Page:Mosquitos (Faulkner).pdf/278

 while he moved his hand over her face, slowly and firmly, but lightly. ''It is like a thing heard, not as a music of brass and plucked strings is heard and a pallid voluption of dancing girls among the strings; nay, Halim, it is no pale virgin from Tal with painted fingernails and honey and myrrh cunningly beneath her tongue. Nor is it a scent as of myrrh and roses to soften and make to flow like water the pith in a man’s bones, nor yet—Stay, Halim: Once I was once I was? Is not this a true thing? It is dawn, in the high cold hills, dawn ts like a wind in the clean hills, and on the wind comes the thin piping of shepherds, and the smell of dawn and of almond trees on the wind. Is not that a true thing?—Ay, Lord. I told thee that. I was there.''

“Are you a petter, as well as a he-man?” she asked, becoming taut again and rolling upward her exposed eye. His hand moved slowly along her cheekbone and jaw, pausing, tracing a muscle, moving on. ''Then hark thee, Halim: I desire a thing that, had I not been at all, becoming aware of it I would awake; that, dead, remembering it I would cling to this world though it be as a beggar in a tattered robe; yea, rather that would I than a king among kings amid the soft and scented sounds of paradise. Find me this, O Halim.'' “Say,” she said curiously, no longer alarmed, “what are you doing that for?”

“Learning your face.”

“Learning my face? Are you going to make me in marble?” she asked quickly, raising herself. “Can you do a marble of my head?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have it?” she thrust herself away, watching his face. “Make two of them, then,” she suggested. And then: “If you won’t do that, give me the other one, the one you’ve got, and I’ll pose for this one without charging you anything. How about that?”