Part 6
But there was something deeper than that--something she couldn’t profitably discuss with Ben. With the clairvoyance of woman she saw, and resented, a creature somehow more detached and more determined than herself. In a vague way, for which no words were possible, she recognized a spirit not more happy but more finely unhappy; a spirit concerned with those impassioned curiosities of life which Ruth knew existed and yet knew not how to approach. She felt the shamed envy and anger that some bitter listener in the audience always feels toward the performer. There was something in that dark childish face and alert reckless figure that made Ruth feel soft and frilly and powdered with sugar. The girl was possessed by some essence, had some fatal current passing through her--something which, if generally admitted, would demand extensive revision of the comfortable world. That was it, perhaps: she looked as though she knew that things most women had agreed to regard as important, didn’t really matter. The Pullman microcosm resented this, as an anthology of prose would resent a poem that got into it by mistake. The only satisfaction it could have, and the explanation of its pitiless appraisal, was the knowledge that this poor creature too was mocked and fettered with a body, subject also to the dear horrors of flesh.
With a sense of weariness and self-pity Ruth turned to the window and saw, far off, the hard blue line of sea. They were emerging from the storm, the train hummed and rocketed over marshes and beside reedy lagoons still prickled by the rain. On that horizon lay the memory of childhood to which she was now returning. The chief satisfaction of revisiting juvenile surroundings is to feel superior to that pitiable era: to appear, before one’s old companions, more prosperous, circumstantial, handsome, and enviable than they might have expected. But now even her gay little woollen sports hat seemed to have lost its assurance. What right had a mere illustrator (and riding in a day coach) with something proud and eager in her face, to start all these troublesome thoughts? She remembered that even as a child Joyce never really joined in their games but watched apart with a shy unwillingness: a shyness which, if rubbed too hard, could turn into bewildered rebellion. Ruth was always so intensely conscious of the existence of other people that a merely random speculation as to what her friends were doing could prevent her all day long from concentrating on her own affairs. Others were more real to her than herself. Now she was painfully haunted by that look of conviction and fulfilment on the girl’s face. Joyce looked unhappy (she consoled herself a little with that); but it was a thrilling kind of unhappiness: an unhappiness scarcely to be distinguished from ecstasy.
She pondered about this, wondering if _she_ had ever looked like that? One of her secret anxieties was that she herself was not passionate. Was that, she sometimes wondered, why she and Ben had never had children? In her absorption she practised an expression on her face ... “rapt” was the word that occurred to her to describe it. Ben, reappearing from behind the paper, was alarmed by her appearance and offered her a soda-mint tablet from the little bottle in his waistcoat pocket.
The dense air of the car began to be alive. After the barrens of pinewood and long upgrades over stony pasture, now the train careered gloriously in the salty northern air, along beaches crusted with stale foam. It cried aloud, its savage despairing chord: as though the fierce engine knew that after all its furious burning labours, the flashing uproar of its toil, its human employers would descend at their destinations unfreed, unaltered, facing there as elsewhere the clumsy comedies of life. Angrily it exulted along the bright dwindle of rails which spread wide under the great wheels and narrowed again before and behind. The telegraph poles came racing toward it, leaping up like tall threatening men; one by one they were struck down and fled away. With swift elbowing pistons and jets of silver steam the engine roared, glorious in its task; glorious in its blind fidelity and passion, caring nothing that all must be retraced in the opposite direction to-morrow.
* * * * *
Joyce was standing in the vestibule of _Godiva_, smoking a cigarette. She had been there a great part of the journey; fast trains always made her mind too busy for sitting still. She had pacified the at first disapproving young brakeman by getting out her sketchbook and making a quick cartoon of him.
Not for many weeks had she been so unconsideringly happy. She never thought of trains as hurrying toward something but rather fleeing wildly _from_. Those great eloquent machines (she hated to have to board a train without seeing the engine first) crouched ready for flight like huge beasts breathing panic. They were symbols of the universal terror; she trembled with excitement to feel the thrill of escape--escape from anything. Escape, for the moment, from Time and Space. She wondered how any one could ever sleep or be bored in a train. You’d think their faces would be transfigured when they got out. She hummed to herself as she stood alone in the vestibule. Life seemed to be beginning all over again: her mind was freshly sensitized to the oddity of human faces, to the colour and vitality of the country, the strong swelling curves of the hills. I am flying, flying, she chanted; I am flying from a dream. I am a little mad. My mind is fuller than it’ll hold: all sorts of thoughts are slopping over the brim, getting lost because there isn’t room for them. I must let them flow faster so I can be aware of them all. What happens to the thoughts that get spilt before you can quite seize them? I must ask George.... I wonder which George it will be?
Once she had startled him by giving him a book she found in a second-hand store, _The Four Georges_. For it amused her to insist that there were four of him: George the Husband, George the Father, George the Publicity Man, and then George the Fourth--_her_ George, the troubled and groping dreamer, framed in an open window....
* * * * *
Go and see Granville, said the Advertising Agent to her. He’s getting up a booklet for the L or somebody. He might be able to use some of these drawings of yours. And because it was urgent he had given her the address. Her knees were quivery as she turned the bend in the corridor, looking for his number.
It was a sultry day, the door of the little office was open. There was a window, high up at the back of the old building, looking over the Brooklyn Bridge. He was leaning on the sill, the smoke of his pipe drifted outward into that hot tawny light that hangs over the East River on summer afternoons. At first he did not seem to hear her tap on the glass panel; then he turned, glanced at her steadily and without surprise. As he had no idea she was coming she thought perhaps he had mistaken her for someone he knew.
“Look here,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
She put down her folder of drawings and crossed to the sill. He leaned there in his shirt sleeves, pointing with the stem of his pipe, as easily as though they were old friends.
“See those tall lance-headed openings in the piers of the Bridge? Did you ever notice they look just like great cathedral windows? And that pearl-blue light hanging in them, better than any stained glass.”
She was too surprised, too anxious about showing him her drawings, to do more than murmur assent.
“I can tell you about it,” he said, “because I don’t know you. It isn’t safe to tell people you know about beautiful things. Those are the windows of my private cathedral.”
How often she had lived again that first encounter. The ring of feet along the paved corridors, the blunt slam of elevator gates, the steady tick of a typewriter in an adjoining office, telephones trilling here and there in the big building like birds in an aviary, the murmur of the streets rising up to them through warm heavy air. Always, in that city, she was a little mad. Where such steep terraces cut stairways on sky, where every tread falls upon some broken beauty poets are too hurried to pick up, how can one be quite sane? God pity the man (George said once) who has none of that madness in his heart.
I have a cathedral too, I have a cathedral too, she was repeating to herself, but too excited to say it. With bungling fingers she untied the portfolio, rummaged through the drawings, found the one of an aisle of trees in Central Park where the wintry branches lace themselves into an oriel.
He went through all the pictures. He only spoke twice.
“Who did these? You?” and then presently, “Here, this isn’t fair. You’ve been trespassing in _my_ city.”
Then suddenly he paused, flushed, and became embarrassed. He became--as she would have said afterward--George the Third. He spoke of the Elevated Railroad’s limited appropriation for promotion, of the peculiar problems of transportation publicity, asked what was her usual price for art work, took her name and address.... Perhaps George the Fourth would have died then and there, perished of cholera infantum at the age of half an hour, never been heard of again except on a tablet in the imaginary cathedral on Brooklyn Bridge ... but as she left the office she shook so with purely nervous elation she had to stop by the brass-rimmed letter chute in the hall. She was wishing she had the courage to go back and ask him how soon the check could come through (Will he mail it here? she thought. Oh, blessed chute!) ... and then he came hurrying round the corner after her.
“Look here,” he said, with pink-browed uncertainty, “I can’t let you go away like this. The family’s off in the country. I’m devilish lonely. Will you have dinner with me and we can talk about New York?”
She was too amused and exultant to answer promptly. But George the Fourth, looking anxiously from his bassinette, need not have been so afraid she was going to refuse. Do artists who have just made their first real sale decline a square meal?
“We’ll ride uptown in the L, to celebrate,” he pleaded. “There’s a bit where it turns right into the sunset for a few blocks; if you stand on the front platform it’s corking. And I know a place where we can get a bottle of _asti spumante_....”
The lighted candles of the Italian basement where they dined. At first his shyness had come back upon him: he seemed to feel that taking any one but Phyllis out to dinner was an incredible truancy. Then, as they looked anxiously at each other, some element in the blood broke free. His mind came running to her like a child, like a boy lost in a world of tall stone buildings and clamouring typewriters. His poor shivered ideas just fitted into the fractured edges of her own. He had been well drilled, but there was in him a little platoon that had broken away from the draft and enlisted in the Foreign Legion.
“You know,” he said, “I never talked like this to any one before. What is there about you that makes one say what he really thinks? My mind feels as though someone had stolen its clothes while it was in bathing. How will it be able to go back to work to-morrow?”
Warm golden candlelight and cold golden wine: the little table in the corner was a yellow island in a sea of cigarette smoke, a sunny silence in the comforting hum of other people’s chatter. In her own loneliness she saw his mind like the naked footprint on Crusoe’s beach.
There must have been another footprint there too: the footprint of a mischievous godling who runs the beaches of the world as naked as Man Friday.
“The ideas I folded neatly and hid under a stone” (she could still hear him saying it, there was something delightfully heavy in his way of saying _stone_), “the ideas I thought you have to leave behind when you go bathing in the river of life, I think maybe I shall go back and look under that stone for them and see if they aren’t the most important of all. I thought they were just clothes. Maybe they were my bathing suit.”
The figure of speech wasn’t quite limpid. There was perhaps a little _asti spumante_ in it, and a few gassy bubbles of exaggeration. But she understood what he meant. Ten, eleven years older than she, how young he seemed.
He paused a while, getting younger every moment. He waved away a drift of smoke.
“You must meet Phyllis,” he said.
Then he had found, later, that it wasn’t necessary, for she had known Phyllis as a child. How small the world is, he said sadly. “Phyllis and I were small, too,” she replied.
She wondered if there were four Phyllises also?
* * * * *
“Ten minutes to Dark Harbour,” said _Godiva’s_ porter, coming into the vestibule with his whisk brush. She hardly noticed him dusting her, she was thinking of George the Fourth, the perplexing phantom she had accidentally startled into life. She felt for him a strange, almost maternal tenderness; an amusement at some of his scruples, an admiration at the natural grace of his mind when he allowed himself to be imaginative. But behind these, a kind of fear: for George the Fourth had grown gigantic in her dreams; sometimes, in panic, she realized how much she thought about him. He was so completely hers because he was hidden in the securest of hiding places--inside a person who belonged to someone else. So she couldn’t resist the invitation to go down to the Island, to renew memories of childhood ... and the most interesting of those ghostly children, she thought, would be George the Fourth, only twelve months old. She had had to remind herself, sometimes, that the first three Georges did belong to others ... but if you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn’t so. For the amazement had been mutual. She had awakened George the Fourth, but he had awakened someone too.... And frightened by these thoughts (it had been her lonely pride to stand so securely on her own feet) she was flying from the dream of George to George himself--and Phyllis.
Over the wide sea meadows the train sounded its deep bluster of warning: a voice of triumph, a voice of pain, announcing reunions that cannot unite, separations that cannot divide. And George Granville--all four of him, at that moment--driving over the long trestle to the mainland, heard it from afar, and in sheer bravado echoed the cry with his horn.
X
In the bathtub Phyllis wondered, for the first time in her life, whether she was “literary.” She sat soaping her knees and revelling in coolness that came about her waist in a perfection of liquid embrace. She found herself--perhaps because her eye had fallen on the volume in the den, while she and George were bickering--thinking about Shakespeare. Now, in an intimate understanding that many an erudite scholar has never attained, she perceived what the man with a beard was driving at. The plays, which she had always politely respected as well-bred women do respect serious institutions, were something more than gusts of fantastic tinsel interspersed with foul jokes--jokes she knew were foul without understanding them. They were parables of the High Cost of Living--the cost to brain and heart and spirit of this wildly embarrassing barter called life. The tormented obstreperous behaviour of his people was genuine, after all: they were creatures in a dream, like herself; a dream more true than reality. She could have walked on in any of the plays and taken a part without sense of incongruity. She felt as if she were a phantom in one of the pieces: a creature in the mind of some unguessable dramatist who had mysteriously decided to make a change in the plot. She thought how she and her friends had sometimes sat through Shakespeare matinées, subconsciously comforting themselves with the notion that real people don’t behave that way.
Why, Bill, you poor old devil (she said to him), how you must have suffered to be able to write like that. It made her feel quite tranquil by comparison. But of course her own particular absurdities had special kinks in them that were unique: even He would have been surprised. But he would have understood.
A soft flow of air had begun to move after the storm. The big maple tree, just outside the bathroom window, was gold-plated in the dropping sun. The window was above the bath and the ripple of those gilded leaves reflected a gentle shimmer into the porcelain tub. Her shiny knees were glossed with pale green light. Shakespeare would have liked that. She fished for the soap, which slipped round behind her like a young thought.
I suppose that as long as I was 99 and 44/100 pure I never could appreciate him. But I don’t know whether I altogether enjoy people who understand so well. That’s the trouble about George: he’s getting weirdly acute, poor soul. Now, Mr. Martin: he looks divinely sympathetic, but I don’t think he quite.... People wonder why one always confides in those who don’t understand. But of course! To confide in people who _do_ is too terrible. Giving yourself away--yes, exactly: you no longer are keeper of your own gruesome self. That’s why the Catholic notion is so sound: confession to God is nothing at all, you know He doesn’t care. But to confess to a priest ... golly, that must take courage.
She lay down for one last lustral wallow, closing her eyes with a calm sensation of new dignity and refreshment. The cool water held her in peaceful lightness, lifting away whatever was agitated and strange. For a moment body and spirit were harmoniously one, floating in a pure eddy of Time. I feel like a nun, she thought. She rose, trickling, threw the big towel round her shoulders, and studied herself in the long mirror. Really, I’m not much more than a child, she mused happily, admiring the slender, short-haired figure in the glass. Or perhaps I feel like a harlot ... a courtesan, nicer-sounding word. Discarding the towel she struck a humorous parody of the Venus Aphrodite attitude, and then felt a little shocked. She could feel her cheeks warming. She remembered George’s coarse remark when they saw the statue. “It’s no use,” he said. “Two hands can’t do it. Any one as timid as that needs three.” She sang a little refrain, trying different tunes for it. She couldn’t remember whether she had heard it, or just made it up:
_What did Mrs. Shakespeare do When William went away?_
The soft flutter of maple leaves outside the window was like a soothing whisper. From the other side of the house she could hear the click of croquet mallets and balls. Time for the children to have their supper, or they won’t be finished before the others get here. Thank goodness it was cooler, Lizzie wouldn’t be so harassed. Wrapping her silk kimono round her, she looked out of the window. Lizzie’s flag was still flying. With a rough delicacy of her own, the cook did not like to run out her private washing on the family line, so she had strung a cord from the kitchen door to a branch of the maple tree. There, floating like a hoist of signal buntings, were Lizzie’s personalia: all the more conspicuous for her mistaken modesty. They were indeed (it was George who had said it) like a string of code flags: a blue apron, a yellow shirt, a pair of appalling red breeches. George always wanted to know to whom Lizzie might be signalling with these homely pennants. They _are_ a kind of signal, Phyllis thought. A signal that life goes on, notifying any other household within eyeshot that here too the humble routine of kitchen and washtub and ironing board, of roof and meat and sleep, triumphs in the end over the wildest poet’s dream. Shakespeare would have relished them, and been pleased to see these bright ensigns hoisted so frankly in the yellow air.
Dressed in a gauzy drift of white and silver, she paused at the cushioned bay windows by the head of the stair. Her body enjoyed that mixed feeling of snug enclosure and airy freedom which is the triumph of feminine costume. Even her inward self shared something of this sensation: within the softly sparkling raiment of thought she was aware of her compact kernel of identity--tranquil for the moment, but privately apprehensive and alert. On the oval grass plot Martin was playing croquet with the children. Janet, nicely adjusting two tangent balls with a bare brown foot, gave them a well-aimed swipe. Phyllis heard the sharp wooden impact and Martin’s cry of good-humoured dismay as his globe went spinning across the turf, leaving a darker stripe on the wet lawn. It bounded over the gravel and into the bushes, right by the corner where she had first seen him. She watched him chase it, lay it on the edge of the turf, and drive it back. How graceful he was! He raised his head with a little unconscious lift of satisfaction as he watched the ball roll where he wanted it to lie.
A film seemed to have been skimmed from her eyes. Perhaps it was that level stream of evening light: the figures moved in a godlike element of lustre: every motion was perfect, expressed the loveliness for which life was intended, was unconscious and exact as the movements of animals. They were immersed in their game as though there were no past, no future: she felt she could watch them for ever. Martin’s face, gravely intent, bent over his ball. She saw the straight slope of his back against the screen of shrubs. The mallet clicked, there was a sharp tinkle as the ball went through the middle hoop, touching the little bell that hung there. How can any one look so charming and yet be so hard to talk to?
Through the scooped hollow of the dunes, catching tawny sparks from the sand, violet dazzles from the sea, the cleansed radiance of sunset came pouring in. The children’s bare legs splashed in brightness as though they were paddling; honey-coloured light parted and closed again about their ankles, the wet shadows dripped and trailed under their feet. The house, growing dusky, was a dyke stemmed in the onset of that pure flood. It caught and held as much darkness as it could; the rest went whirling out. As if in answer to the little croquet bell, the old clock in the hall whirred and jangled six hoarse clanking strokes. They eddied a moment and then were whiffed away by the strong, impalpable current that seemed to be sweeping through. You could tell, by the dull sound, that the gong was rusty. No wonder, a house by the seashore, empty so long.
After the cough of the clock silence came up the shaft of the stairway. Not themselves alone, but the house too, had its part in everything. She could feel its whole fabric attentive and watchful, and wondered how she could have been heedless of this before. A house of ugly pattern, with yellow wainscots and fretsawed mantels and panes of gaudy glass: but she guessed now, what one can only learn under strange roofs, how precious houses are. And how wary they have to be, fortresses against fierce powers, sunshine, darkness, gale. Life has flowed through them: clocks have chimed, logs crumbled, stairs creaked under happy feet. These whispers are all they have to treasure: if you leave them alone too long they get morbid, full of sullen fancies. She remembered herself, visiting that house as a child, once seated at this same window, watching others play croquet ... _was_ it memory, or only the trick of the mind that splits the passing instant and makes one live it twice?
“Come, children!” she called from the window. “Time for your supper.”