"I just did. Please leave. Maybe next year sometime ..."

"But a few words can do wonders...."

"Save them!"

"I-I'm sorry... "

Lovely as it was. pinked over with the morning-the slop- ping, steaming bowl of the sea-he knew that it had to end. Therefore ...

He descended the high tower stairway and he entered the courtyard. He crossed to the bower of roses and he looked down upon the pallet set in its midst.

"Good morrow, m'lord," he said.

"To you the same," said the knight, his blood min- gling with the earth, the flowers, the grasses, flowed from his wound, sparkling over his armor, dripping from his fingertips.

"Naught hath healed?"

The knight shook his head.

"I empty. I wait."

112 .

"Your waiting is near ended."

"What mean you?" He sat upright.

"The ship. It approacheth harbor."

The knight stood. He leaned his back against a mossy tree trunk. He stared at the huge, bearded servitor who continued to speak, words harsh with barbaric accents:

"It cometh like a dark swan before the wind- returning."

"Dark, say you? Dark?"

"The sails be black, Lord Tristram.*'

"You lie!"

"Do you wish to see? To see for yourself-Look then!"

He gestured,

The earth quaked, the wall toppled. The dust swirled and settled. From where they stood they could see the ship moving into the harbor on the wings of the night.

"No! You lied!-See! They are white!"

The dawn danced upon the waters. The shadows fled from the ship's sails.

"No, you fool! Black! They must be!"

"White! White!-Isolde! You have kept faith. You have returned!"

He began running toward the harbor.

"Come back-Your wound! You are ill-Stop ..."

The sails were white beneath a sun that was a red button which the servitor reached quickly to touch.

Night fell.

COMES NOW THE POWER.

I wrote this story on one of the blackest days in my memory, a day of extreme wretchedness accompanied by an unusual burst of writing activity-which I encour- aged, to keep from thinking about what was bothering me. I sat down and did three short stories, one after the other without leaving the typewriter. They were "Divine Madness," this one and "But Not the Herald."

I later put the other two into my collection The Doors of His Face. The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (Donhteday's title-not mine; I had suggested Hearts & Flov/ers) and I would have included this one there, too, save that I could not locate a copy at the time I assem- bled the manuscript. I cannot be certain whether Peter De Vries' The Blood of the Lamb was on my mind then, just a little though I know I'd read it before that time.

It was into the second year now, and it was maddening.

Everything which had worked before failed this time,

Each day he tried to break it, and it resisted his every effort. ^-

He snarled at his students, drove recklessly, blooded his knuckles against many walls. Nights, he lay awake cursing.

But there was no one to whom he could turn for help.

His problem would have been non-existent to a psychia- trist. who doubtless would have attempted to treat him for something else.

So he went 'away that summer, spent a month at a re- sort: nothing. He experimented with several hallucino- genic drugs; again, nothing. He tried free-associating into a tape recorder, but all he got when he played it back was a headache.

To whom does the holder of a blocked power turn, within a society of normal people?

... To another of his own kind, if he can locate one.

Milt Rand had known four other persons like himself:

his cousin Gary, now deceased; Walker Jackson, a Negro

113.

114 .

preacher who had retired to somewhere down South;

Tatya Stefanovich, a dancer, currently somewhere be- hind the Iron Curtain; and Curtis Legge, who, unfortu- nately, was suffering a schizoid reaction, paranoid type, in a state institution for the criminally insane. Others he had brushed against in the night, but had never met and could not locate now.

There had been blockages before, but Milt had always worked his way through them inside of a month. This time was different and special, though. Upsets, discomforts, disturbances, can dam up a talent, block a power. As event which seals it off completely for over a year, how- ever, is more than a mere disturbance, discomfort or up- set.

The divorce had beaten hell out of him.