George was fixing the beds, and making an extra-special crashing and
clanging about it for Phyllis’s benefit, so she would realize how
irritating a job it was. I wonder (he was thinking) if any other man
ever had to move furniture about so much? Phyllis has a passion for
shifting beds. These springs don’t fit the frames. The result is
that every time any one turns over there’s a loud bang, the corner
of the spring comes down clank on the iron side-bar. I fixed it--not
perfectly, but well enough--with a pad of newspaper and a length of
clothesline, when we moved in. Good enough for the children. But of
course for Ben and Ruth....
These can’t be the right springs for these beds. It stands to reason
no manufacturer would be fool enough to send out a bed that couldn’t
possibly be put together. There must be some trick of arrangement.
Human reason can figure out anything, if concentrated on the problem.
Now, let’s see. This goes here, and this here. Think of having to
fiddle over these picayune trifles when the whole of life and destiny
is thrilling in the balance. He was lying under the bed now, among
curly grey rolls of dust, holding up the spring with one hand while the
other reached for the hammer.
Phyllis came in, to empty some of the bureau drawers for Ben and
Ruth. She was taking away neat armfuls of the children’s crisp clean
garments. The whole room was full of their innocent little affairs.
There, in the corner, was the collapsible doll house he had made last
Christmas, and which had to go everywhere with them. Sitting against
the door of the doll house was a tiny china puppet with a face of
perpetual simper and that attitude of pelvic dislocation peculiar to
small china dolls. Around the house was a careful pattern of shells,
diligently brought from the beach. Why did all this make his heart
ache? He remembered one evening when he had been working late, he
passed gently by the children’s door about midnight and heard a
quiet little cough. Janet was awake. That small sound had suddenly,
appallingly, reminded him that these poor creatures too were human. She
must be lying there, thinking. What does a child think, alone at night?
He went in, in the darkness, put his arms round the surprised child,
and whispered encouragements to her. Jay, he said, Daddy’s own smallest
duckling frog, Daddy loves you, don’t ever forget Daddy loves you. The
little figure sat up in bed, threw her arms round his neck and gripped
him wildly in furious affection. “I won’t forget, Daddy,” cried her
soft voice in the warm dark room. Though she was only eight years old
her accent was strangely mature: the eternal voice of woman calling man
back from agonies and follies to her savage and pitying breast.
Mother love? Pooh (he thought, in a glow of bitterness), what was
mother love! A form of selfishness, most of the time. Of course they
love their children, having borne them, suffered for them. Children
are their biological passport, their excuse for not having minds. And
if they’re girls, how mothers hurry to drill and denature those bright
dreaming wits. They love them chiefly because they make so pretty a
vignette in the margin of their own self-portrait--like a _remarque_
in an engraving. But for fathers to love their children--the poor
accidental urchins that come between them and the work they love--that
really means something!
He gave the bed frame several resounding bangs with the hammer:
quite uselessly, merely to express his sense of irritation at seeing
Phyllis’s pretty ankles and the hem of her green dress moving so
purposefully about the room. Then, looking out angrily from under the
bed, he saw her picking up the shells. Instead of bending over from
the hips, as a man would, she was crouching on her heels, deliciously
folded down upon her haunches. This annoyed him. And how heartless to
clear away the shells that had been laboriously arranged in a border
round the doll house.
“Why don’t you leave them there?” he shouted. Then he realized how
impossible it would be to explain his feeling about the shells. They
represented innocence, poetry, the hopeful imaginings of childhood.
Phyllis scooped them up relentlessly.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “You wanted these people here for the
Picnic, didn’t you? All right, we have to make the room decent.”
He felt that, as usual, he had picked up the argument by the wrong end.
Arguments are like cats: if you take them up by the tail they twist and
scratch you.
“And another thing,” she added. “You simply must mend that broken
railing on the sleeping porch. If the children are going to be out
there it isn’t safe.”
“I can’t fix _both_ these beds,” he growled. “There’s a bolt missing.
Tell me which one Ben will sleep in, I’ll fix that. Ruth’s won’t
matter, she’s a skinny little thing, doesn’t weigh much more than
Janet.”
I wouldn’t mind so much fixing Ruth’s bed, he was thinking; there’d be
a kind of vague satisfaction in that. I rather like to think of her
lying there, she’s rather attractive even if she is such a numbskull.
But Ben, that solid meaty citizen ... he probably snores ... I’ll tell
Ben to take this one; this is the one most likely to come down.
“How do I know which will take which?” she said. “They’ll arrange that
to suit themselves, no matter what we say.”
He had carefully lashed the spring to the frame with a piece of rope
six weeks before. But it had worked loose and now must be done all over
again. The deuce of a job: the spring was precariously balanced at one
end only; he was holding the loose end with one hand, trying to rewind
the cord with the other. The thought of doing all this for Ben was too
silly. No, let Ruth have this one and he would try to make a good job
of it. Perspiration rolled from him. He supported the spring with his
left elbow, so that he could take the end of the cord with his left
hand while tightening it with his right. A fuzz of dust was sticking
to his moist cheek. This was too insanely comic: grunting under a
bed on a hot electrical afternoon. He could see Phyl’s feet standing
motionless by the window. How lovely she was, how he wanted her, wanted
to slough away all these senseless tensions and stupidities.... She was
always right because she merely acted on instinct; he, usually wrong,
because he tried to think things out and act reasonably ... if she
knew how heroic he really was, would she understand? He _must_ get her
to understand before it was too late. For this--this crisis that was
hanging over them, was his deliberately desired trial of strength. And
now, if they weren’t careful, they would fritter away all their stamina
in preliminary scuffle and nonsense; and when the moment came ... soon,
appallingly soon ... there would be no vitality left to meet it.
He was terrified. He had planned all this, grimly; now things were
moving too fast for him. A long soft murmur of thunder jarred across
the sky. Would the storm pass over without breaking? No, by God, it
_must_ break, if they were ever to find peace. He must send up a kite,
like old Ben Franklin (that first of modern advertising men) to bring
down a sample of lightning. He must find out whether lightning was
the kind of thing you can live with. He must tell her why he was
terrified. He must tell her quickly. These were the last moments they
would have together before ... already the colour of the light had
changed. Here, on the side of the house away from the water, there was
a darkening sparkle in the air.
Her feet were ominously still. She must be thinking, and this always
worried him. Suppose she too became aware of this secret insolubility
of life? It was only her divine certainty about little things that kept
him going. What business have biological units thinking about things?
Let them obey their laws and not question.
Shifting the weight of the spring to his shoulder he turned over and
put his head out from under the foot of the bed.
“Phyl,” he said, “why don’t you go and lie down a bit, have a rest
before the folks get here.”
She looked down at him. Even in the warm listless dream that seemed to
have mastered her, she was touched by the foolish appeal in his red,
dust-streaked face. Where the light caught the turn of his jaw shone a
coppery stubble.
“You need a shave,” she said; and then regretted her insistent tidying
instinct. She was holding three large shabby dolls, unconsciously
pressing them against her like an armful of real babies. One flopped
forward over her arm, uttering an absurd bleating squawk. _Maaa-maa!_
“The children,” she exclaimed breathlessly. “The storm’s coming. Hurry
up with those beds; get the children back from the beach.”
“They’re all right,” he said sulkily. “Mr. Martin’ll take care of ’em.”
His large flushed face, mouth open, gazed up from the floor. He looked
pitiably silly, like a frightened dog. He was thinking, all I want to
tell her is that I love her; no matter what happens I love her. But
how can I say it? If she weren’t my wife I suppose it would be so much
easier. Why do we always show our worst side to the people we love?
She was thinking: The absurd idiot, writhing about under that bed like
a roach, telling me to go and lie down when there are a hundred things
to be done, beds to be made, towels and linen got out, silver counted,
instructions to Lizzie.... Certainly she had tried to warn him....
“Damn Mr. Martin!” she cried. “Don’t trust him. You fool, you fool.
Can’t you see he’s crazy? We’re all crazy. Stop sprawling there like a
mud turtle, _do_ something.”
“Listen, Phyl,” he said heavily. “I want to tell you something. Now,
listen, you’ve got to help me.”
With a pang of alarm he knew that now it was too late to go back. He
had begun to speak. Now he must try to explain the pillar of smoke
and fire that had moved so long before the lonely track of his mind.
Greatly as he feared her rigid spirit, he must divide the weight of
this heavy fragile burden, like a crystal globe that might contain
either ecstasy or horror. He could not know which until it lay broken
about him in shining scraps and curves. But oh, why was she so
difficult to tell things to?
“Don’t laugh,” he mumbled. “It’s terribly----”
He wriggled forward earnestly. The other end of the metal spring slid
from its joist, the head and foot of the bed toppled inward. With a
clanking brassy crash the whole thing collapsed about him.
He lay there, covered with bed, in a furious silence which was merely
the final expression of his disgust. For an instant, in the stillness
following that ridiculous clamour, she thought he was hurt. She bent
down, dropping the dolls, and one of these again shrilled its whining
protest. His angry face reassured her, and she burst into a peal of
laughter.
He crawled out from under the wreck. He was thinking savagely, yet
with relief also, how close he had been to telling her. But that was
his fate. Even noble tragedy, if it came near him, would be marred by
titters. He didn’t blame her for laughing. Even in an agony he could
never be more than grotesque.
“I was just thinking,” she said, “how awful if the bed did that when
Ben’s in it.”
“Don’t worry. It probably will.”
Sultry blue air pressed close about the house, air heavy with uncertain
energies. He knew now how frail are carpentered walls and doors, how
brittle a box to guard and fortify weak things he held dear. A poor
cardboard doll house, and his own schemes just a ring of shells about
it. Here, in a home not even his own, among alien furnitures, he must
meet the sorceries of life, treacheries both without and within.
Strong walls, strong walls, defend this rebel heart! he whispered to
himself--startled and shamed to find himself so poetical. Strange, he
thought (hastily reëdifying the bed), that people spend such anguish
on decisions that don’t really matter. But in this house he was at
a disadvantage. He had no memories in it. For Phyllis it had old
associations and meanings. It went back into her childhood, into that
strange time when he had never known her; when she must have been so
cunningly caught unawares and machined into rigidity. So even the house
was against him. In that charged air, one spark surely would sheet all
heaven with flame. It would be queer to split open the world’s old
shingled roofs and rusty-screened windows, scatter the million people
with little pig-eyes of suspicion, explode love and merriment over the
land. God help us, he thought, people can’t even sin without finding
dusty little moral justifications for it. This is what civilization
has brought us to!--But what a way for a man to be thinking, with a
half-written booklet on Summer Tranquillity lying on his desk.
He stepped onto the sleeping porch, where two cots had been put for
Janet and Sylvia, to look at the broken railing. Projecting above
the veranda, it overlooked the garden and the pale sickle of beach,
distinct in glassy light. He could see Martin and the children, tiny
figures frolicking on the sand. The sky was piled steeply with swollen
bales of storm, scrolls of gentian-coloured vapour. But it looked now
as though the gust would pass overhead. Phyllis was busy at the linen
closet by the corner of the passage, getting out clean towels and
napkins. He envied her the sedative trifles that keep wives sane. And
after all, perhaps the well-drilled discipline of human beings would
get them past this eddy. People--and especially guests--know so well
what can be done and what can’t. They know how to “behave.” The world,
brave prudent old world, is so sagely adjusted to avert or ignore any
casual expression of what men really feel: terror and mockery, pity
and desire. Oh, surely, by careful management, they could all shuffle
through a couple of days without committing themselves and then safely
relapse into the customary drugged routine. Ben and Ruth, accomplished
students of petty demeanour, would be a great help. Even Joyce, poor
bewitched rebel with frightened eyes, even Joyce must have some powers
of concealment. But he would not think of Joyce for a little while.
“I think maybe the storm’ll blow over,” he called. He felt he must
speak to Phyllis again, to calm his own nervousness.
There was no answer. Going to the end of the passage he saw her
standing at the big bay window in the spare room. She was looking down
toward the beach, one hand nervously plucking at a strip of wallpaper
that had come loose along the frame of the window. He crossed the room
quietly and kissed the back of her neck, with a vague idea that this
would help to keep her from thinking. It was so enormously important
that she should be calm and humorous just now.
He was prepared for silent indifference, or even an outburst of anger;
but not for what happened. She turned silently and flung her arms madly
about his neck. “Love me, love me, love me,” she cried. “Love me,
before it’s too late.”
He was horrified. “There, there,” he said, embarrassed. “Go and rest a
while, little frog.”