WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Compilations - The Library - Volume 09 - R to Z - 354 fiction ebooks (PDF, HTML, RTF, DOC, TXT, ZIP).zip/Smith, Clark Ashton - Venus And The Priest.txt

Text File | 2000-09-05 | 2KB | 33 lines

Venus and the Priest

by Clark Ashton Smith

[Fragment from Strange Shadows.]


SCENE: The house of a village priest, at midnight. The priest himself is
revealed in prayer before the crucifix, besides a table piled with Commentaries
and the Lives of the Saints. His features are buried in a shadow such as
Rembrandt loved to paint; but the ochre-coloured light of a dying candle gleams
on his heavy hair, and on a back and shoulders to whose shapely outlines the
black gown has moulded itself in supple curves. He bows head with a voiceless
prayer, whose nature, perhaps, it were not well to examine over-curiously, or
surmise with too much confidence. Suddenly, the austere room, and the young,
attractive frame of the priest, are suffused with a glare of rosy light that
emanates from the mid-air. The crucifix is seen to tremble and totter and
recede, the room seems to expand, the walls to melt away; and the heavy cross,
with burden, soars and diminishes to a flying mote, lost in immensities of
splendor. In its place, a woman stands-a woman fair and voluptuous as the first
dreams of puberty, and naked as an antique statue. Her breasts and arms are
moulded in the solemn, superb, inevitable lines of a divine lasciviousness; and
her hair is like morning on a waterfall; her eyes are the sapphires bathed in
wine. She smiles, and in the curve of he r crescent lips ineffable lore is
manifest, as if an entire kalpa of summers were epitomizes in a single rose.
With open arms, she advances toward the priest, who turns in terror, and put s
the table with its black-bound commentaries between himself and the apparition.
She pauses, but continues to smile.

The Priest: Saint Anthony preserve us! ...Who are you?

Venus: