her, my eyes opened in query asked if she was all right. She nodded her head. With angular life now coming upon me I helped her to her feet, and held her while dust fell from my hair.
    Helpers were now amidst the wreckage. Melissa asked me to tear table napkins to make bandages. I saw a man trying to take rings off a dead woman’s fingers. Cap on head, sparrow-eyed, sharp after glints, muffler round throat, stopping over broken chairs, kicking broken glass aside, looking for deep red or burning blue ray of diamonds. Like the looters on a battlefield, carrion-crow-minded, there before the stretcher-bearers. People now staggering about, frocks torn, tattered, dark blood patches. Hair wild. Police and firemen. I saw the looter slipping past them. Then I was outside with Melissa, crowds were pressing in the blackout, faces, faces, faces, I was trembling, tottery. Melissa powder pale, eyes round, Melissa bandaging someone’s arms. My ears were ringing with a high-pitched ray. Bodies were being carried out to lie side by side on pavement, great powdered dolls. Dolls from whom sawdust had spilled, limp, broken. Ambulances. One for St. George’s hospital. Melissa’s voice, calm, saying she must go with it. Her head rested on my shoulder, I saw her eyes close as she kissed me. I went down to the Embankment. A crowd shouting, pressing round a staggering figure, Nazi pilot who had baled out and come down at the edge of the lapsed tide. Covered with mud. Chuck the bastard back! Let the sod drown! I told them the pilot was wanted for questioning; and with another man led him away. The police took him in a black van. I walked back to my club. On the way I saw a child dug out of a bomb ruin, its white face blown whiter by fireman’s breath; face calm, quiet, marmoreal.

Chapter 2
SEED BEDS!
    On hundreds of thousands of acres in East Anglia, the granary of England, men had waited for shining sun and drying winds. All the ploughings of mild mornings of October: longeurs on tractors throughout the dull and sombre days of November; endurances of cold December afternoons when hoar-frost rimed hollow places filled by long shadows of the faltered sun—all the monotone of engine-exhaust, trundling wheel, backward glance on rearing furrow—screaming black-headed gulls just behind one’s self-set monotony, enwrapped aloneness upon wide brown landscapes—all this leads to the moment of seeding.
    For each man springtime is renewal, another chance in life.
    The farmer takes on the character of his fields, even as his fields are part of an expression of his spirit. To farm land is to plan and to sustain a war. Its strains (which only farmers know) continue by night and by day in the master’s mind. Should the land be difficult to work, because too hilly or too sticky or too dry; should other matters become too heavy against his resistance, then his farm induces a strain too hard to be borne; and the farmer loses his war.
    He does not lose it suddenly, he loses it slowly. He becomes slow in the losing of it; hesitant and afraid like a man too much beaten or hurt about the mind or body. He suffers the decadence of