“…until – until the touch comes. Goodness knows where from; but there’s no mistaking it; oh no!”— from Chapter XVIII of ‘The Return’ by Walter de la Mare (my bold), a chapter remarkably, by chance, reviewed by me earlier this very same day (here) before reading the Bacchic gallimaufry of a story by Oliver Onions below!

‘Io’ by OO

“She was short-nosed, pulpy-mouthed and faunish-eyed, and only the rather remarkable smallness of the head on the splendid thick throat saved her from ordinariness.”

This being the story of Bessie, whom Ed, her fiancé, is visiting, after her long illness, from which she was supposed to be recovering. Even though Ed mixed cigarettes and music halls, he tempered such habits with a study of literature. His colleague at work, Vedder, was the one who more often “went off on a bend” rather than Ed. And that is perhaps what Ed lacked in being able to grapple with Bessie’s illness, an illness that was intoxicatingly visionary as well as destructively mental with her being ever upon the edge, waiting for that vital de la Mare ‘TOUCH’, the dream halfway between dream and reality, a touch that, if it came from Ed as an affectionate touch upon her hair (“Indeed, had his hand been red-hot, or ice-cold, or taloned, she could not have turned a more startled, even frightened, face to him”) or a light kiss on her neck, would send her into the chaos of her illness. And even with convulsive impulses for that touch coming from trigger words, as, say, in poems by Keats, or knickknacks from the museum, it is Ed’s mention of the words ‘the sea’ (to repeat their holiday there) that, today, severely tips the balance fundamentally in Bessie, and when he comes back from answering the ‘muffin-bell’, he knows she is simply mad, gratuitously and irretrievably mad! No other point to pointlessness than this dreadful outcome. Upon the tiptoe of utter insanity’s ‘jerks and jumps’. Hasten, hasten, beware!

“His touch would be too like a betrayal of another touch . . . somewhere, sometime, somehow . . . in that tantalising dream…”

“They brandished frontal bones, the dismembered quarters of kids and goats; they struck the bronze cantharus, they tossed the silver obba up aloft. […] …the god himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who slept with the serpents coiled about them. Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with libidinous laughter and beating one another with the half-stripped thyrsi, they poured down to the yellow sands and the anemonied pools of the shore. […] Down her body there was a spilth of seeds and pulp.”

“He put up his elbow as if to ward off a blow.”

***

Other reviews of OO: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/22/the-rope-in-the-rafters-1935-by-oliver-onions/