The Single Hound: A Novel by May Sarton

Author:May Sarton [Sarton, May]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Literary, Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9781497647497
Amazon: B00LG8Z780
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2014-07-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

MARK turned over on his back and opened his eyes. It was light already, morning already. He felt as if he had spent the night on a tiresome train journey, stopping and changing every half hour, he had so many small fruitless dreams. He had not dreamed of Georgia, he had dreamed of his hat floating down a river. He had dreamed an exact dream of buying a ticket for a place the man had never heard of and shouting ‘Latour! Latour!’ at him to no purpose. It was a relief to see the light. He looked at his watch. Four o’clock. He got up and went to the window. The street lamp outside looked like a red sun rising out of water. (They should turn them off when it is so light.) In a tree in the street the wood pigeons cooed insistently, persistently, in an unchanging soft monotone. (They are trying to make a different sound but can’t. Their voices always go back to the same ‘rou-cou’ even though they are trying to say something quite different.) He was wide awake. As he stood at the window looking out in the cold clear light it was more resting than that troubled sleep had been. At this hour the blood is turned to water; the mind floats easily upon it. He stood at the window and looked at the unchanging light and was glad to be awake.

He surveyed the last two days and the immediate future. It lay there like a map before him, the limits fairly drawn, the cities and villages there to be observed. It astonished him that he rebelled so little at the facts. Here is a country where I can go, the small mountainous country where Georgia and I will meet at long intervals and stand for a moment on the peaks looking down. Here are the great peaceful plains where I am not allowed: the rhythm of days and nights following each other, the falling asleep listening to the rain, the waking up to say, ‘Have you had a good night?’ We shall never have time to be simple and easy with each other.

But, he thought, looking at the solitary workman bicycling across the city with his bag, in another way I have come home. I am accepted. I am known and accepted. The years before this event seem interminable looking back now.

He thought of his childhood, the tiny blue room in the house in Paris where he had lain pretending to be dead. The strange sinister atmosphere, tropic, as if there were always a storm on its way, his beautiful passionate mother, his father whom he had hated, of whom he had been so jealous. His childhood had been a childhood in a foreign country. It had never been home. It had been a place of devastating lonely emotions ending — only in this unnatural morning light would he allow himself to remember it — ending with the day when he had seen his father strike his mother with his fist.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.