the shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall
never forget his face as it looked one night when he told me about the
solitary day he spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind
blowing through the roofless columns, the birds flying low over the
flowering marsh grasses, the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung
mountains. He had wilfully stayed the short summer night there, wrapped
in his coat and rug, watching the constellations on their path down
the sky until 'the bride of old Tithonus' rose out of the sea, and the
mountains stood sharp in the dawn. It was there he caught the fever
which held him back on the eve of his departure for Greece and of which
he lay ill so long in Naples. He was still, indeed, doing penance for
it.

I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto
of the 'Commedia,' repeating the discourse between Dante and his 'sweet
teacher,' while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between
his long fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet
Statius, who spoke for Dante: 'I was famous on earth with the name which
endures longest and honours most. The seeds of my ardour were the sparks
from that divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I
speak of the "Aeneid," mother to me and nurse to me in poetry.'

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived
about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never
lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was
apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures
scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the
new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from
me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my
own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now,
like the image of the plough against the sun. They were all I had for
an answer to the new appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and
Russian Peter took up in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other
things. But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those
early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they
accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive
in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere
else, or how.