Chapter IV (2)

Perhaps the effect on my imagination of Grosbeake’s religious ideas had been, in recreating my conception of God, to revive for me a vision of the Devil; but at any rate, my recent image of Larry Mickler as a species of hobgoblin combined itself with my assimilation of the gravy-boat and cream-pitcher at the Grosbeakes’ to the demons of Bruegel and Callot, to inspire me with the idea of a satire in which I should ascribe to a race of demons all those anti-social views and habits which had come lately to seem to me so sinister.

My mind, laying hold upon this, worked for a time with great clarity and speed: I even framed sentences and paragraphs: “The attitude of the demons toward each other is entirely devoid of the amenity and dignity characteristic of human behavior. In their amorous relations, they are neither romantic nor faithful. Many of the demons do not function sexually, but among those that do--notably the succubæ and incubi--their matings are wholly physical and transient, and involve neither responsibility nor affection. A human being who has seen the demons at close range is not perhaps disposed to consider this unnatural. The more hideous and monstrous types have died out, like the larger and more powerful: the bat’s ears, pig’s snout and ape’s mug appear only in modified forms; and such a bestial and complex mask as that worn, for example, by Dürer’s Satan would probably be impossible to-day. Yet the devils which have endured to our own time are still sufficiently unsightly and grotesque, and in a sufficient variety of ways, to appear repulsive to human taste as objects of amorous desire, and impracticable even for each other. We do not wonder when a female demon, coming straight from the embraces of a male, makes no scruple of spitting and jeering at him in the presence of other female demons, or in the presence of another male; or when a male, who has been mating with a female, makes her the victim of one of those practical jokes to which the devils are so inveterately addicted--impaling her in a public place or hacking off her arms and legs and leaving her on a crowded thoroughfare. We should, however, be quite wrong in supposing that the devils resent each other’s ugliness: being entirely without ideas of beauty, they are, in consequence, impervious to ugliness, and do not even, as has sometimes been supposed, esteem it for its own sake. The demons exchange, in their amorous intercourse, in a manner not unlike ours, pledges of lasting affection and epithets of tender endearment; but these expressions are simple reflexes involved in the physical process itself and as involuntary as it; they attach no significance to them and we should wrong them in supposing they do. The devils are sterile, and unable, or unwilling, to reproduce their kind.

“The fiends have a highly developed literature, which reflects their habits and ideas. It is mostly printed on crude loose sheets which are passed around from hand to hand; and it consists chiefly of obscene anecdotes and stories of atrocious crime. We must, however, bear in mind, in connection with this literature, that to the demons, whose point of view is so incomprehensible from our own, a scandal is not a scandal, nor a crime, a crime: the former they enjoy as a farce, and the latter as a practical joke. They have an interesting school of poetry, of which the leader is Blashtalatshk. I have met Blashtalatshk and found him a devil of high intelligence. His horns are rudimentary and his lower jaw is lacking: but his enormous dark eyes are among the most sensitive and glowing that I have ever seen. His poetry and that of his fellows is, of course, devoid of the moral ideas and of the ennobling emotions which distinguish human poetry to-day: it is exclusively occupied with the mere representation of sights, sounds, smells and other sensations, which the demons have a genius for recreating with vividness and precision, though occasionally with so much complexity as to produce an effect of incoherence.”...

At this point, however, I dropped it: I found that my satire was boring me, and that it also went against my conscience. My portrait of the demon poet had been a caricature of Pete Bird, and I had no desire to caricature Pete: on the contrary, I liked him. I found that I did not want to write a satire: to satirize humanity was to slander it, and I no longer thought so ill of humanity. Pete and Daisy and the rest, after all--even Larry Mickler himself--were not really base: they had disliked their lives as much as I had. If I had disliked them and found them base, it was because I myself had been tarred with the same stick. Moral problems, I now saw, were too complicated, and human nature too delicate a matter, to be hacked by the axe of satire. So, regretting the emphatic prose style with which a simple moral conviction may supply us and which I now found myself obliged to sacrifice, I decided to be scrupulous of the truth.

Still I could not sleep: I sat up against the arm of the couch, and saw the round cold winter moon, of which I had before had a glimpse on the other side of the house, now studding with its white blinding pearl the pane of the room where I lay. When had I seen it before, setting so, but the moon of summer then, embedded in the morning glass? I thought of Rita, in Paris now. I had been wrong about her and Ray Coleman: Rita had merely, at the time when I had seen her and she had seemed to me evasive about her address, gone to stay at Duff Burdan’s studio--all the rest had been a gruesome fantasy of my jealous imagination and my shaken self-confidence. She had gone abroad for the first time, by herself, at just about the time I was returning, and I had had a letter from her the day before: it had come just as I was leaving town for the country. She was staying, she wrote me, in a little Left Bank hotel, and had as yet seen nobody. But the early morning market-trucks, she said, which rumbled through the Rue du Four and made the walls of her bedroom vibrate, though they kept her awake after midnight, made her feel that she was “really a part of Paris.” I seemed to divine behind her letter an aching loneliness--the loneliness of all Americans when they first try to live in Europe; and I imagined about her, as she wrote, the dark brownish walls of the room, the dispiriting wash-basin and slop-jar, the stuffy and musty French bed. It was partly the fact that I could pity Rita, and that at last she had written to me, as well as the spectacle of Grosbeake’s equanimity, which made it possible for me to think well of humanity.

Not that her letter was plaintive or effusive: it was, on the contrary, dry and brief; but the fact that she had written me at all--she very rarely wrote letters--seemed to me to imply, on her part, an unusual degree of desolation; and the two poems which she enclosed in her letter--she told me she had composed them at night when she could not sleep on account of the trucks--were the palest things of hers I had seen. The first was meagre, terse and wistful: it ticked off, in three brief stanzas, three images from that countryside of her youth--a lone elm, a gray stone fence, a pond athrob with frogs at nightfall--and I recognized in their phantom faintness--so unlike the stinging actuality which she usually gave to such things--that dim aspect which, to the traveller abroad, even the best loved and known sights of home come to wear in alien places, as if they had perhaps never existed, but were the receding images of a dream.

The other poem was a sonnet; and when I first saw it, I did not know what to make of it. It seemed very unlike Rita: in the first place, she never wrote sonnets; and my first thought, when I commenced to read it, was one of solicitude: I felt distressed that her isolation should so disastrously have affected her poetry. Then it dawned on me, after I had finished it, that it was supposed to be addressed to myself. I reread it with attention: it was the first time she had ever written me a poem. Then I became aware of the true situation: the trouble here with Rita’s style was simply that, for the moment, she had become infected with mine. It was I who was addicted to sonnets; and I could recognize in this one of Rita’s, my own forcible-feeble rhetoric and my adjectives in monotonous pairs--all those unavailing devices with which I had muffed the kind of effects that she would clinch with a single short verb or a commonplace idiom. I had never thought myself much of a poet, but now that Rita seemed to be talking my jargon, seemed to be trying to reply to me in the language in which I had been apostrophizing her, I found that I was sickened by it. And I was horrified to observe that even the banal imagery with which Rita could usually perform miracles remained, in this ill-inspired sonnet, irredeemably banal.

My first feeling had been one of depression, the result partly of wounded _amour-propre_--because Rita, having written me a poem, should have written me such an indifferent one--and partly of pained concern that she should have sacrificed a poem for my sake. I had been embarrassed as to what I should write her: I wanted to urge her to suppress the poem, but, as it had been written in an effort to be nice to me, it was impossible to be so ungracious.

Now, as I lay staring into the fire, I thought of the sonnet again, and ran over it in my mind. It had been a memory of our first days together, when we had talked about poetry; and now suddenly, for the first time, I was touched that she should have remembered those days and should have tried to let me know it. I had thought only of the artistic sincerity which she had sacrificed for her subject! Now I was able to take account of the sincerity of some personal sort which must, after all, have come into play to induce her to sacrifice it. In her dismal Paris hotel--so cold and dark in November--had she been trying to recall, to reaffirm, in spite of all our quarrels and failures (and she had known then, as I had not known, how life undoes the soundest of our reasons and depreciates the dearest of our hopes), those moments of common understanding and common enthusiasm of the days when we had first talked freely together--when we had both, for that moment, found a language for those deepest unspoken convictions, for those deepest realities, of such different lives!--And I began even to wonder at last--a possibility I had never admitted--whether, that night at Sue Borglum’s house, when I had met Rita with my freezing, blank looks and my tiresome disapproval and when, reminding me of the poem which I had so loved when I had been in love with her, she had tried to describe to me the river all lined with sword-blades of ice,--and when I had listened only with contempt--I wondered now whether, after all, she had not herself been glad to think of the hours--how rare in the world they must be!--when poetry had burned with love. Had not the river itself been the symbol of the breaking and fraying of passion, of the dispersal of the torrents of the heart?--and had she not, when she had told me, at Sue Borglum’s, of the river alive in winter, for all the frozen countryside about it and though cramped by the ice of its banks--had she not tried to tell me something more, to speak again to the old comrade and admirer, over the head of the angry lover--to establish again that contact--which I now chose to make impossible--but which had brought once, if only for those moments, that common light into a world which, for her as well as for me--it occurred to me now for the first time--must be chiefly a world of darkness?

The last log had a comforting beauty--all woody, rosy luminosity--but I saw that it must soon crumble. I put on another log, trying not to wake Pete and Daisy. I glanced over toward their bed--they had turned to each other in sleep. The log smoked, and then caught fire: it sent up little tongues of flame. What a pity that I couldn’t write a satire, making use of my wide knowledge of demonology, for lack of misanthropic conviction! The log began to crackle and blaze.

I looked for the moon, but it was gone: I craned around the side of the couch and saw it low, vaporish and gray, as if dissolving in the ichor of dawn. So I had watched it set so many times, on guard at night, in France--in that terrible, dull, dead hour when night is over and day not begun, when one must either make verses or be dull, be dead, as the earth and sky, as the soldiers in their deepest sleep--I had run into Hugo in Toul--I had not seen him since the beginning of the War and we had only had a chance for half an hour’s talk in a café--he had been so funny about his unit, so funny and so good-natured, that unit which was soon to condemn him to the horrors of the prison-camp--what a great fellow he really was, in spite of the fact that, as Grosbeake said, he did caricature American business men too grimly--how few there were like him!--that France where Rita had never been till she arrived in that dreary hotel, where the market-trucks kept her awake!--I rolled over and went to sleep.

But I had scarcely closed my eyes, it seemed, when persistent coughs, steps, and bumpings compelled me to open them again: it was Pete, in the gray, early light, getting into his pants and khaki shirt; he was rolling up his sleeves before the window.

I tore myself out of my blanket-cocoon and--though he begged me not to get up--I blinkingly pulled on my clothes, and followed him out into the cold undersea of the early morning ocean. He had gone into the shed to chop some wood: I had used up the last log during the night, and he wanted to make the room warm for Daisy. He begged me again not to bother; but with eager, if incompetent, helpfulness, I hacked up a large crooked limb, as well as several of the planks of the floor.

After this, we went in and had some coffee--Daisy was still asleep. We talked about literature and drinks: Pete had volumes of Shelley and Keats, and a treatise on French wines, which he said were the only books he had not sold when he had come away to the country. Sitting close against the stove, I examined the wine book with interest. “Never buy 1916 Burgundy,” Pete admonished me, with an air of independent knowledge. “From 1910 to 1914 are all good years--and 1915 is fair. But you have to go back to 1904 to get really A-1 Burgundy!”

I had to leave before noon--it was a long way into the town and a long way back to New York. We talked a little about a taxi; but as it was already growing late and as the nearest telephone was at a farm some distance away, I decided that I would undertake to walk, and Daisy offered to go with me. Pete had promised to call on a farmer and examine his grandfather’s clock--putting clocks in order, it appeared, was one of his curious useless aptitudes--in return for which service, he explained to us, he hoped to be able to induce the farmer to make him a present of a crippled lowboy which was being used as a kitchen-table.

“I can supply the handles,” he assured us. “Nothing easier in the world! Just take them off that old bureau in the store-room. But I _don’t_ see how I can supply that missing leg without a lathe.--But, after all, why not have a lathe?” he went on, with the liberal enthusiasm of a thoroughly practical man. “Think of all we could do with one! We could make regular tables and chairs!--Why, I’d be turning out table-legs so voluptuous that all the local oafs would be trampling over one another to buy them!” “I suppose,” said Daisy, “that you’re going to buy the lathe with the money we owe the grocer.” “My dear child,” Pete retorted, like a millionaire who takes pleasure in explaining that he always saves money on his clothes by having them made when he is in London, “you can get a lathe from Sears Roebuck for ten dollars! You simply say that you want to buy it on instalments, and they send you the lathe. Then you don’t pay them anything more--and by the time they’ve sent a man for the money and he’s gotten way out here, you’ve had time to turn out a whole dining-room set, enough legs and rungs for several dining-room sets, and you’ve sold the sets and ordered another lathe from another mail-order company, paying the first instalment out of what you get for the sets--so that by the time the first lathe is taken away, another one is just arriving, and the work goes merrily on!”

We set out--Daisy and I--on a hard crust of frozen snow, which broke through at every step and let us down into powdered depths. Daisy was dressed in high laced leather boots, a white sweater under a tan leather jacket and a round knitted white cap. I had never liked her so much: a certain strength and independence of character, which I had felt in her even at the period when she had seemed most demoralized, had now fully come into its own. Her frankness and her common-sense jokes, which I had once thought the typical products of Pittsburgh and New York, now seemed to me the wisdom of the country, which the false values of the city couldn’t fool.--I began to think--it had already occurred to me--how delightful it would be to live with Daisy in a solitary farmhouse in the country, to chop wood to keep her warm, to sit with her at night before the fire, to read Bulwer-Lytton’s novels aloud. I thought wistfully of Bulwer Lytton, whom it seemed to me I should like to read.

I congratulated her on leaving New York: “I began to feel before I left,” I said, “as if the Village were a cage of wild animals--I began to feel that it might be just as well to make good your escape in time.” “I certainly felt that way,” said Daisy, “but I didn’t know anybody else did.--I thought everybody ate it up but me.--I got so I felt that I couldn’t trust anybody!”

We strode, plodding, through the snow. “You know, Pete and I,” she went on, “just after that last time I saw you--we got on a train with our last money”--(the money, no doubt, from Pete’s books)--“and got off at the first town that looked good to us out of the train-window. We went to the real-estate office and asked for the cheapest thing there was--and we finally got this old hell-hole. The owner said that, if we’d fix it up, they’d give it to us free.” The idea of this exploit enchanted me, and I envied Pete more than ever.

I told Daisy how much I liked Pete--what a relief I thought she must find him after living with Ray Coleman. “To tell the truth,” she replied, “I don’t notice much difference. The only thing is that I get along much better with Pete. We can sit around and wisecrack for hours.--The time that we had that party--the first time that I ever met you--I’d only seenum a few times, but I said to-um, ‘I get along with you better than with anybody else I know.’” “What did he say?” I inquired. “He just grinned,” said Daisy. I remembered how I had felt myself when it had first burst upon me that Rita, instead of scorning my apartment, enjoyed it. “So,” Daisy continued, “we went out and went to Julius’s bar together--and here we are now!”

I told her how wise I thought them to have left New York for the country--how glad I had been to go abroad--what a fool I had made of myself the night of Sue Borglum’s party. “As far as I’m concerned,” she replied, “that night was about the worst I remember--about the worst sunk I’ve ever been.”

“You know,” she added, after a pause, “I cut my wrist that night--you knew that, didn’t you?” “Good Heavens!” I exclaimed, “Why did you do that?” “Why, because I’d lost my job, I suppose,” she said, “--and because I got tired of the traffic going in and out of Gus Dunbar’s rooms--and I’d been drinking so much that I didn’t know what I was doing anyway.--I felt like such a tramp--that I’d been so inconsiderate of other people, and just gotten myself into a worse mess than before.--I cut my wrist,” she went on, “with Gus Dunbar’s razor-blade. I never saw anything spurt the way the blood did--it seemed as if all the blood in my body must be just in my wrist--it spurted clear across the bathroom. I just stood there and looked at it--the only thing I could think of was the leak in the hose, in that movie that you and I went to--don’t you remember?--a little while before. If Pete hadn’t come in just then, I’d probably have bled to death. But he arrived and called a doctor and put a tourniquet on my wrist: he certainly stopped it in short order--it seems he knows all about tourniquets.”

“Oh, my dear,” I said, “did you do that?--Is it really all right now?” “Yes,” she said. “The doctor said that I really ought to have an operation, but I’m almost all right again now without one.”

I made her take off her gauntlet: I saw that she could hardly move the fingers of that hand which Pete had once described as a “little surprising moonbeam violin”--they were as stiff as the fingers of a doll which a child tries to make hold a broom.--“Why don’t you get them operated on?” I asked. “It probably isn’t a very serious operation.” “Can’t afford to,” she replied.

“What had happened, anyway,” I asked, “before I came to get you that night?” “Oh, it was horrible!” said Daisy. “I’d gone around to Larry Mickler’s to see Larry about getting Pete a job--he was a friend of Gus Dunbar’s.--When I’d called him up on the telephone and suggested sending Pete around, he’d said for me to come--but I told Pete to drop in after I’d been there a while. I could see what Larry wanted, but I thought that I’d jolly him along a little if Pete could get anything out of it. I thought that I could fix it all up and get back in time to have dinner with you. Well, when I got there, he made me drink and then he tried to grab me. And then before Pete arrived, his wife came in. It was awful: that was really one reason that I cut my wrist, I guess--I was so disgusted with everybody!”

I thought with pitying superiority of Larry Mickler. I felt to-day that I myself was so very far from being capable of behaving in such a way as to make a young girl lose faith in life!

We marched on--we were in wagon-ruts now: there was a long, rising road before us, with a straight row of trees on each side. We climbed the hill--there was a farmhouse at the top--we started down the slope of snow.

“Our favorite yokels live in there,” she said. “You ought to see me giving parties for the yokels--I have the time of my life--and so do they: they think I’m swell--they never saw anything like me before!” “It must be nice to live in the country,” I said--I felt envious of the yokels. “It must be nice to know your neighbors--which you never do in New York.” “Yes,” said Daisy, “I get to take positive pride in competing with the other housewives to see who can have the best-looking kitchen. You know how sloppy Gus Dunbar’s looked?--I think it was that as much as anything that discouraged me with life that time--well, when I came down here to the country, the first farmhouse kitchen that I saw brought out a suppressed housewife’s complex,”--I remembered her remark, at Sue Borglum’s, on the neatness of Sue Borglum’s kitchen--“and I used to feel ashamed unless our kitchen was just shining!”

There was still a stretch at the bottom of the hill. What a marvellous walker she was!--And she had felt as I had done, that life without honor was horrible! But where Rita could save her self-respect with a poem, where even I could imagine a satire, Daisy could only cut her wrist!

We walked on for a time in silence. I could be so happy with Daisy, I thought--taking long walks in the snow in silence!

“I was in a pretty bad way myself,” I presently remarked. “That night that we went to the movies, you really saved my life! You don’t know how sweet you were!” “Well,” she replied with amiability, “you weren’t so sour yourself!”

We were coming now into the town: we had reached the first white houses. I was cheered by a sudden inspiration: “Look,” I said, “we couldn’t get a drink, could we?--Isn’t there some kind of a bootlegger in town?--I’ve got plenty of time before the train.” “We might go to Ned Lovejoy’s,” she said thoughtfully.

It was just a room in a private house: there was an oil-cloth-covered table; a stove--which was pleasant after the cold; some “cabinet-size” photographs of members of the family, paralyzed in family groups; and an old-fashioned tinted picture of a little beribboned girl, smiling innocently and sweetly upon a sweet-natured cat and dog who ate amicably out of the same bowl. I don’t know which was worse--the gin or the ginger-ale. Ned Lovejoy was inclined to converse, but we discouraged him and he left.

“You don’t think that Pete and I are getting to look alike, do you?” asked Daisy: I assured her that they weren’t in the least. “That’s what Gus Dunbar said when he was out here a couple of weeks ago: he said we were getting alike. They say that people who live together do get to look alike.”

I began to tell her again how much I approved of her course; how I had come to detest New York. I explained that I was going away, and intended to stay away as long as I possibly could. When I had returned in the fall from abroad, I hadn’t been able to get back my job; and I had decided that, before looking for another, I might as well go on squandering my legacy, to the extent of a trip to New Orleans: I wanted to be there for the Mardi Gras.

Against the cold, sunny light of the window, her sharp nose, pale eyes, and blond hair looked almost Scandinavian. I told her how much I had enjoyed myself--how fine it was to have seen her again--how much I wished I were living in the country. “Why do you go to New Orleans, then?” she asked. I replied, not without a touch of wistfulness, that I had nowhere in the country to go. I tried to summon another drink; but Ned Lovejoy was absorbed by his radio, of which we could hear the sepulchral buzzing--and there was a long, rather stupid silence. I went and found him, and got him to bring us some more ginger-ale and gin, of which I had almost ceased to notice the taste.

I told her how splendid she looked with her outdoor complexion and clothes; and how much I liked and admired her.--She said suddenly: “Take me to New Orleans!” “Come along!” I replied. “I’m sailing just after Christmas.” “Take me away from all this!” she went on, burlesquing a woman in a play saying “Take me away from all this!”--but it seemed to me, and shocked me a little, that she was partly in earnest. “Pete can’t go on like this!” she said. “He’ll have to go back to the city and get some kind of a job. We owe everybody in town! I get panicky about it sometimes. Living with Pete like this is just like living with another woman--you just live on your wits from day to day--you don’t dare to think ahead.--You know: you can keep yourself on the go and keep using your vitality up, just so you won’t mind things so much--but every now and then I begin to think about the situation and then I don’t know what to do!--I never thought I’d be living like this--I never thought I’d be with anybody the way I’ve been with Pete and Ray!”...

I remembered how, suddenly one night, she had left Ray Coleman for Pete, and had never come back--and I remembered how she had begged Hugo to take her to Afghanistan. What if I could really get her away from Pete! I wanted a mistress now, and I liked Daisy so much--I desired her so much. But I couldn’t flatter myself that she cared about me, she merely wanted to get away--and all that treachery, that promiscuity, that stealing of other men’s girls, had come by this time to seem to me detestable: I had known Pete Bird through his poems, and had stayed in his house and read his books, drunk his coffee and eaten his food--and I remembered how bitter _I_ had been when Rita had not scrupled to betray me, poetry, devotion and all, for that fellow from Columbus (or whoever it had been: I never knew; if it was not merely some image of herself, that self which could not mate with others, because it had already, in one body, made a union of female with male).--Pete Bird had, as it were, built his house with his own hands, and he possessed no legacy.--I did not even doubt now that he had, as he said, been slandered by Larry Mickler in the matter of the liverwurst sandwiches.

The cold light on the cold road where I was looking, early as it was in the day, was already beginning to darken; and I had a consciousness of stoic fortitude at the thought that, if the sun was short, I could endure the closing-down of night.--I spoke to Daisy of the sad imperfection inherent in all human relations, and of the necessity for loyalty and faith in a world where love was sure to fail us. “But,” I warmly and earnestly broke off, “you know all about that better than anybody! You know all about everything better than anybody! You’re one of the most intelligent girls I know!” And I told her again how much I liked her and how well she deserved of life.--It was time for me to go.

At the station, I tried to get some gum for her out of a solitary slot-machine, but it was apparently frozen up. There were some country people standing about, and I was a little shy of kissing her good-by; but we kissed, as I was getting on the train: I touched her coral lips for an instant. It was deliciously cold, moist and light, like that moment of ice and winter flowers inside the glass of Grosbeake’s porch.