Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/79

composition, without form or proportion. Yet there was something interesting, even engrossing in its reach and sweep.

If he were not so tired he would grasp this picture, recreate it just as it was, without any addition or subtraction. Let the world see what was usually hid from it. He sat quietly. Then, slowly, like the curtain in a theatre, his eyelids lowered-and the scene changed. He is in the Louvre. He tries to catch the lines of the familiar figures, but the colors swim and merge together. Out of the gilt frame the figure of a man appears, in a white cloak, with long hair and a vague, featureless face. There is a pencil in his hand. He draws it nervously across the naked canvas, and forms immediately take shape. Grotesque forms, which Morris seems vaguely to have seen before. The shapes become clearer. The peacocks on the red-papered wall, the wash hanging across The room, the two sleeping women in the background.. What are you doing, Monsieur Gerard? he wants to shout. But his lips are dry. Yet the artist says-Why concern yourself with the past? Don't you feel the fresh new winds blowing? And Morris does indeed feel them. He feels them on his face and throat. There's something else he wants to ask, but the fantasy fades away.

He tore his eyes open, and smiled a lonely smile. He knocked the ash out of the cold pipe. From somewhere on the other side of the courtyard he heard a hoarse cry- "Special Extra! People's Front Wins!" It was like a cry of life rising, forever rising out of the broken grave of time. It was like prophecy, timeless, spaceless, breaking through walls, flashing through the air like the wings of morning, intangible, yet touching the eyes to tears with its ineffable whiteness.