Women sat in shawls on the housesteps: doors opened into reeking, into pregnant darkness: children in rags among filth of gutters: horses rattling their carts through laughter of children. Mothers had gray long breasts--they held them to sweet red lips. Mothers had shrill words--they spoke love. High noon came on the precocious sun of Spring and clarified the crevices of filth between the Belgian blocks. Odors rose to the sun not sweet like the smells of earlier Springs. And yet no Spring was fertile like this Spring. No stir of field with young grass, with young flowers, with margin of maples ruddy in hard buds, keen in the glint of birds.... David lived. David for a moment saw with his eyes how his eye-lids were shut down against them. David saw.... * * * * * Blackness ... ultimate texture of all colors ... light. A world of infinite color, infinite flesh: himself within the world, himself carried within it through it. Himself of the breakless tissue of the world. Flesh of sweet smells, sweet odors, sweet fluids. Flesh altogether and altogether about him. He altogether touching all Flesh--and All. David knew through his shut eyes, walking the world, how he was carried within a world of ceaseless substance: how he was substance within it: how his moving and knowing through Flesh was Spirit.... He walked--he worked--he ate. He had a woman’s body, he earned the bread of a man, he held the love of a friend. Flesh, all. And his moving through Flesh, his moving through infinite immersion through the Night, through the World of Flesh--Spirit and Dawn.... His eyes were shut. But his mouth was open! David saw with his mouth. And though he knew not he had seen, there was within him, there would be now forevermore within him, life of a vision. The world was a Dark Mother. The Night of the miracle of worlds was fleshed and was a Mother. She moved in infinite directions an infinite path. She was moveless. And he within her, moving with the world toward the movelessness of birth. David was unborn. But his mouth sucked vision. Sucking the Night sucked vision. He slept again. Slept long.... Slept years.... But he lived. * * * * * David and Tom came back from dinner: they sat together for a last smoke in their room: the world they willed came to be. David lit his pipe: it was the one smoke that gave him comfort. Tom sat gloomy, nervous, flicking his cigarette until he had destroyed it, lighting another. He tore open his collar as if he needed air. He whistled the last half of a tune, stopped, met David’s eyes and broke from the strain of their mutual discovery by jumping up and gazing into the night. David did not budge. The room was filled with a strange restraint. Somewhere a struggle was, in which his mind grappled against a sinuous opponent. Why did he have to struggle even with his friend for the friend he wanted?