The Dead Seagull Read Online Free

little too much money.”
    “What does she do with herself? I suspect she is an actress.”
    “Her father sent her around the world with an aunt when she left the convent. I haven’t seen very much of her since then. I shouldn’t think she actually does anything. She used to have literary ambitions, but I imagine they’ve evaporated.”
    “Why?”
    “Oh, she was an eccentric creature. She’s probably an aeronaut now.”
    I detected an inflexion of resentment in Theresa’s tone. “I get impatient with her,” she concluded, “because although the world may be her oyster, it’s mine too.” She began to clear away the breakfast dishes. “Shall we invite her to come? I think that you will find her entertaining. And I should like to see her again.”
    *  *  *  *
    No matter how I endeavour to disguise it, I am increasingly conscious of what I can only think of as a distance supervening between us. For, as her concern the more intently turns inward towards the child, it turns, necessarily, its face away from me. I see her now as a pregnant mother rather than as a woman pregnant. And the knowledge that my love itself is responsible only renders the paradox the more unbearable. It is not, I repeat, that I am puzzled and frightened and resentful of our love being turned, by a germ in our genetics, to the irreparable personification of original sin. Her fulfilment in the child seems likely to be so perfect that everything else will be forgotten—it is for this simple reason that I cannot help suspecting that the woman exists in a lower category of spiritual consciousness. I wish to god I could be fobbed off from the omnipresence of evil by merely fulfilling my function as a father. But through the body of the suckling mother I know that biological obedience suffuses itself in an absolute benediction. With the sore dug plugging, the bub lugged out of an opening in the smock, the small man sucking, the grunting, the drooping udder, behold the mater amabalis, the virgin with a piglet, the pig with a saviour.
    *  *  *  *
    That supremely placatory face, with its forehead like the masterpiece of a monumental stonemason, its lips spreading altruisms through which no rain can reach us, its eyes, half opened, enlightening all enigmas, and the altar above the upper lip dedicating this face and all human faces to the communicability of love: this is the face I see behind all faces. And always it wears a gaze of solicitude that seeks to dissolve the plaster masks through which we spy upon it.
    I believe that under the plaster cast each one of us is a possible deity and a probable daemon. It is the probable daemon that commonly breaks out of our plaster. For the god will not emerge of his own deliberation—in order to expose him we must shatter ourselves upon him.
    *  *  *  *
    Therefore women give birth because it might be a god.
    *  *  *  *
    Now I get drunk every evening. The Goat and Compass, a little pub like a tea-cosy, where the easily consoled keep warm, provides me, also, with easy consolation. But it is a consolation shot through with livid ineffectualities like tiger traps or stage drops. I rehearse conversations, as I sit, in which I render myself incontestably right in desiring that the child should die. Also I get very sick.
    In the half darkness as I go home to the cottage a derisive voice points its finger at me out of a cloud and jibbers: “You got born! You got born! You got born!” Not so much in disgust as in resignation I experience the aphrodisiac of the alcohol on my erotic system, and under a hedge, raging in despair, I have taken two million sinners out of my fallibility.
    *  *  *  *
    Regal Theresa, can you forgive me, now, from wherever you are? My least forgivable infidelities were those with myself. The inhabitants of the heart, these are the inveterate enemies; and of these inhabitants, who except oneself is the principal? What on earth does one do at a crossroad except become