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By Root 1919 0

and clay, the weight of a breast, the warmth and damp of her, underneath. Briefly he remembered cold naked Pomona, pushing under his blanket in Purchase House. Cold and white like marble, like The Danaïde. Rose had clever, coercive fingers, with which she too thought. Philip, who was growing up fast in every sense, thought that the naming of parts must be a routine she went through with all foreigners, and then thought he didn’t care, it was all perfectly sensible and efficient. Rose was generous to him. He got overexcited and came quickly, and she then revived him and showed him subtler ways of pleasure, slower rhythms, until at last he was thinking with that part of him, as happened occasionally when he was pleasuring himself. He thought Rodin must think a lot in this way. He had an obscure vision of a church window, on the Marsh, showing the Fall of Man, the woman handing the man the round apple from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and the fork-tongued snake staring with satisfaction. It had never made any sense to him, and he didn’t believe a word of it, but suddenly as he pushed into the compliant Rose, clutching her breast, he saw it in his body, the round apple, the tough sinuous snake, the knowledge of nakedness and good and evil.

“Bon?” said Rose, with professional concern.

“Bon,” said Philip, drowsily, feeling the damp of sex like the slip on the clay.

August Steyning invited everyone to see Loïe Fuller perform in her own theatre; they went back to England the next day, so the dance was the finale of their visit. Loïe Fuller’s image was pervasive in the Exposition—her whirling figure crowned the Palais de la Danse, and stood above the entrance to her own theatre, with her floating veils solidified into plaster. Bronze figurines and statues of her were on sale there and elsewhere. Philip said to Fludd that there must be better ways of making images of floating cloth than these solid blobs which reminded him of melting butter. The theatre itself was low and white, and its front wall, modelled to resemble a skirt or shawl with a frilled hem, resembled, Philip also thought, an iced cake before it was trimmed. There was a low portal, like the entrance to a grotto or cavern. Inside were huge butterflies and flowers and a grille of Lalique’s bronze butterfly-women. “That is the way to do it,” said Fludd to Philip. “With veining and empty space.” Lalique had designed the electric light fittings also, in gilt bronze. Laughing imps were cupped round the mysterious face of an enchantress, above whose head the electric bulbs were suspended in delicate, snowdrop-shaped flowers on fine stems.

Fuller’s dances depended on two things—furling, unfurling, billowing lengths of cloth, and electric lighting, in magic lanterns covered by different coloured gelatines. Her body was half-glimpsed through coils transparent, translucent, opaque. She deployed her veiling with the aid of supporting batons. They saw “The Flight of the Butterflies,” and “Radium,” an iridescent shimmering confection dedicated to Pierre and Marie Curie. They saw, finally, the Fire Dance, in which the dancer was lit from below, through a lantern using an intense scarlet light. The moving silks became a stream of volcanic magma, they became the rising flames of a burning pyre, they became the oven of a holocaust. “The Ride of the Valkyries” sang out, and the woman gyrated in a cocoon of fire—like red clay, like white marble luridly lit, smiling in the conflagration, stepping through the fires of hell-mouth incandescent and unconsumed. They were all entranced. Julian wondered if it was vulgar, and then got lost in the silk fringes. Tom was happy with that happiness that comes from being shut in the unreal box of the theatre. Olive was reminded of the uncanny feeling she had had as Hermione, wound in marble folds of grave-cloth or wedding dress. She remembered the flowing marble hair of Rodin’s Danaïde, and felt that everything was of a piece, that the dancer, and the carved woman, and the glassy lit surface of the river outside with its threaded