I Like It Here

read. Try this, now.
It was with a sense of having by now earned the right to attempt penetration of the hard confident sheen that had, since the first morning of his stay, overlaid in her grey-green eyes the smoky tumult he had glimpsed there that spring evening (the strange light all velvet and honey)—it was with such a sense that, presented now with her vigilant yet dreamy profile (it wasn’t much good wasting time at this stage on speculations about the significance of that comma-shaped mole on the nostril-wing) as they stood at the open-flung window—before which in the flinty afternoon sun a bougainvillaea waved—
Frescobaldi. brought to utterance: “Do you come here often?”
“What a strange question,” lightly.
Well, he was not to be put off “You’re waiting—” he teased.
She was facing him now. The faintest flicker, too slight to be called a tremor (what, nervousness in her regard!), came, went and came again in the dear pallor of her cheek, as if some small fish-shadow had flicked away into a pool’s darkness at a dreadful strange heavy tread—his tread? But there had not been, he’d thought, that in their talk, even earlier, which would of a sudden have brought this to her. “For nobody”—it was quick, level-spoken, and in anyone else, anyone less careful, he sensed, always to appear to match a mood, would perchance have seemed to scout him— “that you know.”
He reached towards her with “How can you be so sure ?” and the moment he had awaited, his words barely out, came. With an almost audible snap the bright shell of light that hid her eye-depths was, in but an instant, gone and vanished, and the tumultuous whirl beneath was his to gaze and guess at. Tumultuous ?—why, certainly I—and yet, through all those maddening smoke-bedevilled galleries of ambiguity there rose up—to meet him, him? or was he a mere tourist of others’ feelings, for whom the cataract would leap, the geyser spout, the dark waters still hold mirrored a speaking artifice of lighted towers as indifferently as if none were by ?—there rose up in Yelisaveta’s eyes, at all events, the unmistakable intimation of a power that was also a consciousness of power, a still certainty far remote, indeed, from the turbid middle depths of the grey-green orbs and nearly as far removed, in some octaves of its implication, from the almost insolently shallow self-confidence of their surface which even now, as he prolonged— with something not at all distantly akin to terror—his gaze, silently re-formed, as the first touch of winter would breathe upon some rush-fringed pool a coating of ice thinner than gold-leaf, inexorable in its very delicacy.
A protest, then. He tried “You’ll know me again”, but this spun wanly away down the gulf between them, a poor scrap of anonymous pasteboard let fall from a night-lit window. More firmly: “What is it that, my dear, would seem to be, now, the matter?”—and on the instant before his eyes there wheeled momentarily, duskily, the vision of black sea-flowers at a depth coiling offendedly aside at the lurching, slowed fall of a rotting and timbered prow, won from deck and keel by soft century-long motions at the sea’s floor. No earthly power would have stopped him, now, from turning away.
But she followed him, her hand lighting upon his arm. She had understood. She, somehow, had seen it too.
You go out of your way to tell us how, Bowen inwardly recommended, as once to Frank Sinatra in the long-ago. He wanted to put the man who had written that in the stocks and stand in front of him with a peck, or better a bushel, of ripe tomatoes and throw one at him for each time he failed to justify any phrase in the Frescobaldi-Yelisaveta scene on grounds of clarity, common sense, emotional decency and general morality. Alternatively he could turn an honest dollar by getting in first with something he might provisionally entitle “Full Fathom Five: an examination of light and water imagery in the later work of Wulfstan Strether”. Yes. Was there really a Prospero tie-up here? If so it might be significant, for what he had been reading was One Word More. A conscious attempt to echo This Rough Magic on such a level might well occur to a Cambridge, Mass. sophomore with his head stuffed full of Blackmur and Burke, but hardly to an oldster like Buckmaster, who probably thought The Sacred Wood a bit newfangled and clever-clever. On the other hand, an unconscious Prospero thing in One Word More did seem to go some tiny way towards suggesting that its author was also the author of This Rough Magic. Unless, sod it, it merely pointed to the devotion with which Buckmaster had soused himself in Strether’s work. And was there really a Prospero tie-up anyway? Bowen felt that he would never be sure now.
Feeling that he would never be sure now about almost any given problem was beginning to obsess Bowen to a degree comparable with the liquidation of Mrs. Knowles. For instance, his uncertainty about whether or not it was right to spy on old Buckmaster now felt more or less permanently jelled. (Jelly, while he was on imagery, was a pretty good equivalent for the properties of his mind, Bowen decided: it was soft, it set easily, and it shook whenever anyone went near it.) Anyway, he now felt convinced, or felt he thought he felt convinced, that Buckmaster must be Strether. It was so unlikely that he wasn’t. On the other hand—and why was there always another hand? and not just another hand, but half a dozen ?—Briareus and Scaevola: an examination of the predicament of modern man, by Garnet Bowen: Hiscock & Weinstein, 25s. ON THE OTHER HAND, that earthquake they had had along the road a couple of hundred years ago must have seemed almost inconceivably unlikely right up to the time when the first tiles started dropping. Mm. You never could tell.
The sound of the Morris