Trust: A Novel Part 37

When the child was born the father vanished. Not immediately, but by degrees, like a barometer measuring weather. Italy was warm, for example; he measured that. He began merely by talking of Italy, because the coast of England was turning cold and dull and tedious. The cottage walls were the color of the inside of an eggsh.e.l.l, though more porous. In summer, when they first came there, the house was a creamy hump in a nest of green weediness, a place to tumble about in with a frying-pan lid for a cymbal; and Allegra was a joke on herself: "I'm a helium balloon!" "Then you'll be kept from floating off," said Nick, and tugged at her hair, which grew and grew like weeds, till she thrust it round out of her way. "Work," said Nick, and went to sleep in the narrow bed; he liked to sleep, and afterward reported the long adventures of his dreams, in which, oddly, she appeared only once, and then subordinately. But he dreamed often of Hugh, who was still in Italy. "Work," he said, and since he was asleep (he had finished the wine), she read a little in Oscar Wilde ("That's to prime the pump," said she) and went to Marianna with an elegant and erotic chameleon-pen, and wrote of flowers like an aesthetic druggist, meditating in a botanical handbook that told of vegetable cannibals, savages, and Macbeths. "Quit it now," he said, yawning himself awake; "come and show me what you've done." She showed him: "Is it awful?"-because he laughed. "It leaves me full of awe," he answered; "it's Walter Pater crossed with George Eliot." "But I meant it to be Socialist Realist." "Then that's just what it is. You've bred a hybrid, and have every right to give it a name. If only d.i.c.kens could have tried his hand in the middle of the seventh month!" "I don't see what that's got to do with it," she said haughtily. "Everything, everything. The female is an engine." "Well, my mind's not an engine." "True, but I wasn't speaking of your mind, I was speaking of your imagination. It's involuntary, like parturition. The male ought to be prevented from writing at all. Male literature ought to be abrogated for its wishy-was.h.i.+ness. There ought to be daily burnings, beginning with Voltaire, and including all the male poets before and after. I don't leaVe out Sappho, though he was unwillingly a woman. True literature is obscene, and only women know how to be truly obscene; they can't help it. Rabelais only imitates the talk of women when they're alone in a room together, and Lawrence goes a step farther by trying to think like a woman-Joyce too-but it's hopeless. No one, no matter how talented, can be as obscene as a female about to bear. Now look, that means I'm sure this chapter's better than the last-it's got more social justice for the unemployed lovers in it-so go and get the darts," They had no target, only a round bit of scallop on the cornice, with a worm-hole for a bull's-eye, and Allegra's throw went out the open window and pierced a little tree. They swore to one another that they had heard the dryad shriek. Every day for a month or so they wondered if she would shriek again to show she was not dead. But she was dead; it was winter; they never heard her. Then a shriek, howling and long, after all: and the child's head was born that moment.

The greengrocer was a far walk. The butcher was dear, the milk repulsive. The child s.h.i.+vered when the mother's hair fell down into its queer face-like pygmy notches carved into a wedge of coconut meat. "I can't drink wine, I'm not supposed to," said the mother, pale as milk. Then there was no safe place to keep the child, so they put it in a packing box begged from the grocer. "It smells of apples," said the mother. "It smells of sourgra.s.s," said the father, "and if the money goes for milk we can't have wine." "He'll send the money now," said the mother. "Now? Why now? You said he was certain to send at least double the amount when you first told him, and that was months ago." "But it wasn't born then." "It's born now, and where's the money?-I tell you what, let's to to Italy, Hugh's living it up in Sicily on nothing at all." The child yowled. "Oh we can't go to Italy!" said the mother; "what's it yelling for? Look, its head is sort of funny, do you think I broke it off? Aren't you supposed to hold their heads a special way so they don't fall off?" "Can't drink wine," said the father, "can't go to Italy, can't get cash. Trust him not to send the money even now." "But it's freezing, that's the trouble! Can't you do something about the fire? Its lips are purple." "Oh d.a.m.n its lips," he said, and fiddled with the hearth-"nothing's coming from America. Why don't you write him again?" "He never answers." "Well d.a.m.n him." "Maybe if Enoch gets rid of the ma.n.u.script to a good London publisher-" "Hurray, you've got the n.o.ble Outlaw for an agent. They're bound to treat him very respectfully at Chatto and Windus. They love their agents in Grecian sandals at New Year's. I say d.a.m.n him." "-then I'd get an advance on it maybe, and we'd have some money right away. Anyhow it's not Enoch's fault he can't wear regular shoes with his feet in that condition. It's ever since the last Peace March, it's no joke from Glasgow down to Manchester, it's one of the longest they've ever done." "And the typist he got you was five pounds hard cash." "I had to have it typed, didn't I?" "Then d.a.m.n you too. Give me your wallet, I'm going out." "Where?" "Where! To bring some breakfast. -Doesn't the thing ever shut up? We'll all end up deaf. Is this all the money there is?"

And went, and dawdled a bit on the square, then dawdled in the train station, then dawdled in the carriage; and, by degrees, departed.

But when the child fell asleep-a thing that occurred abruptly, with an exhausted and queerly narrow sn.i.g.g.e.r of its lungs-he was still on the square, browsing in a newspaper stall. And he had only just gained the station when Allegra, restively blackening her thumb with the carbon copy of Marianna (since Enoch had taken the original away to London to find a publisher she read in it every day, marveling and doubting in turn), suddenly seized out of the morning somnolence a new scene, brave, lubricious, carnal, and at once sat down to write it into its logical place, which was Chapter Twelve. That was the chapter, and this the scene, that afterward caused a New York reviewer, the well-known Orphew (nicknamed Off-Hue) Codpress, to call the author, with a prurient sneer, the Wunderkind of Eros (he said this sedately to his wife, however; in print he said "shameless," "shocking," "boring," "tedious"). And in the Soviet edition that was the chapter, and this the scene, that subsequently had to be almost wholly omitted, on the ground-according to Literaturnaya Gazyeta-that only the paragraphs celebrating the workers' council were actually relevant to the novel's great and primary theme of Capitalist Plunder Exposed.

But all that was afterward, and commentary; the scene itself she did not imagine in a single moment, as she liked later to pretend, though what she gave out in that hour of her only genuine inspiration was a unity of sensuality not, after all, the sole product of inspiration so much as the grafted fruit of inspired tutelage, the tutor meanwhile paying for his ticket out of her alligator-skin wallet, a long-ago gift from William. If there were ironies in this, the baby's interruptions (the baby itself a sign of the novelist's interrupted Sangerian subtleties) were still more ironic, since the baby (which normally whimpered, even in slumber) interrupted chiefly by not interrupting: lay in its box motionless and ominous. Its cold rubbery little hands were curled up like snails, which Allegra conscientiously felt; then, just as conscientiously, she listened to see if it was still alive. It breathed, so it was. But Allegra, reminded by her own h.o.a.ry puffs to s.h.i.+ver, and drawing on a pair of socks over a pair of socks to effect an elephantiasis of warmth, slanted her mind from the subjective being-fondled of the fictional b.r.e.a.s.t.s of her heroine to the now-dry mammary vessels which Nick had forbidden to suckle; breast-feeding was then in disrepute; it was not, like the appearance of the baby itself, avant-garde. She rehea.r.s.ed an address to Nick: "Look, a revision, rich, rich," was the whole of it And his reply (which, since by now he was boarding the train, he never gave): "You ought to've revised before, if you were going to revise at all; I told you Twelve was a sermon preached by Enoch and needed a slippery slavering tongue, but you wouldn't touch it, and now we'll have to pay the typist to type over, and how-with a certain New York lawyer st.i.tching up his stingy pockets-how, my dear poet, do you think we'll get the money?" It was perilous when he called her poet; it meant he was hungry. Then she observed to herself that he was long in fetching the food. He never cared that she was hungry; he would buy himself a bun on the way: so she found her pen (it had dropped into the baby's box and stank slightly) and filled it, and emptied it in long scrawls, and crammed all the c.h.i.n.ks of Chapter Twelve with arrowheads and goat-hooves of Venus and Pan, and wished she had a bun with frosting on it. Finally the postman intervened, hastening and truncating (though he did not know he was improving anyone's style) the anticlimax, and bringing a letter from America fat-cheeked with doc.u.ments. The money was at last a.s.sured, but by then, of course, Nick was already halfway to London, and asleep in his compartment with a crumb on his lip.

11.

The divorcee's reply: February 2, 1938. Dear William, I wrote my name wherever you marked the blue dots. I also got your note that came separately about your not wanting me to get labeled Adulteress. You don't seem to mind lying any more. Thank you for hoping I will always be very happy. I can't drag the coal in and I am cold and nearly dead and yesterday it hailed, right on top of the old snow. If you hadn't lied the way lawyers know how to do better than anybody I bet you would say I am getting the wages of Adultery, but now all you cay say is that I am getting the wages of Incompatibility, or whatever it is you fixed me up with. I didn't read all those papers-I just signed wherever you put the blue dots. They couldn't put me in jail, could they? I'd rather be an Adulteress than a Prisoner. Enoch's in jail right now, and it's awful, it's not a bit like the time I learned how to play cards. There's a man named Mosley who's got a Fascist gang, and they made some trouble out in the East End against the Movement, and somehow everybody got away but Enoch, and he didn't raise even a stick. They were nice to him in the police station but the jail is as bad as this house, if you want to count dampness. The reason I'm still here is that I have to wait till Enoch gets out. He's coming to help me pack up, but he won't be out for two more days. I'm going to London, I can't stay here alone. There's the rent owed anyway. If not for Enoch I wouldn't have survived everything. He was here a couple of days before the Mosley thing happened with Marianna Harlow in a box like a coffin. I hate Chatto and Windus, and will try finding another publisher with more intelligence when I get back to America. Anyhow I wrote some extra parts for Marianna, and one whole section is so exciting now and up-to-date that I expect to get famous from it, not that you care. The enclosed (I'm sorry, but it had to be in handwriting) is a copy of Chapter Twelve the way it is now. Your blue dots came when I was in the middle of doing it, and I'm sending it to you so that you can learn something about love-making in case you ever decide to get married to someone else. It's a sort of advance wedding present. I hope you don't find it too literary, though it's not Sh.e.l.ley. Have you got any publishers for clients? I want an American publisher now because Enoch said I should go home right away on account of the baby, also the World Situation. I don't know what else to do. Enoch doesn't like the baby much, but I don't blame him, neither do I. You always wanted a baby and I don't see why. This one isn't very good-looking so far, I suppose they get better as they go along. It's allergic to something, it pukes all the time, n.o.body knows why. We used to give it wine like they do in France and those countries and it puked and now I always give it milk and it still pukes. That time I wrote you about, a couple of months ago when Enoch was here for that parade and his bad tooth flared up and we made an ice-pack from snow on the window-sill, well, what happened was he had such a terrible pain we had to give him the bed, and it was so cold that night we had to put the baby in with him under the blanket to keep it from freezing, and that's just when it decided to puke all over Enoch. So you can see it's a terrible baby. I'm going to use your name for it and I'm going to keep on using your name for myself too, I'm supposed to drop only the Mrs. William part. That's what Abby Lywood did-you remember Abby from Miss Jewett's, who was the second to get engaged in our whole cla.s.s? After she and Walter were divorced she stopped writing Mrs. Walter Paine and wrote just Abby Paine, and that's what I'm going to do. Not because it's what I'm supposed to do, I'm not doing it because it's what you used to call right and proper. If I always did what was right and proper you wouldn't have sent the blue dots. Well, if it were up to me I'd go right back to being Miss, why not? But Enoch says the baby's got to have some sort of name, so it might as well be yours, there's no other that's currently available. If I sound resentful it's honestly not on account of the blue dots. It's all right about the blue dots, I don't blame you, except you were stingy about the money to spite me for Nick. He's in Italy now I think, he-kept talking about Sicily, maybe only to mislead. He's the one I'm bitter about, not you. I have to go home to America now, not just because Enoch thinks I ought to be where I can get good advice, but I somehow really want to now. Everybody keeps worrying about a war, not that it isn't perfectly plain it's all a bluff. But there's nothing to do in Europe any more, and England's ten times worse. I hate Brighton. Brighton's the place I hate, because the happiest summer of my life happened right here, even though the baby was coming in me, it didn't matter, it just made everything hilarious and sentimental. There were lots of things this summer I didn't write you about, I know you don't think I have any decencies but I wouldn't have written at all except that Nick made me, on account of there not being enough money. You should have sent more or else you should have answered. All I can tell you about the summer is flowers-I mean you like gladioli and ugly formal things, things for funerals, but we cut twigs of red berries one day-not to eat, they're dangerous to eat (I looked to see in a little book I had that tells about poisonous plants)-but to keep part for a bouquet and part for a sort of garland. You wouldn't have thought of that, in fact you wouldn't like it, you don't understand Sacred Beauty. For instance, there's such a nice tree, not too tall but sort of thin and holy-looking, just outside the window. You wouldn't look twice at that tree, that's what I mean. You wouldn't even see its connection with holiness. Most trees are atheists, but not this one. Once in July all the sheets were off the bed for was.h.i.+ng and I noticed that even the mattress looked religious. It had a pocket in its middle and you could imagine a guru sitting cross-legged in it. There's a frying pan with a copper bottom that's like one of these Oriental gongs Buddhist monks. .h.i.t with little hammers when they're calling the rest of the monks to prayer, and even the frying pan's connected with the tree. There are connections everywhere that you don't know anything about, and it's not even your fault, it's exactly what the blue dots say, Incompatibility, me with you (according to the blue dots) and you with Sacred Beauty. If you want to know what I mean by Sacred I mean anything that's alive, and Beauty is anything that makes you want to be alive and alive forever, with a sort of s.h.i.+ning feeling. That's why I brought up the gladioli and the red berries: to show you it couldn't be helped, so you oughtn't to feel bad. It's as though I was destined to feel one way about the tree and the frying pan and the guru in the mattress and you were destined to feel another way about the blue dots. In a certain sense my way is a lie, and your way is a lie too. I mean my way is Pagan, and yours is Presbyterian, and maybe not-lying and Sacred Beauty come somewhere in between, and are where people really belong. Nick's the one who discovered I'm a Pagan, and half the summer he called me an ancient Greek, and made a face whenever I said I was a modern Marxist. He said you couldn't be both, you were a heathen or you weren't a heathen, and I was the clear-cuttest heathen he ever saw. But Enoch was down from London then-he was practically always down from London last summer, because there was all that trouble, the strikes and all, and told Nick he needed a haven, but Nick said what he really needed was a hideout. All he did when he came was sit around and read things like The Psychological Basis of Social Economics, and weed. He did a lot of weeding, isn't that funny? It's because weeding is very good for meditating and thinking through your position-you bend the knee and you disembowel, and it's veneration and violation at the same time. (Enoch said that and I copied it down.) Anyway, I was telling you, one particular time when Nick called me a heathen Enoch gave one of those secretive laughs he's capable of.

Nick: Aha. The whinny of consent. You agree.

Enoch: I'm agreeable, at any rate.

Nick: That's questionable.

Enoch: If you want to call her unredeemed-

Nick: She has no morals. She's a pre-Christian.

Enoch: Ah, but if she has no morals she's a Christian.

Nick: She's what I say she is-heathen.

Enoch: Exactly-Christian. All Christians are heathen, but not all heathen are Christian. Still, if she isn't redeemed, it doesn't mean she's not redeemable.

Me: Oh, I don't want to be redeemed!

Enoch: You will be. Historically the fate of the heathen has always been conversion.

Nick: To convert 'em you need a missionary, and at the moment there aren't any missionaries in Brighton. Unless-

Enoch: Don't look at me. I'm not out to convert her to anything.

Nick: You already have.

Enoch: You mean the Movement. But it didn't last-she's a heretic. She's gone over to your sect.

Nick: I have no sect. Sects are exactly what I'm against.

Enoch: People who are against sects form a very large sect.

Me: But don't you see! I'm not open to conversion.

There's no missionary representing anything who's clever enough to catch me.

Enoch: The missionary needn't be clever.

Me: Anyone who could change my ideas would have to be clever all right!

Enoch: On the contrary. Even illiterate. Even ignorant in toto.

Me: That sort of individual wouldn't affect me.

Enoch: That sort of individual will persuade you.

Me: To what?

Enoch: To become what you were always intended to become.

Me: What's that?

Enoch: A member of a cla.s.s.

Nick: Ho hum, Karl Marx again.

Enoch: No. Anton Chekhov.