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By Root 2040 0

a bat, boys anxiously kneeling at the toe of one’s boot, polishing a shoe. The beauty of them was the danger—even more, in some cases, the impossibility—of touching them. Their grave or gentle or mischievous faces hung in the half-dark before the imagination as one wrote one’s clever essay on Plato’s Forms of the Good, or as one snuggled one’s head into one’s solitary pillow and slept. Of course, one had to believe that these lovely creatures were, in potentia, the longed-for intimate friend, from whom nothing need be hidden, by whom everything would be understood, forgiven and admired. But Julian was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated. “Love is a standing, or still growing light / And his first moment, after noon, is night.” “What will it be, when that the watery palate tastes indeed / Love’s thrice repured nectar?”

Did he really want to know?

He sometimes thought, he chose to love people like Tom, who seemed simple, good in some way, and opaque, so as to preserve some essential loneliness, or solitude, in himself, that he needed more profoundly than any human contact. He liked to make Tom smile. He liked to give him things, and see him flush with pleasure. But he liked this best when he had got back into his solitary bedroom, and could look at himself taking pleasure.

That was not the morality anyone taught him. Love is the highest thing, the books said, the teachers said. He had to think it must be. Or might be. So he would love Tom, and see how it felt, and suffer, delectably, the distance between them.

They left the omnibus and stood in a queue in the Porte Binet to buy tickets. They travelled on the moving pavement past various attractions and the windows of Parisian houses, some decorously shuttered, some offering glimpses into foreign drawing rooms and balconies. Each strip of the escalator had regular posts with brass knobs, to steady those changing speed. Women giggled and gripped their skirts as they made the little jump. Gentlemen and pickpockets offered arms to steady them. Julian and Tom, indulging in boyishness, gripped each other’s arms and made several rapid transitions. There were thousands of people, from hundreds of towns and countries, carrying bags of food, elegant canes, parasols, parcels. There was a smell that was foreign. Julian knew it was garlic, added to cheese. Tom didn’t. He sniffed it, like a hunting dog in a field.

They went on the Great Wheel. They sat side by side in the sunlight in their little cart and rose into the blue sky, next to the erect iron cage of the Eiffel Tower and the belching chimneys of the powerhouse. They saw the river and its bridges, the imaginary palaces along its front, the huge Celestial Globe inside which you could whirl around the zodiac.

Julian remarked lightly that he was afraid of vertigo. Tom touched him with a reassuring hand, and said that the secret was to look out, not down. He said he was happy up there, and confessed that he was more worried by a kind of choking feeling in crowds. He said he was unsure whether he could ever live in a big city. What did he want to do, Julian asked. They were still mounting. Julian remembered the Donne quotation again. At the very top, at the apex, he should touch Tom. Tom said he liked being up on the downs, and didn’t know what else he might want, though he supposed he had to want to do something. They both laughed at the idea of thinking, up above Paris, in the sky, of being “up” on the “downs.” They began to descend, and at that exact moment Julian swayed against Tom, as if by accident. Tom shrugged comfortably in response. There was no electric prickle.

Prosper Cain was very busy, on behalf of the Museum, and on his own account. He was exchanging information and advice with the new Austrian Museum of Applied Arts. He was interested in purchasing new metalwork, from the Scandinavians. He was concerned by the enthusiasm of one of the jurors at the Exposition, George Donaldson, who had purchased a collection of examples of the new Art Nouveau furniture,