Magick Without Tears

SORE SPOTS 479 years ago. Place: Paris, just off the Place des Tertres, overlooking the city. A large and lovely studio, panelled in oak. Strange: it was completely bare, and so far as one could see, it had no door. The skylights, mindful, were carefully screened with broidered stuff. A gallery, some ten feet from the floor, ran round one corner. Here was a buffet, loaded with priceless wines and liquors of all sorts-except the "soft"-and excellent variety of all cold "snack" refreshments. One gained it by a staircase from the lower floor. By the buffet , the old butler: oh, for a painter to portray his Weariness of Evil Wisdom! Our host led us to the gallery; "we ate and drank and saw" not God also, but the lady responsible for the heavy tread upon the stairs. A woman of the HaIles Centrales, in her early forties; coarse, brutal, ugly, robust, square-set, curiously radiant with some magnetic form of energy. I cannot describe her clothes-for lack of material. She greeted us all round with a sort of surly good humour . The butler took a pot of very far-gone Roquefort cheese, and smeared her all over. She drank to us, and clumped away downstairs. She came out into the studio from under the gallery, braced herself and shook her mop of hair as if about to wrestle, waved to us and waited. A minute later a small trap at the far end of the studio was smartly pulled up; in rushed a hundred starving rats. There was a moment's hesitation; but the smell of the cheese was too much, and they rushed her. She caught one in both hands, bit through its spine, and flung it aside. Softly repeating to myself passages from The Revenge by the late Alfred Lord Tennyson, of which the scene most powerfully reminded me, "Rat after rat, for half an hour, flung back as fast as it came." Their courage wilted; the hunted became the huntress ; I thought of Artemis as I sang softly to myself, "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces." Bllt she pursued ; snapped the last spine, and flung it into the gallery with a yell of triumph .