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Back Adventures in the Skin Trade
Chapters (25)
  1. Title Page
  2. INTRODUCTION
  3. ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE
  4. AFTER THE FAIR
  5. THE ENEMIES
  6. THE TREE
  7. THE VISITOR
  8. THE LEMON
  9. THE BURNING BABY
  10. THE ORCHARDS
  11. THE MOUSE AND THE WOMAN
  12. THE HORSE’S HA
  13. A PROSPECT OF THE SEA
  14. THE HOLY SIX
  15. PROLOGUE TO AN ADVENTURE
  16. THE MAP OF LOVE
  17. IN THE DIRECTION OF THE BEGINNING
  18. AN ADVENTURE FROM A WORK IN PROGRESS
  19. THE SCHOOL FOR WITCHES
  20. THE DRESS
  21. THE VEST
  22. THE TRUE STORY
  23. THE FOLLOWERS
  24. Other Titles
  25. Copyright

And the storm came up again as they drank.

This was the coming of death in the interior world.

THE BURNING BABY

They said that Rhys was burning his baby when a gorse bush broke into fire on the summit of the hill. The bush, burning merrily, assumed to them the sad white features and the rickety limbs of the vicar’s burning baby. What the wind had not blown away of the baby’s ashes, Rhys Rhys had sealed in a stone jar. With his own dust lay the baby’s dust, and near him the dust of his daughter in a coffin of white wood.

They heard his son howl in the wind. They saw him walking over the hill, holding a dead animal up to the light of the stars. They saw him in the valley shadows as he moved, with the motion of a man cutting wheat, over the brows of the fields. In a sanatorium he coughed his lung into a basin, stirring his fingers delightedly in the blood. What moved with invisible scythe through the valley was a shadow and a handful of shadows cast by the grave sun.

The brush burnt out, and the face of the baby fell away with the smoking leaves.

It was, they said, on a fine Sabbath morning in the middle of the summer that Rhys Rhys fell in love with his daughter. The gorse that morning had burst into flames. Rhys Rhys, in clerical black, had seen the flames shoot up to the sky, and the bush on the edge of the hill burn red as God among the paler burning of the grass. He took his daughter’s hand as she lay in the garden hammock, and told her that he loved her. He told her that she was more beautiful than her dead mother. Her hair smelt of mice, her teeth came over her lip, and the lids of her eyes were red and wet. He saw her beauty come out of her like a stream of sap. The folds of her dress could not hide from him the shabby nakedness of her body. It was not her bone, nor her flesh, nor her hair that he found suddenly beautiful. The poor shudders under the sun, he said. He moved his hand up and down her arm. Only the awkward and the ugly, only the barren bring forth fruit. The flesh of her arm was red with the smoothing of his hand. He touched her breast. From the touch of her breast he knew each inch of flesh upon her. Why do you touch me there? she said.