“It was just adorable of you to come.”
Ruth was getting out of the car. They kissed.
“Why, Phyllis! How sweet you look! Gracious: I thought this was a
Picnic, and here you are in a dance frock. For Heaven’s sake lead me to
hot water. Those awful Pullmans; I’m simply speckled with cinders. I
feel gritty all over.”
That, of course, must be Miss Clyde, on the front seat.
“How do you do! After all these years! I don’t suppose we’d have known
each other. But we ought to, George admires your work so much.”
They shook hands. It was a hard, capable little hand, calloused like
a boy’s. Phyllis knew now that she remembered the grey-green eyes:
agates, gold-flecked, with light behind them. Eyes softly shadowed
underneath, as though from too much eagerness to understand; eyes
dipped in darkness. The small shy child of long ago, who stood apart
from games. How many strange moments had both been through since last
they met?
George was getting out the suitcases. He was afraid to watch Phyllis
and Joyce greet. When a finely adjusted balance hovers in equilibrium
you don’t breathe on the scales.
“We were on the same train,” cried Ruth, “and never recognized each
other.”
Ben felt the twinge of anxiety common to the husband who hears his wife
tell an unnecessary fib. Ruth had said this once before already, in the
car, so perhaps it was important. Her allusion to Pullmans, also, was
based (he suspected) on the erroneous notion that Miss Clyde had ridden
in a day coach. But he liked to back Ruth up, if he knew what she was
heading for.
“I guess we’ve all changed,” he said mildly. “The old house hasn’t, it
looks just the same.”
“Miss Clyde’s brought her paint box,” George said. “She’s going to do a
picture.”
“Oh, yes, and we have another--why, that’s fine, Miss Clyde--we have
another artist here too, Mr. Martin. You must all come in and meet him.”
She stood holding the screen door aside, welcoming them in. George,
coming last, saw how her cheerful smile faded to expressionless blank
when the guests had passed. She had relapsed into automatic Hostess.
How lonely she must be to look like that. I wish it was over, he
thought. His mind felt like a spider that has caught several large
flies at once: the delicate web was in danger of breaking.
They entered the hall.
“It isn’t changed a bit!” Ruth said. “Exactly as I remember it--except
it seems smaller. That old table, for instance, that used to be just
enormous. Well, hot water first. I can sentimentalize much better when
I’m clean.”
George was thinking: Ruth’s probably the kind of woman who always
twists the toothpaste tube crooked, but her babble will help us around
corners.
“I hope Miss Clyde won’t mind being in the little sitting room
downstairs: you see we’re just camping out here, you must all make
yourselves at home.”
Joyce tried to frame some appropriate reply to Phyllis’s clear, faintly
hostile voice. She was in the tranced uneasiness of revisit. Coming
from the station she had been trying to realize the Island again: her
mind was startled by the permanence of the physical world. Things she
had not thought of for so long--things that she had apparently been
carrying, unawares, in memory--were still there, unaltered, reproaching
her own instability. The planks of the station platform, the old scow
rotting in the mud, the road of crushed oyster shells, the same vacancy
of sand and sky.
In the car she and George were both achingly mute. There seemed to be
a sheet of glass between them. The Brooks emitted cheerful chatter
from the back seat, George replied with bustling geniality, his only
mask. How wonderful if they could just have made this ride in silence;
she had a feeling that all sorts of lovely meanings were escaping
her. There was the notch of blue light where the road slipped over
a prickling horizon of pines. How just right were the slopes of the
puppy-coloured sand hills, the tasselled trees against the pure lazy
air, the coloured veining of the fields. Now, now; here, here; I’m here
and now, she had to remind herself. It’s God’s world, whatever that can
mean. Golly, you must be careful how you make fun of religion: it’s
a form of art. She imagined a painting of that aisle of sandy road,
climbing through the tall resiny grove. _Religion_ would be a good name
for it.--George had never seemed so far away as now when she sat beside
him. Would it always be like that? Oh, teach yourself not to love
things, she thought. Be indifferent. It’s love that causes suffering,
it’s tenderness that weighs heavy on the heart. How ridiculous to say
that God loves the world. He doesn’t give a damn about it, really.
That’s why He’s so cheerful ... such a competent artist. His hand
doesn’t shake. Still, I don’t think I want to meet Him. It’s a mistake
to meet artists you admire; they’re always disappointing.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” she said. “I love it too much. Those
trees. They look so surprised. I have a guilty passion for pine trees.”
Driving the faithful car had strengthened George. Even the paltriest
has an encouraged sense of competence with that steady tattoo
underneath his feet. The artist that lay printed like a fossil in
George’s close-packed heart--the artist that only Joyce had ever
relished--always responded to the drum of the engine. He adored the
car; when he drove alone to the Island (sending the family by train) he
sang to her most of the way. This was _his_ guilty passion. Now it was
the car’s rhyming vitality that came to his rescue. He broke the glass.
He cut himself, but he got through.
“Any kind of love is too much,” he said.
Then he was grieved to find himself uttering such a cheap oracle; but
it comforted Joyce because she saw it was a symptom. It showed that
he was trying to tell the truth. She did not dare look at him: she
was too conscious of the others behind them, who seemed as massively
attentive as an audience in a theatre. Then in a wave of annoyance,
Surely I have a right to look where I want? She did so. She could see
the confidential tilt of his eyebrow so plainly, she knew he was hers
for the taking. Nothing but themselves could stand between them.
“How queer: that’s just what I was thinking,” she told the eyebrow.
“Oh, do you believe in telepathy?” chirped Ruth. “Ben sometimes knows
exactly what I’m thinking without my saying a word.”
It can’t happen often, George thought.
“What were you laughing at?” he found time to ask her, as the others
were descending from the car.
“I was just thinking, there’s not much danger of my meeting God,
because I’m not pure in heart.”
* * * * *
“Oh, I shall be perfectly comfortable anywhere,” she said.
The single swathe of sunshine carved the hall, dividing it into two
dusks as the word _Now_ divides one’s mind. All, all unchanged: the
series of hemispherical bronze gongs at the dining-room door, the
wakeful asthma of the tall clock, the wide banistered stairway with its
air of waiting to creak. The soft, gold-sliced shadow trembled with
small sounds, and light voices of children drifted down from above.
If this was still real, then what was her life of to-day? Why pretend
any longer to make the world seem reasonable? It was all a delightful
ironic farce with an audience applauding the wrong moments and the
Author gritting his teeth in the wings. What use was Time if it availed
so little?
The broad stream of sunlight flowed through the house like a steady
ripple of Lethe, washing away the sandy shelves of trivial Now,
dissolving little edges of past and future into its current, drawing
all Time together in one clear onward sluice. What are we waiting for,
she wondered. What is everyone waiting for, always? She was painfully
aware of George standing near her. It was not silence that sundered
them, but their grotesque desire to speak.
“George,” Phyllis was saying, “you give Ben a drink or something while
I take the ladies----”
In the shadow beyond the table there was a clicking sound. Through the
wide opening of the dining-room double doors two figures crawled, on
all fours, with a toy train. Janet was in her pyjamas, ready for bed.
Martin’s hand moved the engine across the floor. They came into the
stripe of sunset.
“Wait a minute!” cried Janet. “Here’s one of the passengers.”
“Put him in,” said Martin. “And then the train goes round a sharp curve
and smashes into a lot of people, bing!”
“Quick, I’ll telephone for a nambulance. You adbretized Perfect Safety
on this railroad. It said so in your booklet.”
“Well, if people will sit down for a Picnic right on the main line----”
“Goodness, what a nasinine thing to do.”
“They were using the hot rails to fry their bacon on.”
“Here’s the doctor. Are there any children hurt?”
“Children all safe,” said Martin, looking carefully through the
wreckage. “A lot of grown-ups badly damaged.”
“Here’s the pistol. Put them out of their misery.”
“Bang-bang-bang!”
“They didn’t suffer much. I’ll go for the wrecking train.”
“Janet!” exclaimed Phyllis. “What are you _doing_, running about the
house in your pyjamas. And you’ve got sniffles already.”
The two players looked up; but they could see nothing outside their
tunnel of brightness. The voice seemed like imagination.
“Of course the railroad company will have to pay money for those
valuable lives,” said Martin regretfully.
“I’ll get the blocks, we can build a norphan asylum for the surveyors.”
“Not surveyors, survivors.”
“Janet! Say good-night to Mr. Martin and run upstairs.”
This time the command was unmistakable. Janet became aware of tall
ominous figures emerging from the surrounding dusk.
“Good-night!” she cried hastily, and ran.
“I’m afraid Janet’s manners are terrible,” Phyllis said. “She ought to
have shaken hands, but I don’t like to call her back now, she’ll catch
more cold.”
Two other forms appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Is to-morrow the Picnic?” they called anxiously.
Martin was still sitting on the floor, musing over the disaster. Janet
halted halfway up and shouted. “He says you said Damn the Picnic.”
Sylvia and Rose burst into snivels. There was a moment of difficult
pause. Martin realized that something was happening and began
collecting the train.
“You _promised_ the Picnic for to-morrow,” he said, looking up from
where he was kneeling.
“Yes, yes, to-morrow, don’t worry,” George shouted to the children.
“Mr. Martin’s been awfully kind at keeping them amused,” said Phyllis.
“Mr. Martin, Mr. and Mrs. Brook, Miss Clyde.--George, turn on the
light, Mr. Martin can’t _see_ us.”
The button clicked, the bulbs jumped to attention, mere loops of pale
wire beside the orange shaft of sun. Martin scrambled suddenly to his
feet.
“How do you do,” he said.
* * * * *
“What stunning towels,” Ruth remarked as Phyllis was pointing out
the hot-water tap. The embroidery of Phyllis’s maiden initials was
luxuriously illegible, in some sort of Old High German character.
“Surely those didn’t come with the house?”
“No; they’re mine; all that’s left of my trousseau. What George calls
my pre-war towels.”
But Ruth was too busy in her own thoughts to pursue little jokes.
“Your artist man is rather extraordinary,” she said. “Why should any
one so attractive need to be so bashful?”
“He’s not really bashful.--There, I think you’ll find everything you
need.”
* * * * *
The light twinkled on a tray of yellowish glasses on the sideboard.
George unlocked the cupboard, took out a bottle, and split open a new
box of cigarettes with his thumbnail. There’s a consolation in having
these small things to do, he thought. Meanwhile, what am I really
thinking of? I suppose she’s washing her hands. It’s awkward having
her downstairs. She’ll want to change.... I don’t believe she’s got a
mirror in there. We can hardly expect her to use the bookcase panes.
“Excuse me a moment,” he said. “Ben, pour the tonic. It’s good stuff.”
Mr. Martin was still standing by the door uncertainly, holding the toy
engine. Heavens, does the fellow have to be moved round like a chess
man? He’s so difficult to talk to, somehow. George made a cordial
gesture, indicating that Mr. Martin might as well join Ben at the
sideboard. Martin crossed the room obediently.
The anxious host glanced into the sitting room. Yes: Phyllis, with
her usual skill, had turned the desk into a dressing table: there was
a fresh doily on it, a vase of flowers, and the mirror from his own
bureau upstairs. Already, though she hadn’t entered it yet, the room
was no longer his but Joyce’s. It had become private, precious, and
strange. Here, in the very centre of his own muddled affairs, was
suddenly a kernel of unattainable magic. Why in God’s name had Phyllis
put her in his room? It was too savagely ironic. In my heart, in my
mind, in my very bed, and I can’t even speak to her. It’s too farcical.
If I didn’t have to keep it secret we could all laugh about it. Secrecy
is the only poison.
He carried in Joyce’s suitcase and paint box, put them on the couch,
and fled.
“Well, Ben, I saved my last bottle for this party. It’ll help us live
through the Picnic. Mr. Martin, aren’t you drinking?”
“What is it?” asked Martin.
“Try it and see. You don’t need to worry. It’s real.”
Ben held up his glass, prolonging anticipation. The fine vatted aroma
of the rye cheered his nostrils. Here at least was one trifle which
helps assuage the immense tedium of life.
“Funny to see the old place again,” he said. “How well I remember those
coloured panes. Well....”
“Never drink without a sentiment,” said George.
“All right: stained glass windows.”
“Good enough. Stained glass windows.”
“Is this your first visit?” Ben began politely; but the other guest was
still coughing and gagging. His eyes were full of tears.
Not used to good stuff, George thought. You don’t get much of this
genuine rye nowadays. He and Ben waited, rather embarrassed, until the
other had stopped patting his chest. Ben lit a cigarette and blew a
ring.
Martin’s face brightened. He put out his finger and hooked the floating
twirl.
“That’s lovely!” he said. “How do you do it?”
Ben was pleased at this tribute to his only social accomplishment.
“Why, it’s quite easy. Get a big mouthful of smoke, purse your lips in
a circle, like the hole in a doughnut, and raise your tongue suddenly
to push the smoke out.”
“Do it again.”
Ben looked so comic, shaping his mouth, Martin couldn’t help laughing.
“You look like a catfish. Can _you_ do it too?”
“Not so well as Ben. Gosh, didn’t you ever see any one blow smoke rings
before?”
“No. My father doesn’t smoke.”
Ben looked a little perplexed. He had an uneasy feeling that perhaps
the artist was making fun of them in some obscure way.
Phyllis called from the stairs. “George, will you come up and speak to
the children? They want to be reassured about the Picnic.”
“Do I have to finish this medicine?” Martin asked.
George grinned at him, rather tickled by this drollery.
“You must do as you think best. Make yourselves at home, you fellows.
I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Don’t you like it?” said Ben.
“No.”
“Well, I can help you.”
“It was nice of you to blow a smoke ring to amuse me.”
There was silence, which Ben concluded by taking the other glass of
whisky.
“Happy days,” he said.
“To-morrow will be a happy day,” Martin said. “We’re going to be
reassured by a Picnic.”
“Have a cigarette,” was all that Ben could think of.
“Who were the ladies you brought with you?”
“Well, one of them’s my wife.”
“Which, the pretty one?”
Ben poured himself another slug. He felt he needed it. He had a strong
desire to laugh, but there was sincere inquiry in Mr. Martin’s eyes. He
really wanted to know.
“Ask _them_,” he said.
Phyllis came into the room.
“It’ll soon be dinner time. You people all ready?”
Martin held out his arms. It was so nearly the substance of her dream,
she moved forward to enter his embrace. Ben’s face of surprise checked
her in time. She took Martin’s hands.
“Mr. Martin is my guest of honour,” she explained lightly.
“He seems to be,” said Ben, and finished his glass.
They stood a moment. Then Martin said, “You didn’t look at them.”
“At what?”
“My hands. I mean, are they clean enough?”
Janet and Sylvia were already in the two cots on the balcony; but their
eyes were waiting for George, with that look of entreating expectancy
worn by those who look upward from bed. In the lustrous garden air
crickets were beginning to wheedle. The rickety old porch seemed an
alcove of simpleness divided from the absurd tangled emotions of the
house. But even here was passion: the little white trousered figures
sprang up, their strenuous arms clutched him, their eyes were dark with
anxiety. With horror he saw how they appealed to him as omnipotent
all-arranging arbiter. Him, the poor futile bungler! They crushed him
with the impossible burden of their faith.
“Yes, we’ll have the Picnic to-morrow. Now you go to sleep and get a
good rest.”
“Mother forgot to hear our prayers.”
He stood impatient as they lengthily rehearsed, one after the other,
their confident innocent petitions. The clear voices chirruped, but he
shut their words from his mind, as regardless as God. Would they never
finish? To hear these dear meaningless desiderations was too tender a
torment. He tried to think of other things--of anything--of the sea; of
washing his hands and putting on a clean collar; of the striped brown
and silver tie that he intended to wear to-morrow (Joyce had never
seen it); and what on earth are we going to do to amuse these people
after dinner?
“... and Mother and Daddy and all friends kind and dear; and let
to-morrow be a nice day for the Picnic....”
Poor little devils, he thought; they seem as far away from me as if
they were kittens or puppies. People pretend that children are just
human beings of a smaller size, but I think they’re something quite
different. They live in a world with only three dimensions, a physical
world immersed in the moment, a reasonable world, a world without that
awful sorcery of a fourth measurement that makes us ill at ease. What
is it their world lacks? Is it self-consciousness, is it beauty, is it
sex? (Three names for the same thing, perhaps.) Little Sylvia with her
full wet eyes, what torments of desire she would arouse some day in
some deluded stripling.
Strange world of theirs: a world that has no awareness of good and
evil; a world merely pretty, whereas ours is beautiful. A world that
knows what it wants; whereas we are never quite sure....
He looked at them with amazement. Where did they come from, how did
they get there? They were more genuine than himself, they would still
be in this incredible life long after he had been shovelled out of
it. How soon would they begin to see through the furious pettiness of
parents? See that we do everything we punish them for attempting, that
we torture them for our own weakness, set their teeth on edge for the
taste of our own green grapes?
He tucked them in, gave each rounded hill of blanket a consoling pat,
and left them. Joyce was standing in the passage. She had changed her
clothes and was wearing a plain grey linen dress. He wanted to tell her
that she was one of the unbelievably rare women who never have a pink
strap of ribbon running loose across one shoulder. There must be _some_
solution of that problem? A man would have abolished it long ago. But
she’s on her way to the bathroom, I suppose; it’ll be more polite if I
just stand aside and let her pass without saying anything. Besides, we
can’t talk here, right outside Ruth’s door.
But she did not move. Evidently she had been watching his little scene
with the children. In a flicker of the mind he wondered whether his
part in it had looked creditable. He was afraid it had. For now, to her
at any rate, he hankered to be known as the troubled imbecile he really
was.
“And you wonder why I envy you,” she said.
He didn’t answer. He was busy reminding himself that that was what her
eyes were like. It is only a few times that any man has the chance or
the will to search the innermost bravery of other human faces. He had
thought much about her eyes, had imagined the fine glory of telling
them about themselves. Foreigners, he would call them; bright aliens
not quite at home in the daily disasters of earth’s commonplace.
Foreigners, but he was on the pier waiting for them. They seemed to
know that life is a precious thing and that we are always in danger
of marring it. He imagined them as they would be if their shadow of
questioning were skimmed away; if they were flooded with the light
of complete surrender, of reckless trust. But how can these things
be said? There is no code, he thought: so perhaps the wise presently
abandon attempt to communicate. The gulf surrounds us all; only here
and there on the horizon a reversed ensign shows where some stout
spirit founders in silence. Or now and then, in the casual palaver of
the day, slips out some fantastic phrase to show how man rises from
clay to potter, can even applaud the nice malice of his own comedy.
He had got beyond the point where he could talk to her in
trivialities. He must say all or nothing.
“Lucky children,” she said. “I wish _I_ had someone to hear my
prayers.--If I had, I might say some.”
“I _didn’t_ hear them. I wasn’t listening; I couldn’t. Oh, Joyce,
Joyce, there’s so much I want to say, and your eyes keep interrupting
me.”
He thrilled a little at himself, and felt better. For he had his
Moments: unforeseen felicities when he said the humorous and necessary
word: and when his Moments came he could not help gloating over
them. She gloated too, for she relished that innocent glee when he
congratulated his own mind. When himself was his own guest of honour,
and he stood genially at the front door.
So she smiled. What other woman could ever reward a lucky phrase with
such magic of wistful applause?
“I apologize for them. They didn’t mean to be rude.”
She was so young and straight in her plain frock, so blessedly
unconscious of herself. He thought of her fine strong body, the ungiven
body that was so much her own, near him again after all the miracles of
life that divide flesh from flesh and then bring it again within grasp;
her sweet uncommanded beauty, irrelevant perhaps, yet so thrillingly
a symbol of her essence. The noble body, poor blasphemed perfection,
worshipped in the dead husks of statue and painting and yet so feared
in its reality. He had to remind himself that it _was_ irrelevant. How
could any man with a full quota of biology help dream of mastering that
cool, unroused detachment?
Ah, he had already had all of her that was imperishable: her dreams,
her thoughts, her poor secret honesties. She had given him these, and
nothing could spoil them. He had agreed with himself that his love was
merely for her mind. (Distressing thought!) It was only the ridiculous
need of keeping this passion to themselves that darkened and inflamed
it. If it could be announced it would instantly become the purest thing
on earth. It would be robbed of its sting. He imagined an engraved
card:--
_Mr. and Mrs. George Granville
have the honour to announce
the betrothal of Mr. Granville’s mind
to that of Miss Joyce Clyde
Nothing Carnal_
“_Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments._”
But this would satisfy no one. Perhaps not even themselves. And people
don’t like things to be pure: it casts a rebuke on their own secrets.
“Joyce, let’s make our announcement at this party.”
“What announcement?” She looked startled.
“Why, that our minds are engaged.”
Her hand, in his, tightened a little, reproachfully.
“George, before you go down. Who is this Mr. Martin?”
“I don’t really know; some friend of Phyl’s. I never saw him before.
She says he’s going to do a portrait of her. I think he’s kidding her.”
He turned toward the stairs and then called her back.
“Listen,” he said softly. “When I say something, after dinner, about
putting the car away, that’s your cue. Slip away and come with me. I
want to show you something.”