Ah, fortunate,
Ah, fortunate ...
I can defy tomorrow’s law;
Never tomorrow can say to me—
_It passed you by. You did not see._
For I saw....
There was a star fell out of the night,
Fell down that tall blue precipice,
And I had time to lift my sight,
To lift my fortunate sight to this
And say—_I am not too late,_
_I am not too late._
Days and nights went by under the trees. The travellers went down into
the Yosemite Valley itself. At one hour the subtle shape of Half Dome was
suggested through a robe of morning mists, at another it was hewn starkly
out of a hard sky. They confronted the incredible grained and golden face
of El Capitan, that perfect half of an unknown whole, that perpendicular
desert of stone which bares its naked heart to the sun and whose
boundaries march with those of the clouds. There was for days a sound of
falling waters always. Edward did not hear it, but he could see the thin
silken bands of water binding the mountains, and he could lie at the feet
of falls in an explosion of light spray and watch the stars shoot out of
the smooth high brim of the fall three thousand feet above him.
The red pine ground was their bed between the crimson and golden trunks
of trees. There was always light on the river and often, it seemed, a
light within the river, a twisting snake of light.
Yosemite was printed like a dream upon that part of the memory that
registers impossible things....
They were motoring westward again through the gold country—Eldorado. The
two Fords were together now, Tam driving the first. Lucy was in the front
seat beside Tam. Emily and Edward sat in the back.
“I have never really driven a car before this trip,” said Tam as they
started. “In England I am no motorist, though a friend’s Rolls Royce
occasionally wears Lucy and me as buttons. But I am no driver and it
alarms me to have anyone but Lucy in the seat beside me.”
Lucy looked at the country with a patient expression. The angle of
her head followed the line of the hills. The line was like a feverish
temperature chart against the sky and Lucy watched it with uncritical
attention.
Emily put her hand upon Edward’s thin arm. “You know, Edward,” she said,
“you’re a masochist.”
“I suppose I am,” said Edward despondently. “What is it?”
“A person who enjoys hurting himself.”
Edward considered this.
“That’s what makes me want to love you without being loved,” he thought.
“Yes, I want that. I want to be hurt and to make myself sick with pitying
myself. I want to ensure that you shouldn’t love me by telling you the
worst about myself.”
He found it suddenly a real effort to be silent. He wanted to tell her
how unhappy he was; he wanted to try and make her cry for him, or rather
to satisfy himself that she would never cry for him. He wanted to tell
her how often his head hurt and how poorly his ears served him and of
the unbearable thundering and crashing that was always in the foreground
of his hearing. He wanted to tell her how impossible he found it not
to drink too much, how impossible he found it to be like other men. He
wanted her to say, “Poor Edward, poor man...” and stroke his hand.
He said, “Emily, are you really as hardhearted as Tam says?”
They both looked suddenly at Tam. He was telling Lucy in his usual
absolutely confident way of some small experience of his own—an
experience that would not have been worth describing had it not been
for his own intense interest in it. They heard him say, “And the silly
part of it was that if I hadn’t been wearing those old grey flannels the
feller wouldn’t have dared to speak to me like that.”
He had a habit of speaking to Lucy as if she were not his wife but a
friend.
Emily leaned her head suddenly on Edward’s shoulder. “How can you be so
brutal?” she said. “How can you ask me if I am hardhearted when I am in
such pain—and all for love....”
She never could keep her hands still. She threw out her right hand as if
in surrender and hammered the side of the car. Edward could feel that she
was absolutely tense. The muscles of her neck were unyielding.
He thought, “I must be very cautious.” He understood that he was not in
Emily’s world at all. “I must be very cautious even in thinking of her
now....” It was like falling into very cold water and becoming at once
numb. “I mustn’t be feeble in this too. I must be a hero in another
way. If I love her without hope, in the end I must die because the pain
will grow and grow.” He looked forward almost eagerly to atrocious pain
forever. The forever of the morbid introspective is not a real eternity.
I believe he looks forward in the very end of the end to telling God and
being publicly pitied and caressed at last. “Well done, thou good and
faithful servant, thou hast been alone and unfortunate in all things.
Enter thou into the unending pity of thy Lord.”
The wind blew back to them something that Lucy was saying. “Well, it’s
just as I always told you, Tam. You never know what you can do till you
try.” They were being briskly polite to each other. They were what is
called in sprightly domestic literature, “Good Comrades.”
“When you asked me if I were hardhearted, Edward,” said Emily, “I suppose
you were going to tell me something about yourself.”
“I was,” replied Edward. “But I won’t now. Anything I could say to
you now would seem too big to me and too little to you. My love, for
instance. And the fact that I must miss everything in the world....”
“Your deafness....” said Emily. “I gathered you were a bit deaf even
before Melsie Ponting told me you were as deaf as a post. Tam said—‘Yes,
and as slow as a Sunday post’—but I told him to shut up. It must be
beastly being deaf because I suppose you feel that you seem stupid and
that people get tired of talking to you. Why don’t you go to a doctor and
all that? I always go to doctors the very minute I have a symptom—doctors
are so awfully interested and lean forward when I talk about myself,
which of course nobody else will ever do. Other people tiresomely begin
talking about themselves as soon as I get going, but luckily doctors
never do that. Tam is the only person I know who can talk successfully
about himself, but then he is always perfectly happy about himself and
talks of what happened when a vital button came off at his wedding, or
how pleased somebody was to see him when he called, or why an Armenian
mistook him for a Turk. And everybody listens with a poised smile on
their lips, and when he has finished there is always a loud noise of
success. Sure and happy people never fall flat. Edward, if you weren’t so
sad-hearted, people would love you much more.”
“That’s what happy-hearted people always say,” said Edward. “Happiness
and sadness are not attributes and not moods. They are the foundations on
which people are built. You can’t change your foundations.”
“Well, if you are sad, your castle is built on sand. It is so safe to
be well and truly laid on a happy and a rocky heart. Then even pain is
nothing more than storms beating on the rock. When the storm goes down
you are wet and perhaps a shade chipped but still safe.”
“I am never safe,” said Edward. “Never safe for a second.”
“Oh, I am so tired of talking about you and me, Edward dear,” said Emily
sitting up.
They were silent and Edward felt as if he were learning Emily’s face
by heart and as if it were a lesson knowledge of which would be most
urgently required of him some day. Her upper lip was thinner than the
lower and, though the upper lip did not protrude beyond the lower at all,
the effect of a little uptilted pout was produced by the line below her
mouth which receded very definitely before jutting out to form a rather
large round chin. Her nose was strong and rather broad, absolutely
straight in profile and a little tilted. Tilted lines were necessary in
her face to support her slanting thick black brows and the upward angle
of her dark hair. She was smaller than most people and looked as if she
were accustomed to putting her shoulders back and looking half defiantly
up into the eyes of large, strong, delighted men.
There were no level places in the land they were passing through and
no color except a hot brown. The air shook in the heat; the summits
of the brown dead hills seemed to be seen through shaken water. There
were scars in the hills made by old gold-seekers here and there, and
surviving one-man mines stabbed the slopes. Small villages of bleak grey
shacks clung to the road. The sunset turned the brown to red; the air
in the shadow of the hills was russet red. It was time to find a camp
site. Whenever they turned a corner and looked down, as it seemed, upon
a perfect site, some little town had chosen that site too. There was no
remoteness in that strange broad land.
“This damned country has broken out into a rash of towns,” complained Tam.
One of the intrusive little towns seemed to attract the sunset. Its
windows flamed in orange; its roofs smouldered in dull crimson.
“It’s like as if it was on fire,” said Lucy. “Stop, Tam, and let me
look.” Lucy always had to look where the others only glanced.
“Lot’s wife,” said Tam.
“One thing, by the way, that we know because the Bible tells us so,” said
Emily, “is that Lot didn’t care a damn for his wife. If he had cared he
would at least have looked round at her predicament; probably he would
have tried to help her or melt her or something. We should have known
if he had because he would have been preserved forever as a pillar, a
monument to conjugal gentlemanliness. The cad.”
“We ought to get under cover. It’s going to rain; the cows are lying
down,” said Lucy restlessly.
“Oh well, even a cow is human and may err,” said Emily.
But the stars became gradually absorbed in darkness.
As the final darkness fell they came to a deserted village consisting
of a roadhouse, a shack or two and a barn, all empty. The travellers
had with them dill pickles, a cucumber, canned tomatoes, raw eggs, raw
potatoes and soda-crackers. They had also accumulated various bottles,
one of very fulsome country-saloon port wine, two of gin, one of vermouth
and two of whiskey.
The meal, eaten seated on the bare floor of the old roadhouse, seemed
blessed. There was so much to drink. They all felt as if they had left
themselves gloriously behind. There was no hint of life in the village
except—far off—the asthmatic and difficult cry of a donkey. And a dog
strayed in and joined the travellers. It did not seem to mind the fact
that they all tried to be funny at its expense. Tam pulled its tail,
lifted it up by its tail.
“The way to flatter a dog,” said Emily, “is to say, ‘What a nice new tail
you are wearing today, darling.’ Dogs are frightfully sensitive about
criticism of their tails. Of course most dogs have only one tail which
they wear weekdays and Sundays, but they would never admit that. They
only think to themselves, ‘How lucky I chose this one—I hesitated between
the one with the black pin-spot and the plain white one—and how lucky it
still looks new.”
“That reminds me of my new puce stockings,” said Melsie Ponting. “Do you
know that no less than three gentlemen acquaintances—old beaux of mine,
you know—stopped me on Geary to say how cute they looked. Don’t you want
to say something about my puce stockings, Banner?”
Emily whispered incautiously to Edward, “I think she even sleeps with
mistletoe over her bed.”
Edward was strongly stroking the dog’s head. “The point of a dog,” he
said, “is that you can always pretend to yourself that the dog is saying
to itself, ‘Well say, this is a feller worth knowing.’ They always look
like that. No dog ever will show that he despises you.”
“Edward,” said Emily, “are your spirits always at half mast?”
Edward had an acute pain in his head, under his eyebrow. But his mind
seemed to him detached from the pain and extraordinarily facile. He
could hear well, he felt, but this was because Banner Hope was singing in
such a sharp voice. Edward said, “It is more dramatic to be sad than to
be happy, anyway, Emily. Everything that is meant to be dramatic is sad.
The song that Hope is singing is—like all jazz songs—about being far away
from where you want to be.”
“Sadness is too easy,” said Emily. “It is like mother-love and the
weakness of little children and the old home and the maiden’s prayer—a
too easy short cut to drama. All my life I have been dramatic but I have
never arrived at drama by sadness.”
There seemed to be things rolling about under Edward’s forehead. He
thought they were loaded dice; they did not feel like balls, they hurt
too much and had too many corners. He was almost pleased when he tried to
stand and found himself too giddy.
Edward realised for the first time that it was raining outside. There
were miles of air full of rain, like steel bars between him and safe
towns and a warm bed.
“Gee!” exclaimed Melsie, unremittingly facetious. “Edward’s British
standards have fallen down on him. One twist too many in the lemon peel,
Mr. Williams.”
But Rhoda saw his eyes and rose with that tolerant yet exasperated look
to which Edward was accustomed when he needed sympathy. There was wild
agony in his forehead. He fell down. He rolled upon one side and then
on the other. For a second he saw Emily looking detached, looking at
him with an expression of excited contempt. Was she saying, “Oh, what a
party!” to herself? Rhoda pressed her hands firmly over his eyes, her
cold hands moved firmly about his forehead....
Edward was not good at bearing pain although he was fairly well
accustomed to the exercise. It was only after disgracing himself in his
own eyes and in Emily’s several times by crying in the car that he found
himself in a ward in a San Francisco hospital.
It was immediately apparent that he could not escape an operation. The
surgeon tapped his forehead impressively and his gold teeth gleamed
briskly down upon the horizontal Edward.
“I wouldn’t carry those sinuses about with me, my friend, not in that
condition, not for half of John D. Rockefeller’s pile.”
Edward would not have minded continuing to carry his sinuses about
exactly as they were. He vaguely treasured his afflictions. Without them
he would not have felt interesting. Once, when a palmist told him that
the latter part of his life would be spent in perfect health, Edward was
definitely disappointed. However, an operation had its dramatic side, at
least in anticipation and in retrospect. At the time it was a humiliation
and a terror.
“General anæsthetic absolutely unnecessary,” the gold-mouthed surgeon
had said. “It’s as simple as letting off a gun. I’ll take out your
tonsils at the same time. You won’t know a thing about it. You’ll be out
batting with your friends in three days.”
Early one morning a man in white helped the pale Edward on to a
white-sheeted vehicle which ran quickly on white and furtive castors.
There was no pillow on the vehicle, and Edward, perfectly horizontal,
darting head first along strange smelling corridors, felt like a torpedo
whizzing towards destruction. “As simple as letting off a gun.”
The surgeon, waiting in a sort of loose-box furnished in white, was
dressed in white. His manner had lost the affability which had hitherto
characterised it. Even his gold teeth were hidden by a white mask which,
like the mask of a Turkish woman, hid the lower part of his face. He
further obscured his face by covering one eye with a saucer made of
mirror. The pupil of his eye could be seen through a hole in the middle
of the saucer, restless and malevolent like a spider in its web. Edward
was draped in gauze by a nurse. The smell of drugs and disinfectants was
so strong that it seemed as if the walls must burst.
There was now no escaping from what the surgeon was going to do. The only
thing one could do was to hinder him in his work.
“Keep still, keep still ...” said the surgeon in a harsh voice. “Stop
that noise, you fool.”
Edward was afraid and he intended to stop the noise but he heard his own
voice still bursting from his lungs. “Ah-ow ... ah-ow....”
He wished to implore the surgeon to stop and let him rest from pain and
the feeling of ubiquitous blood, but the cocaine in his throat prevented
him from articulating. Every time the surgeon struck his terrible little
chisel, Edward winced violently. He was very anxious that the surgeon
should realise how unusually sensitive he was. He wanted the surgeon to
be sorry for him. But the surgeon was angry. He tapped Edward’s forehead
with barely suppressed anger. “I’m within a third of an inch of your
brain here,” he said. “It’s up to you whether I can put this bit of work
through or not.”
Edward writhed. The nurse took his hand. “She’s sorry,” thought Edward.
There was blood everywhere. Some blood on the white apron that was
stretched across the surgeon’s stomach. Sweat was falling from the
surgeon’s chin.
“Take him away,” said the surgeon suddenly and loudly. It was over.
Full of shame because of his forlorn and hideous condition, Edward was
wheeled quickly along the corridors. A man on crutches in a check woollen
dressing-gown stared at his outraged and disordered face. Edward made
feeble movements with his hands and the nurse covered his face with part
of the sheet. “Now people will think I am dead. They will get quite a
thrill,” thought Edward and lay very still. When they took the sheet
away he was beside his bed in the long bleak ward. All the other patients
were looking greedily at him. Edward wanted to tell the nurse of his
horror and discomfort but the cocaine still blocked his utterance. He
could not mould his voice into syllables.
He hoped intensely that Emily would not come to see him while he was
padded with bloodstained cotton-wool. He made up little tests to find
out whether she would come. “If the sunlight reaches the chin of the man
opposite before a tram goes by outside I shall know that she will not
come until I am really fit to let her see me.”
In answer to a croak from the man opposite, the nurse came and pulled
the blind down with a peevish flounce. Most of the nurses in that
ward visited on everyone who made a request the irritation they had
accumulated by reason of scores of other requests. If Edward asked for
anything he was made to feel as if he had asked for the same thing an
unreasonable number of times. Only when the doctors were there the nurses
spoke in soft optimistic voices and patted the patients’ shoulders
genially and called them “This poor boy....”
Edward’s test was spoilt by the pulling down of the blind. He betted with
himself on whether the facetious man with bristly hair would ring the
bell for the nurse before the blind man next to him did so. The facetious
man called the nurses, “Say, Saddie,” and asked them about their
beaux. No nurse was ever irritable with him. Sometimes he rang the bell
specially to tell the nurse that he was so hollow he could put himself
outside a whole steer, and the nurses, though they gave him nothing,
never seemed to be annoyed by his cheerful importunity.
Edward thought that no-one in the world cared that he was ill. He did not
want Emily to come and see him in his undignified condition. But he would
have liked her to come to the door of the ward with a great splendid
tangle of salmon-colored roses and be stopped there by a grave sweetfaced
nurse, who would tell her that Mr. Williams was too seriously ill to see
anyone. Then Emily would ask, “Is there any danger?” in an anxious voice
that he had never heard, and the nurse would shake her grave sweet head
and say, “One never knows. He is suffering terribly. The surgeon had to
operate within a third of an inch of his brain.” Edward fell into a half
sleep imagining the roses that Emily would bring and lay against his lips.
When he awoke he saw Banner Hope walking away from him towards the door
of the ward.
“Hey!” said Edward in a thick desperate voice. A week before he would
have refused to believe that the sight of Banner Hope could ever give him
pleasure.
“Why, why, why....” said Mr. Hope, turning round guiltily. Edward saw at
once that the visitor had been glad to find the patient asleep. It had
been to Mr. Hope an opportunity to acquire merit as a benevolent friend
without the effort of expressing benevolence. “Why, why, why ... isn’t
this just too bad?...”
He looked inquisitively at Edward’s miserable face.
“Now, don’t you say a thing, Edward. The nurse has told me how it is. You
gotter lie low and say nothing and I’ll give you noos of all the folks.
All your friends surely are peeved with these old sawbones for carving
you about this way. I should say so. Yes, indeed.”
This unprecedented burst of sympathy at once restored to Edward a pale
gleam of the melancholy heroic light in which it was his constant effort
to see himself. Still the name of Emily had not yet been mentioned and he
tried to point this out. But his throat still played him false.
“Eb-gy....”
“That’s all right. That’s all right. I get you perfectly. You gotter let
uncle do all the tongue work. Let me see now.... Well, there’s Melsie
Stone Ponting. She’s a sport now.... What d’you guess she said when she
knew you were sick? Why, she said—well, mebbe I’d better not tell you
after all.... Anyway it was very smart and showed how crazy she was about
you. Avery Bird I haven’t seen recently, he naturally can’t think of
a thing except Rhoda’s indictment. I guess you’ve heard how Rhoda was
arrested the day we all got home from Yosemite. Indicted for what they
call Criminal Syndicalism. Some of the dope she put across at the W. I.
L. A. kinda got somebody’s goat. You know, when we’d left you at the
hospital some of us went round for a drink at Rhoda’s studio. There’s
a kind of an old she-janitor, you know, located in the basement, and
she met us and said how the cops had been and opened Rhoda’s bureau and
gotten a wad of papers out of it. Rhoda surely was mad, and Avery—who
almost never lets up on his detached pose or says anything except
epigrams—I’ll say he blasphemed quite a bit. And right there in the
middle of that little tableau two plain-clothes cops walked in. The door
was still open and they walked in and there was Rhoda up to her elbows in
her bureau, trying to find out which papers they’d gotten hold of. Well,
it was a fair cinch. There was no getting around it. One of the cops read
the warrant; it was all about sabbotidge and advocating unlawful methods
of effecting political changes. They seemed to know a whole heap about
sister Rhoda. She didn’t answer back any. She smiled and looked white.
Avery said a hell of a lot, but they didn’t take much account of him.
They took all our names and addresses. Of course, it’s a long ways from
indictment to conviction. Avery says he’s not taking much on her chances,
she’s got in good and deep. The ‘What Is Liberty’ offered to put up her
bail money—but Rhoda’s got plenty of dough herself. For some reason she
isn’t accepting bail. It seems like if she’s got to be arrested she
wants to have it done thorough. She’s always been crazy about prisoners
and jails....”
“Ebb-ly ...” hiccoughed Edward.
The nurse was beckoning to Banner. The sedate wives and mothers of other
patients followed by their scrubbed and creaking children were willingly
submitting to authority and leaving the ward.
“Say, I must be moving along,” said Banner Hope with alacrity. “What’s
that you say? Emily? Oh, Emily’s gone to China. Take care of yourself,
Edward, some of your friends’ll be around again some time soon....”
Edward was left in such an unrelieved condition of depression that he
was on the verge of peace. “Gone to China.... Gone to China.... Gone to
China....” his mind chanted to itself to the rhythm of the pulse drumming
in his ears. He reminded himself without ceasing that Emily had gone to
China. To do so put the finishing touch to his orgy of despair. But all
the time he felt certain that his ears had really played him false. All
the time a little secret unadmitted factory in his mind was circulating
hope by making phrases with similar vowel sounds. “He must have said,
‘Emily’s doing fine,’ or he must have said, ‘Emily’s reading Heine,’
or he must have said, ‘Emily—how do _I_ know?’” The rhymes became less
and less probable as Edward approached sleep. “Penny-a-liner.... Asia
Minor.... Clementina.... Norah Criner....” But gone to China seemed the
most absurd of all.
Edward was long enough in this hospital to fit a kind of bare innocent
interlude into his experience. No other visitor came to see him during
the three weeks of his illness, and he had leisure to build upon the dark
and sordid foundation of his life a sort of airy trivial superstructure
of interests. He watched the manners of the nurses. He became interested
in human temperatures, weights, symptoms and facetious gossip connected
with physical details. The watch under his pillow became his most
intimate friend and guide. Waking up at six o’clock, bathing, and
bed-making were an intolerable nuisance, but he was much concerned if
the nurses were a moment late. The whole day was enlivened by the jokes
or scoldings of the nurses. A new joke was hardly ever made in the
ward, but the old ones were always successful. All the men laughed at
them because they were glad that the temper of the nurses made joking
possible. Sometimes the doctors were late and, though no-one loved the
doctors, everyone was exasperated with them for being late. Sometimes the
doctors were so late that the breakfasts became tired of waiting, and
then all the patients ate their breakfasts with a sense of incompleteness
and danger. Meals were very important. Sometimes there were little red
jellies at the midday meal, and when the cheerful glitter of these
jellies blossomed on all the approaching trays Edward was full of an
almost gay anticipation. There were no books to read, only magazines.
To the nurses a magazine was a book. Any magazine would do. One did not
mention the titles of books or magazines in the ward; one asked for “a
book to read” as one would ask for a glass of milk. Edward was called
by doctors and nurses “a great student” because he was always reading a
magazine. He was not critical enough to refuse to read the bad literature
that was placed before him. Sometimes he quite enjoyed the sentimental
love stories. He read the comic pages with a somber interest. And he
often made little tunes in his head to fit the poems, most of which
seemed to have been written in imitation of each other. Some of the poems
were patriotic and these annoyed Edward; it seemed so silly that anyone
should love any country but England to the point of writing bad rhymes in
its honor. Edward’s mind was tired, too tired to feel very acutely the
need of better fare. Others in the ward were more conscious than he. The
man next to Edward liked the works of Gene Stratton Porter; he thought
the tales of this writer very moral and very deep. He often told their
plots in great detail to Edward, announcing himself as “considerable
of a student like yourself.” This man, who had a thin voice all on one
note, was fond of talking to his neighbors at night. He would say, “Hope
I’m not disturbing you folks,” and nobody dared to say, “You are.” They
were all rather gentlemanly and talked a good deal about Americanism and
the advantages of American education. In health they frequented movies
rather than saloons. They all had wives or very respectable sweethearts
who came conscientiously to sit with them during visiting hours. You
could distinguish the sweethearts from the wives by their habit of
bringing tight bundles of flowers and flinging them down ungraciously on
the stomachs of the afflicted. Wives never did this. The wives brought
snorting and bubbling babies instead of flowers. Neither wives nor
sweethearts had anything much to say. They all looked as if they took for
granted that the invalids were going to die. Visiting the sick seemed to
embarrass them hopelessly.
Visiting hours were always exciting to Edward because Emily might come.
He still boasted to himself that she had gone to China and that he was
sunk in despair, but actually he felt convinced that he had mistaken
Banner Hope’s meaning. When he should next see her he would tell her of
his mistake as a sort of heroically tragic joke. She would come any day
now and sit beside his bed and tears would come into his eyes and his
thin hand would grope for hers and for a moment they would both be unable
to speak. Then he would say simply, “They told me you had gone.” And she
would think, “Could I ever find a more faithful lover than this?” and she
would touch his hot thin cheek with her cold fingers.
He hated the nights. Either he would stay awake and watch the dim sickly
light upon the ceiling and think of his dreary yet too expensive room
at the hotel absorbing money all this time, and think of the senseless
and exasperating death of Jimmy at Loos, and think of money again and of
the fact that he could not get his complexion clear—directly one set of
spots healed another began. Or else he would sleep and dream cruelly and
grotesquely of endless, arid journeys and of beautiful anticipations that
withered away and of missing trains—never of Emily.
In the daytime he would forget the hateful night. All day till about six,
when the night clamored to be remembered, he was almost contented.