Ryder by Djuna Barnes

Author:Djuna Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, Father, and please you I’ve done it again, and this time it was with Fat Liz, him as keeps bar in a gophered boudoir cap, and smelling all zig-zag of patchouli, and as drunk as a lord, and saying his prayers so fast that he hoped not a sailor in Salem would so much as catch his eye, for he was giving his inclinations the grand haughty O’Farrell, and him mad for the gremial and the faldstool and the lambrequin of the mass, and the grail and the surplice and the host, Kyrie eleison! and the way the robes of the saints pass up from the righteousness of the feet and go under the righteousness of the cincture and pass away under the holy beards, and saying his paternosters and crying his tedeums in a roaring whisper through his nose, because the bridge of it is all gone and eaten away by the whacking snuffing of coke he’s done come forty years past, for the temptations of man are not as pure as they were, and, please you, Father, adulteration has conjured away many a best joint, and there was Fat Liz staggering off to the fifteenth round when I caught his eye, and he has travelled not one bead farther since, please your honour, for my ways let no man forge at redemption. And night long there was his soul and mine tossing and tossing, until the great wave came and receded, and there was nothing for it but to beach upon our stranded shoals, says I, and both of us rolling our eyes and praying fast and thick and trying to scramble back into the grace of God, out of sight and mind come twenty minutes, and breathing like we had been pushing each other for all we were worth getting to absolution and control, please Father, Son and Holy Ghost, it was a terrible race! And us coming in neck and neck, looking for the score. Go, my child, and thank thy Saviour it came as high as fifteen, and the earth rolling and plunging and tossing men into all kinds and sorts of postures difficult to recover from and puzzling to tell the good from the bad, and our minds milled and addled by the Devil, and our noses and our eyes thick with the dust that does pour out of hell like a storm cast down to the boundaries of perdition and over and beyond, and no stopping it, for man, he says, is a twig in a whirlwind, and this goes past him and that goes past him, some stinking and some sweet, and his net frail and his soul torn, wherefore then should we judge thee? but, my child, try thou to stand in that gale and catch neither finch nor fledgling, neither bramble nor chaff, but cling to the pillar of righteousness, and shut thy mouth against the flesh of thy brothers whirled down the vortex of time, and lo! thou

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