Part 6

She said quietly to him, as if she were preparing him for a great disappointment, “I have deliberately, very deliberately, removed remorse from the forbidden fruit,” and he was abject suddenly and trembling.

“There will be no thorns for you,” she went on in a cold abrupt voice. “You will miss that, but do not presume to show it in my presence.”

“Also my floor is not the floor on which you may crawl,” she continued, “and I do not permit you to suffer while I am in the room—and,” she added, unfastening her brooch slowly and precisely, “I dislike all spiritual odours.”

“Are we all strange?” he whispered.

“It takes more than will to attain to madness.”

“Yes.”

Then she was silent for a while, thinking.

“I want to suffer,” he murmured, and trembled again.

“We are all gross at times, but this is not your time.”

“I could follow you into the wilderness.”

“I would not miss you.”

And it was said in a terrible forbidding voice.

“I suffer as a birthright—I want it to be something more my own than that.”

“What are you going to do?” he said.

“Does one ever destroy oneself who is utterly disinterested?”

“I don’t know.”

Presently she said, “I love my husband—I want you to know that, it doesn’t matter, but I want you to know that, and that I am content with him, and quite happy——”

“Yes,” Castillion Rodkin answered and began trembling again, holding on to the sides of the bed.

“But there is something in me,” she continued, “that is very mournful because it is being.”

He could not answer and tears came to his eyes.

“There is another thing,” she said with abrupt roughness, “that I must insist on, that is that you will not insult me by your presence while you are in this room.”

He tried to stop his weeping now, and his body grew tense, abject.

“You see,” she continued, “some people drink poison, some take a knife, and others drown; I take you.”

In the very early dawn, she sat up with a strange smile. “Will you smoke?” she said, and lit him a cigarette. Then she withdrew into herself, sitting on the edge of the mahogany boards, her hands in her lap.

And there was a little ease, and a little comfort in Castillion Rodkin, and he turned, drawing up one foot, thrusting his hand beneath his beard, slowly smoking his cigarette.

“Does one regret?” he asked, and the figure of Katrina never moved, nor did she seem to hear.

“You know, you frightened me—last night,” he went on, lying on his back now and looking at the ceiling. “I almost became something—something.”

There was a long silence.

“Shall the beasts of the field and the birds of the air forsake thee?” he said gloomily, then brightly. “Shall any man forsake thee?”

Katrina Silverstaff remained as she was, but under her cheek something quivered.

The dawn was very near and the street lamps had gone out; a milk cart rattled across the square, and passed up a side street.

“One out of many, or only one?”

He put his cigarette out, he was beginning to breathe with difficulty, he was beginning to shiver.

“Well——”

He turned over, got up, stood on the floor.

“Is there nothing I can say?” he began, and went a little away and put his things on.

“When shall I see you again?”

And now a cold sweat broke out on him, and his chin trembled.

“Tomorrow?”

He tried to come toward her, but he found himself near the door instead.

“I’m nothing,” he said, and turned toward her, bent slightly; he wanted to kiss her feet—but nothing helped him.

“You’ve taken everything now, now I cannot feel, I do not suffer——” He tried to look at her—and succeeded finally after a long time.

He could see that she did not know he was in the room.

Then something like horror entered him, and with a soft, swift running gait he reached the door, turned the handle and was gone.

A few days later, at dusk, for his heart was the heart of a dog, he came into Katrina’s street, and looked at the house.

A single length of crape, bowed, hung at the door.

From that day he began to drink heavily, he got to be quite a nuisance in the cafés, he seldom had money to pay, he was a fearless beggar, almost insolent, and once when he saw Otto Silverstaff sitting alone in a corner, with his two children, he laughed a loud laugh and burst into tears.

HUSH BEFORE LOVE

A voice rose in the darkness saying “Love,” And in the stall the scattered mice grew still, Where yet the white ox slept, and on the sill The crowing cock paused, and the grey house dove Turned twice about upon the ledge above.

THE ROBIN’S HOUSE

In a stately decaying mansion, on the lower end of the Avenue, lived a woman by the name of Nelly Grissard.

Two heavy cocks stood on either side of the brownstone steps, looking out toward the park; and in the back garden a fountain, having poured out its soul for many a year, still poured, murmuring over the stomachs of the three cherubim supporting its massive basin.

Nelly Grissard was fat and lively to the point of excess. She never let a waxed floor pass under her without proving herself light of foot. Every ounce of Nelly Grissard was on the jump. Her fingers tapped, her feet fluttered, her bosom heaved; her entire diaphragm swelled with little creakings of whale-bone, lace and taffeta.

She wore feathery things about the throat, had a liking for deep burgundy silks, and wore six petticoats for the “joy of discovering that I’m not so fat as they say.” She stained her good square teeth with tobacco, and cut her hair in a bang.

Nelly Grissard was fond of saying: “I’m more French than human.” Her late husband had been French; had dragged his nationality about with him with the melancholy of a man who had half dropped his cloak and that cloak his life, and in the end, having wrapped it tightly about him, had departed as a Frenchman should.

There had been many “periods” in Nelly Grissard’s life, a Russian, a Greek, and those privileged to look through her key-hole said, even a Chinese.

She believed in “intuition,” but it was always first-hand intuition; she learned geography by a strict system of love affairs—never two men from the same part of the country.

She also liked receiving “spirit messages”—they kept her in touch with international emotion—she kept many irons in the fire and not the least of them was the “spiritual” iron.

Then she had what she called a “healing touch”—she could take away headaches, and she could tell by one pass of her hand if the bump on that particular head was a bump of genius or of avarice—or if (and she used to shudder, closing her eyes and withdrawing her hand with a slow, poised and expectant manner) it was the bump of the senses.

Nelly was, in other words, dangerously careful of her sentimentalism. No one but a sentimental woman would have called her great roomy mansion “The Robin’s House,” no one but a sentimentalist could possibly have lived through so many days and nights of saying “yes” breathlessly, or could have risen so often from her bed with such a magnificent and knowing air.

No one looking through the gratings of the basement window would have guessed at the fermenting mind of Nelly Grissard. Here well-starched domestics rustled about, laying cool fingers on cool fowls and frosted bottles. The cook, it is true, was a little untidy; he would come and stand in the entry, when Spring was approaching, and look over the head of Nelly Grissard’s old nurse, who sat in a wheel-chair all day, her feeble hands crossed over a discarded rug of the favourite burgundy colour, staring away with half-melted eyes into the everlasting fountain, while below the cook’s steaming face, on a hairy chest, rose and fell a faded holy amulet.

Sometimes the world paused to see Nelly Grissard pounce down the steps, one after another, and with a final swift and high gesture take her magnificent legs out for a drive, the coachman cracking his whip, the braided ribbons dancing at the horses’ ears.

And that was about all—no, if one cared to notice, a man, in the early forties, who passed every afternoon just at four, swinging a heavy black cane.

This man was Nicholas Golwein—half Tartar, half Jew.

There was something dark, evil and obscure about Nicholas Golwein, and something bending, kindly, compassionate. Yet he was a very Jew by nature. He rode little, danced less, but smoked great self-reassuring cigars, and could out-ponder the average fidgety American by hours.

He had travelled, he had lived as the “Romans lived,” and had sent many a hot-eyed girl back across the fields with something to forget or remember, according to her nature.

This man had been Nelly Grissard’s lover at the most depraved period of Nelly’s life. At that moment when she was colouring her drinking water green, and living on ox liver and “testina en broda,” Nicholas Golwein had turned her collar back, and kissed her on that intimate portion of the throat where it has just left daylight, yet has barely passed into the shadow of the breast.

To be sure, Nelly Grissard had been depraved at an exceedingly early age, if depravity is understood to be the ability to enjoy what others shudder at, and to shudder at what others enjoy.

Nelly Grissard dreamed “absolutely honestly”—stress on the absolutely—when it was all the fashion to dream obscurely,—she could sustain the conversation just long enough not to be annoyingly brilliant, she loved to talk of ancient crimes, drawing her stomach in, and bending her fingers slightly, just slightly, but also just enough to make the guests shiver a little and think how she really should have been born in the time of the Cenci. And during the craze for Gauguin she was careful to mention that she had passed over the same South Sea roads, but where Gauguin had walked, she had been carried by two astonished donkeys.

She had been “kind” to Nicholas Golwein just long enough to make the racial melancholy blossom into a rank tall weed. He loved beautiful things, and she possessed them. He had become used to her, had “forgiven” her much (for those who had to forgive at all had to forgive Nelly in a large way), and the fact that she was too fluid to need one person’s forgiveness long, drove him into slow bitterness and despair.

The fact that “her days were on her,” and that she did not feel the usual woman’s fear of age and dissolution, nay, that she even saw new measures to take, possessing a fertility that can only come of a decaying mind, drove him almost into insanity.

When the Autumn came, and the leaves were falling from the trees, as nature grew hot and the last flames of the season licked high among the branches, Nicholas Golwein’s cheeks burned with a dull red, and he turned his eyes down.

Life did not exist for Nicholas Golwein as a matter of day and after day—it was flung at him from time to time as a cloak is flung a flunkey, and this made him proud, morose, silent.

Was it not somehow indecent that, after his forgiveness and understanding, there should be the understanding and forgiveness of another?

There was undoubtedly something cruel about Nelly Grissard’s love; she took at random, and Nicholas Golwein had been the most random, perhaps, of all. The others, before him, had all been of her own class—the first had even married her, and when she finally drove him to the knife’s edge, had left her a fair fortune. Nicholas Golwein had always earned his own living, he was an artist and lived as artists live. Then Nelly came—and went—and after him she had again taken one of her own kind, a wealthy Norwegian—Nord, a friend of Nicholas’.

Sometimes now Nicholas Golwein would go off into the country, trying to forget, trying to curb the tastes that Nelly’s love had nourished. He nosed out small towns, but he always came hurriedly back, smelling of sassafras, the dull penetrating odour of grass, contact with trees, half-tamed animals.

The country made him think of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony—he would start running—running seemed a way to complete all that was sketchy and incomplete about nature, music, love.

“Would I recognize God if I saw him?” The joy of thinking such thoughts was not every man’s, and this cheered him.

Sometimes he would go to see Nord; he was not above visiting Nelly’s lover—in fact there was that between them.

He had fancied death lately. There was a tremendously sterile quality about Nicholas Golwein’s fancies; they were the fancies of a race, and not of a man.

He discussed death with Nord—before the end there is something pleasant in a talk of a means to an end, and Nord had the coldness that makes death strong.

“I can hate,” he would say, watching Nord out of the corner of his eye; “Nelly can’t, she’s too provincial——”

“Yes, there’s truth in that. Nelly’s good to herself—what more is there?”

“There’s understanding.” He meant compassion, and his eyes filled. “Does she ever speak of me?”

It was beginning to rain. Large drops struck softly against the café window and thinning out ran down upon the sill.

“Oh, yes.”

“And she says?”

“Why are you never satisfied with what you have, Nicholas?”

Nicholas Golwein turned red. “One dish of cream and the cat should lick his paws into eternity. I suppose one would learn how she felt, if she feels at all, if one died.”

“Why, yes, I suppose so.”

They looked at each other, Nicholas Golwein in a furtive manner, moving his lips around his cigar—Nord absently, smiling a little. “Yes, that would amuse her.”

“What?” Nicholas Golwein paused in his smoking and let his hot eyes rest on Nord.

“Well, if you can manage it——”

Nicholas Golwein made a gesture, shaking his cuff-links like a harness—“I can manage it,” he said, wondering what Nord was thinking.

“Of course it’s rather disgusting,” Nord said.

“I know, I know I should go out like a gentleman, but there’s more in me than the gentleman, there’s something that understands meanness; a Jew can only love and be intimate with the thing that’s a little abnormal, and so I love what’s low and treacherous and cunning, because there’s nobility and uneasiness in it for me—well,” he flung out his arms—“if you were to say to Nell, ‘He hung himself in the small hours, with a sheet’—what then? Everything she had ever said to me, been to me, will change for her—she won’t be able to read those French journals in the same way, she won’t be able to swallow water as she has always swallowed it. I know, you’ll say there’s nature and do you know what I’ll answer: that I have a contempt for animals—just because they do not have to include Nelly Grissard’s whims in their means to a living conduct—well, listen, I’ve made up my mind to something”—he became calm all of a sudden and looked Nord directly in the face.

“Well?”

“I shall follow you up the stairs, stand behind the door, and you shall say just these words, ‘Nicholas has hung himself.’”

“And then what?”

“That’s all, that’s quite sufficient—then I shall know everything.”

Nord stood up, letting Nicholas open the café door for him.

“You don’t object?” Nicholas Golwein murmured.

Nord laughed a cold, insulting laugh. “It will amuse her——”

Nicholas nodded, “Yes, we’ve held the coarse essentials between our teeth like good dogs—” he said, trying to be insulting in turn, but it only sounded pathetic, sentimental.

* * * * *

Without a word passing between them, on the following day, they went up the stairs of Nelly Grissard’s house, together. The door into the inner room was ajar, and Nicholas crept in behind this, seating himself on a little table.

He heard Nord greet Nelly, and Nelly’s voice answering—“Ah, dear”—he listened no further for a moment, his mind went back, and he seemed to himself to be peaceful and happy all at once. “A binding up of old sores,” he thought, a oneness with what was good and simple—with everything that evil had not contorted.

“Religion,” he thought to himself, resting his chin on his hands—thinking what religion had meant to all men at all times, but to no man in his most need. “Religion is a design for pain—that’s it.” Then he thought, that, like all art, must be fundamentally against God—God had made his own plans—well, of that later——

Nelly had just said something—there had been a death-like silence, then her cry, but he had forgotten to listen to what it was that had passed. He changed hands on his cane. “There is someone in heaven,” he found his mind saying. The rising of this feeling was pleasant—it seemed to come from the very centre of his being. “There’s someone in heaven—who?” he asked himself, “who?” But there was no possible answer that was not blasphemy.

“Jews do not kill themselves——”

Nelly’s voice. He smiled—there was someone in heaven, but no one here. “I’m coming,” he murmured to himself—and felt a sensuous giving away in the promise.

His eyes filled. What was good in death had been used up long ago—now it was only dull repetition—death had gone beyond the need of death.

Funnily enough he thought of Nelly as she was that evening when she had something to forgive. He had pulled her toward him by one end of a burgundy ribbon, “Forgive, forgive,” and she had been kind enough not to raise him, not to kiss him, saying, “I forgive”—she just stood there showing her tobacco-stained teeth in a strong laugh, “Judas eliminated.” He put his hand to his mouth, “I have been _There_,” and _There_ seemed like a place where no one had ever been. How cruel, how monstrous!

Someone was running around the room, heavy, ponderous. “She always prided herself on her lightness of foot,” and here she was running like a trapped animal, making little cries, “By the neck!”—strange words, horrifying—unreal——

“To be a little meaner than the others, a little more crafty”—well, he had accomplished that, too.

Someone must be leaning on the couch, it groaned. That took him back to Boulogne; he had loved a girl once in Boulogne, and once in the dark they had fallen, it was like falling through the sky, through the stars, finding that the stars were not only one layer thick, but that there were many layers, millions of layers, a thickness to them, and a depth—then the floor—that was like a final promise of something sordid, but lasting—firm.

Sounds rose from the streets; automobiles going uptown, horses’ hoofs, a cycle siren,—that must be a child,—long drawn out, and piercing—yes, only a child would hold on to a sound like that.

“Life is life,” Nelly had just said, firmly, decisively. After all he had done this well—he had never been able to think of death long, but now he had thought of it, made it pretty real—he remembered sparrows, for some unknown reason, and this worried him.

“The line of the hips, simply Renoir over again——”

They were on the familiar subject of art.

The sounds in the room twittered about him like wings in a close garden, where there is neither night nor day. “There is a power in death, even the thought of death, that is very terrible and very beautiful——” His cane slipped, and struck the floor.

“What was that?” the voice of Nelly Grissard was high, excited, startled——

“A joke.”

Nicholas Golwein suddenly walked into the room.

“A joke,” he said and looked at them both, smiling.

Nelly Grissard, who was on her knees, and who was holding Nord’s shoe in one hand, stared at him. It seemed that she must have been about to kiss Nord’s foot.

Nicholas Golwein bowed, a magnificent bow, and was about to go.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Nelly Grissard cried, angrily, and got to her feet.

He began to stammer: “I—I am leaving town—I wanted to pay my respects——”

“Well, go along with you——”

Nicholas Golwein went out, shutting the door carefully behind him.

PARADISE

This night I’ve been one hour in Paradise; There found a feather from the Cock that Crew— There heard the echo of the Kiss that Slew, And in the dark, about past agonies Hummed little flies.

NO-MAN’S-MARE

Pauvla Agrippa had died that afternoon at three; now she lay with quiet hands crossed a little below her fine breast with its transparent skin showing the veins as filmy as old lace, purple veins that were now only a system of charts indicating the pathways where her life once flowed.

Her small features were angular with that repose which she had often desired. She had not wanted to live, because she did not mind death. There were no candles about her where she lay, nor any flowers. She had said quite logically to her sisters: “Are there any candles and flowers at a birth?” They saw the point, but regretted the philosophy, for buying flowers would have connected them with Pauvla Agrippa, in this, her new adventure.

Pauvla Agrippa’s hair lay against her cheeks like pats of plated butter; the long golden ends tucked in and wound about her head and curved behind her neck. Pauvla Agrippa had once been complimented on her fine black eyes and this yellow hair of hers, and she had smiled and been quite pleased, but had drawn attention to the fact that she had also another quite remarkable set of differences—her small thin arms with their tiny hands and her rather long narrow feet.

She said that she was built to remain standing; now she could rest.

Her sister, Tasha, had been going about all day, praying to different objects in search of one that would give her comfort, though she was not so much grieved as she might have been, because Pauvla Agrippa had been so curious about all this.

True, Agrippa’s husband seemed lost, and wandered about like a restless dog, trying to find a spot that would give him relief as he smoked.

One of Pauvla’s brothers was playing on the floor with Pauvla’s baby. This baby was small and fat and full of curves. His arms curved above his head, and his legs curved downward, including his picture book and rattle in their oval. He shouted from time to time at his uncle, biting the buttons on his uncle’s jacket. This baby and this boy had one thing in common—a deep curiosity—a sense that somewhere that curiosity would be satisfied. They had all accomplished something. Pauvla Agrippa and her husband and her sister and the boy and Pauvla’s baby, but still there was incompleteness about everything.

Nothing was ever done; there wasn’t such a thing as rest, that was certain, for the sister still felt that her prayers were not definite, the husband knew he would smoke again after lunch, the boy knew he was only beginning something, as the baby also felt it, and Pauvla Agrippa herself, the seemingly most complete, had yet to be buried. Her body was confronted with the eternal necessity of change.

It was all very sad and puzzling, and rather nice too. After all, atoms were the only things that had imperishable existence, and therefore were the omnipotent quality and quantity—God should be recognized as something that was everywhere in millions, irrevocable and ineradicable—one single great thing has always been the prey of the million little things. The beasts of the jungle are laid low by the insects. Yes, she agreed that everything was multiple that counted. Pauvla was multiple now, and some day they would be also. This was the reason that she wandered from room to room touching things, vases, candlesticks, tumblers, knives, forks, the holy pictures and statues and praying to each of them, praying for a great thing, to many presences.

A neighbour from across the way came to see them while Pauvla’s brother was still playing with the baby. This man was a farmer, once upon a time, and liked to remember it, as city-bred men in the country like to remember New York and its sophistication.

He spent his Summers, however, in the little fishing village where the sisters, Pauvla and Tasha, had come to know him. He always spoke of “going toward the sea.” He said that there was something more than wild about the ocean; it struck him as being a little unnatural, too.