No More Learning

The room is damp, but warm. Little flashes swarm about from the firelight.
The lustres of the chandelier are bright, and clusters of rubies leap in
the bohemian glasses on the _étagère_. Her hands are restless, but the
white masses of her hair are quite still. Boom! Will it never cease to
torture, this iteration! Boom! The vibration shatters a glass on the
_étagère_. It lies there formless and glowing, with all its crimson gleams
shot out of pattern, spilled, flowing red, blood-red. A thin bell-note
pricks through the silence. A door creaks. The old lady speaks: "Victor,
clear away that broken glass. " "Alas! Madame, the bohemian glass! " "Yes,
Victor, one hundred years ago my father brought it--" Boom!
The room
shakes, the servitor quakes. Another goblet shivers and breaks. Boom!

It rustles at the window-pane, the smooth, streaming rain, and he is shut
within its clash and murmur. Inside is his candle, his table, his ink, his
pen, and his dreams. He is thinking, and the walls are pierced with beams
of sunshine, slipping through young green. A fountain tosses itself up at
the blue sky, and through the spattered water in the basin he can see
copper carp, lazily floating among cold leaves. A wind-harp in a
cedar-tree grieves and whispers, and words blow into his brain, bubbled,
iridescent, shooting up like flowers of fire, higher and higher. Boom! The
flame-flowers snap on their slender stems. The fountain rears up in long
broken spears of disheveled water and flattens into the earth. Boom! And
there is only the room, the table, the candle, and the sliding rain.
Again, Boom! --Boom! --Boom!