And in the stall the scattered mice grew still,
Where yet the white ox slept, and on the sill
The crowing cock paused, and the grey house dove
Turned twice about upon the ledge above.
THE ROBIN’S HOUSE
In a stately decaying mansion, on the lower end of the Avenue, lived a
woman by the name of Nelly Grissard.
Two heavy cocks stood on either side of the brownstone steps, looking
out toward the park; and in the back garden a fountain, having poured
out its soul for many a year, still poured, murmuring over the stomachs
of the three cherubim supporting its massive basin.
Nelly Grissard was fat and lively to the point of excess. She never let
a waxed floor pass under her without proving herself light of foot.
Every ounce of Nelly Grissard was on the jump. Her fingers tapped, her
feet fluttered, her bosom heaved; her entire diaphragm swelled with
little creakings of whale-bone, lace and taffeta.
She wore feathery things about the throat, had a liking for deep
burgundy silks, and wore six petticoats for the “joy of discovering that
I’m not so fat as they say.” She stained her good square teeth with
tobacco, and cut her hair in a bang.
Nelly Grissard was fond of saying: “I’m more French than human.” Her
late husband had been French; had dragged his nationality about with him
with the melancholy of a man who had half dropped his cloak and that
cloak his life, and in the end, having wrapped it tightly about him, had
departed as a Frenchman should.
There had been many “periods” in Nelly Grissard’s life, a Russian, a
Greek, and those privileged to look through her key-hole said, even a
Chinese.
She believed in “intuition,” but it was always first-hand intuition; she
learned geography by a strict system of love affairs—never two men from
the same part of the country.
She also liked receiving “spirit messages”—they kept her in touch with
international emotion—she kept many irons in the fire and not the least
of them was the “spiritual” iron.
Then she had what she called a “healing touch”—she could take away
headaches, and she could tell by one pass of her hand if the bump on
that particular head was a bump of genius or of avarice—or if (and she
used to shudder, closing her eyes and withdrawing her hand with a slow,
poised and expectant manner) it was the bump of the senses.
Nelly was, in other words, dangerously careful of her sentimentalism. No
one but a sentimental woman would have called her great roomy mansion
“The Robin’s House,” no one but a sentimentalist could possibly have
lived through so many days and nights of saying “yes” breathlessly, or
could have risen so often from her bed with such a magnificent and
knowing air.
No one looking through the gratings of the basement window would have
guessed at the fermenting mind of Nelly Grissard. Here well-starched
domestics rustled about, laying cool fingers on cool fowls and frosted
bottles. The cook, it is true, was a little untidy; he would come and
stand in the entry, when Spring was approaching, and look over the head
of Nelly Grissard’s old nurse, who sat in a wheel-chair all day, her
feeble hands crossed over a discarded rug of the favourite burgundy
colour, staring away with half-melted eyes into the everlasting
fountain, while below the cook’s steaming face, on a hairy chest, rose
and fell a faded holy amulet.
Sometimes the world paused to see Nelly Grissard pounce down the steps,
one after another, and with a final swift and high gesture take her
magnificent legs out for a drive, the coachman cracking his whip, the
braided ribbons dancing at the horses’ ears.
And that was about all—no, if one cared to notice, a man, in the early
forties, who passed every afternoon just at four, swinging a heavy black
cane.
This man was Nicholas Golwein—half Tartar, half Jew.
There was something dark, evil and obscure about Nicholas Golwein, and
something bending, kindly, compassionate. Yet he was a very Jew by
nature. He rode little, danced less, but smoked great self-reassuring
cigars, and could out-ponder the average fidgety American by hours.
He had travelled, he had lived as the “Romans lived,” and had sent many
a hot-eyed girl back across the fields with something to forget or
remember, according to her nature.
This man had been Nelly Grissard’s lover at the most depraved period of
Nelly’s life. At that moment when she was colouring her drinking water
green, and living on ox liver and “testina en broda,” Nicholas Golwein
had turned her collar back, and kissed her on that intimate portion of
the throat where it has just left daylight, yet has barely passed into
the shadow of the breast.
To be sure, Nelly Grissard had been depraved at an exceedingly early
age, if depravity is understood to be the ability to enjoy what others
shudder at, and to shudder at what others enjoy.
Nelly Grissard dreamed “absolutely honestly”—stress on the
absolutely—when it was all the fashion to dream obscurely,—she could
sustain the conversation just long enough not to be annoyingly
brilliant, she loved to talk of ancient crimes, drawing her stomach in,
and bending her fingers slightly, just slightly, but also just enough to
make the guests shiver a little and think how she really should have
been born in the time of the Cenci. And during the craze for Gauguin she
was careful to mention that she had passed over the same South Sea
roads, but where Gauguin had walked, she had been carried by two
astonished donkeys.
She had been “kind” to Nicholas Golwein just long enough to make the
racial melancholy blossom into a rank tall weed. He loved beautiful
things, and she possessed them. He had become used to her, had
“forgiven” her much (for those who had to forgive at all had to forgive
Nelly in a large way), and the fact that she was too fluid to need one
person’s forgiveness long, drove him into slow bitterness and despair.
The fact that “her days were on her,” and that she did not feel the
usual woman’s fear of age and dissolution, nay, that she even saw new
measures to take, possessing a fertility that can only come of a
decaying mind, drove him almost into insanity.
When the Autumn came, and the leaves were falling from the trees, as
nature grew hot and the last flames of the season licked high among the
branches, Nicholas Golwein’s cheeks burned with a dull red, and he
turned his eyes down.
Life did not exist for Nicholas Golwein as a matter of day and after
day—it was flung at him from time to time as a cloak is flung a flunkey,
and this made him proud, morose, silent.
Was it not somehow indecent that, after his forgiveness and
understanding, there should be the understanding and forgiveness of
another?
There was undoubtedly something cruel about Nelly Grissard’s love; she
took at random, and Nicholas Golwein had been the most random, perhaps,
of all. The others, before him, had all been of her own class—the first
had even married her, and when she finally drove him to the knife’s
edge, had left her a fair fortune. Nicholas Golwein had always earned
his own living, he was an artist and lived as artists live. Then Nelly
came—and went—and after him she had again taken one of her own kind, a
wealthy Norwegian—Nord, a friend of Nicholas’.
Sometimes now Nicholas Golwein would go off into the country, trying to
forget, trying to curb the tastes that Nelly’s love had nourished. He
nosed out small towns, but he always came hurriedly back, smelling of
sassafras, the dull penetrating odour of grass, contact with trees,
half-tamed animals.
The country made him think of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony—he would
start running—running seemed a way to complete all that was sketchy and
incomplete about nature, music, love.
“Would I recognize God if I saw him?” The joy of thinking such thoughts
was not every man’s, and this cheered him.
Sometimes he would go to see Nord; he was not above visiting Nelly’s
lover—in fact there was that between them.
He had fancied death lately. There was a tremendously sterile quality
about Nicholas Golwein’s fancies; they were the fancies of a race, and
not of a man.
He discussed death with Nord—before the end there is something pleasant
in a talk of a means to an end, and Nord had the coldness that makes
death strong.
“I can hate,” he would say, watching Nord out of the corner of his eye;
“Nelly can’t, she’s too provincial——”
“Yes, there’s truth in that. Nelly’s good to herself—what more is
there?”
“There’s understanding.” He meant compassion, and his eyes filled. “Does
she ever speak of me?”
It was beginning to rain. Large drops struck softly against the café
window and thinning out ran down upon the sill.
“Oh, yes.”
“And she says?”
“Why are you never satisfied with what you have, Nicholas?”
Nicholas Golwein turned red. “One dish of cream and the cat should lick
his paws into eternity. I suppose one would learn how she felt, if she
feels at all, if one died.”
“Why, yes, I suppose so.”
They looked at each other, Nicholas Golwein in a furtive manner, moving
his lips around his cigar—Nord absently, smiling a little. “Yes, that
would amuse her.”
“What?” Nicholas Golwein paused in his smoking and let his hot eyes rest
on Nord.
“Well, if you can manage it——”
Nicholas Golwein made a gesture, shaking his cuff-links like a
harness—“I can manage it,” he said, wondering what Nord was thinking.
“Of course it’s rather disgusting,” Nord said.
“I know, I know I should go out like a gentleman, but there’s more in me
than the gentleman, there’s something that understands meanness; a Jew
can only love and be intimate with the thing that’s a little abnormal,
and so I love what’s low and treacherous and cunning, because there’s
nobility and uneasiness in it for me—well,” he flung out his arms—“if
you were to say to Nell, ‘He hung himself in the small hours, with a
sheet’—what then? Everything she had ever said to me, been to me, will
change for her—she won’t be able to read those French journals in the
same way, she won’t be able to swallow water as she has always swallowed
it. I know, you’ll say there’s nature and do you know what I’ll answer:
that I have a contempt for animals—just because they do not have to
include Nelly Grissard’s whims in their means to a living conduct—well,
listen, I’ve made up my mind to something”—he became calm all of a
sudden and looked Nord directly in the face.
“Well?”
“I shall follow you up the stairs, stand behind the door, and you shall
say just these words, ‘Nicholas has hung himself.’”
“And then what?”
“That’s all, that’s quite sufficient—then I shall know everything.”
Nord stood up, letting Nicholas open the café door for him.
“You don’t object?” Nicholas Golwein murmured.
Nord laughed a cold, insulting laugh. “It will amuse her——”
Nicholas nodded, “Yes, we’ve held the coarse essentials between our
teeth like good dogs—” he said, trying to be insulting in turn, but it
only sounded pathetic, sentimental.
* * * * *
Without a word passing between them, on the following day, they went up
the stairs of Nelly Grissard’s house, together. The door into the inner
room was ajar, and Nicholas crept in behind this, seating himself on a
little table.
He heard Nord greet Nelly, and Nelly’s voice answering—“Ah, dear”—he
listened no further for a moment, his mind went back, and he seemed to
himself to be peaceful and happy all at once. “A binding up of old
sores,” he thought, a oneness with what was good and simple—with
everything that evil had not contorted.
“Religion,” he thought to himself, resting his chin on his
hands—thinking what religion had meant to all men at all times, but to
no man in his most need. “Religion is a design for pain—that’s it.” Then
he thought, that, like all art, must be fundamentally against God—God
had made his own plans—well, of that later——
Nelly had just said something—there had been a death-like silence, then
her cry, but he had forgotten to listen to what it was that had passed.
He changed hands on his cane. “There is someone in heaven,” he found his
mind saying. The rising of this feeling was pleasant—it seemed to come
from the very centre of his being. “There’s someone in heaven—who?” he
asked himself, “who?” But there was no possible answer that was not
blasphemy.
“Jews do not kill themselves——”
Nelly’s voice. He smiled—there was someone in heaven, but no one here.
“I’m coming,” he murmured to himself—and felt a sensuous giving away in
the promise.
His eyes filled. What was good in death had been used up long ago—now it
was only dull repetition—death had gone beyond the need of death.
Funnily enough he thought of Nelly as she was that evening when she had
something to forgive. He had pulled her toward him by one end of a
burgundy ribbon, “Forgive, forgive,” and she had been kind enough not to
raise him, not to kiss him, saying, “I forgive”—she just stood there
showing her tobacco-stained teeth in a strong laugh, “Judas eliminated.”
He put his hand to his mouth, “I have been _There_,” and _There_ seemed
like a place where no one had ever been. How cruel, how monstrous!
Someone was running around the room, heavy, ponderous. “She always
prided herself on her lightness of foot,” and here she was running like
a trapped animal, making little cries, “By the neck!”—strange words,
horrifying—unreal——
“To be a little meaner than the others, a little more crafty”—well, he
had accomplished that, too.
Someone must be leaning on the couch, it groaned. That took him back to
Boulogne; he had loved a girl once in Boulogne, and once in the dark
they had fallen, it was like falling through the sky, through the stars,
finding that the stars were not only one layer thick, but that there
were many layers, millions of layers, a thickness to them, and a
depth—then the floor—that was like a final promise of something sordid,
but lasting—firm.
Sounds rose from the streets; automobiles going uptown, horses’ hoofs, a
cycle siren,—that must be a child,—long drawn out, and piercing—yes,
only a child would hold on to a sound like that.
“Life is life,” Nelly had just said, firmly, decisively. After all he
had done this well—he had never been able to think of death long, but
now he had thought of it, made it pretty real—he remembered sparrows,
for some unknown reason, and this worried him.
“The line of the hips, simply Renoir over again——”
They were on the familiar subject of art.
The sounds in the room twittered about him like wings in a close garden,
where there is neither night nor day. “There is a power in death, even
the thought of death, that is very terrible and very beautiful——” His
cane slipped, and struck the floor.
“What was that?” the voice of Nelly Grissard was high, excited,
startled——
“A joke.”
Nicholas Golwein suddenly walked into the room.
“A joke,” he said and looked at them both, smiling.
Nelly Grissard, who was on her knees, and who was holding Nord’s shoe in
one hand, stared at him. It seemed that she must have been about to kiss
Nord’s foot.
Nicholas Golwein bowed, a magnificent bow, and was about to go.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Nelly Grissard cried, angrily,
and got to her feet.
He began to stammer: “I—I am leaving town—I wanted to pay my respects——”
“Well, go along with you——”
Nicholas Golwein went out, shutting the door carefully behind him.
PARADISE
This night I’ve been one hour in Paradise;
There found a feather from the Cock that Crew—
There heard the echo of the Kiss that Slew,
And in the dark, about past agonies
Hummed little flies.
NO-MAN’S-MARE
Pauvla Agrippa had died that afternoon at three; now she lay with quiet
hands crossed a little below her fine breast with its transparent skin
showing the veins as filmy as old lace, purple veins that were now only
a system of charts indicating the pathways where her life once flowed.
Her small features were angular with that repose which she had often
desired. She had not wanted to live, because she did not mind death.
There were no candles about her where she lay, nor any flowers. She had
said quite logically to her sisters: “Are there any candles and flowers
at a birth?” They saw the point, but regretted the philosophy, for
buying flowers would have connected them with Pauvla Agrippa, in this,
her new adventure.
Pauvla Agrippa’s hair lay against her cheeks like pats of plated butter;
the long golden ends tucked in and wound about her head and curved
behind her neck. Pauvla Agrippa had once been complimented on her fine
black eyes and this yellow hair of hers, and she had smiled and been
quite pleased, but had drawn attention to the fact that she had also
another quite remarkable set of differences—her small thin arms with
their tiny hands and her rather long narrow feet.
She said that she was built to remain standing; now she could rest.
Her sister, Tasha, had been going about all day, praying to different
objects in search of one that would give her comfort, though she was not
so much grieved as she might have been, because Pauvla Agrippa had been
so curious about all this.
True, Agrippa’s husband seemed lost, and wandered about like a restless
dog, trying to find a spot that would give him relief as he smoked.
One of Pauvla’s brothers was playing on the floor with Pauvla’s baby.
This baby was small and fat and full of curves. His arms curved above
his head, and his legs curved downward, including his picture book and
rattle in their oval. He shouted from time to time at his uncle, biting
the buttons on his uncle’s jacket. This baby and this boy had one thing
in common—a deep curiosity—a sense that somewhere that curiosity would
be satisfied. They had all accomplished something. Pauvla Agrippa and
her husband and her sister and the boy and Pauvla’s baby, but still
there was incompleteness about everything.
Nothing was ever done; there wasn’t such a thing as rest, that was
certain, for the sister still felt that her prayers were not definite,
the husband knew he would smoke again after lunch, the boy knew he was
only beginning something, as the baby also felt it, and Pauvla Agrippa
herself, the seemingly most complete, had yet to be buried. Her body was
confronted with the eternal necessity of change.
It was all very sad and puzzling, and rather nice too. After all, atoms
were the only things that had imperishable existence, and therefore were
the omnipotent quality and quantity—God should be recognized as
something that was everywhere in millions, irrevocable and
ineradicable—one single great thing has always been the prey of the
million little things. The beasts of the jungle are laid low by the
insects. Yes, she agreed that everything was multiple that counted.
Pauvla was multiple now, and some day they would be also. This was the
reason that she wandered from room to room touching things, vases,
candlesticks, tumblers, knives, forks, the holy pictures and statues and
praying to each of them, praying for a great thing, to many presences.
A neighbour from across the way came to see them while Pauvla’s brother
was still playing with the baby. This man was a farmer, once upon a
time, and liked to remember it, as city-bred men in the country like to
remember New York and its sophistication.
He spent his Summers, however, in the little fishing village where the
sisters, Pauvla and Tasha, had come to know him. He always spoke of
“going toward the sea.” He said that there was something more than wild
about the ocean; it struck him as being a little unnatural, too.
He came in now grumbling and wiping his face with a coarse red
handkerchief, remarking on the “catch” and upon the sorrow of the house
of Agrippa, all in the one breath.
“There’s a touch of damp in the air,” he said, sniffing, his nose held
back so that his small eyes gleamed directly behind it. “The fish have
been bad catching and no-man’s-mare is going up the headlands, her tail
stretched straight out.”
Tasha came forward with cakes and tea and paused, praying over them
also, still looking for comfort. She was a small woman, with a round,
wrinkled forehead and the dark eyes of her sister; today she felt
inconvenienced because she could not understand her own feelings—once or
twice she had looked upon the corpse with resentment because it had done
something to Pauvla; however, she was glad to see the old man, and she
prayed to him silently also, to see if it would help. Just what she
prayed for she could not tell; the words she used were simple: “What is
it, what is it?” over and over with her own childhood prayers to end
with.
She had a great deal of the quietness of this village about her, the
quietness that is in the roaring of the sea and the wind, and when she
sighed it was like the sound made of great waters running back to sea
between the narrow sides of little stones.
It was here that she, as well as her brothers and sisters, had been
born. They fished in the fishing season and sold to the market at
one-eighth of the market price, but when the markets went so low that
selling would put the profits down for months, they turned the nets over
and sent the fish back to sea.
Today Tasha was dressed in her ball-gown; she had been anticipating a
local gathering that evening and then Pauvla Agrippa got her heart
attack and died. This dress was low about the shoulders, with flounces
of taffeta, and the sea-beaten face of Tasha rose out of its stiff
elegance like a rock from heavy moss. Now that she had brought the cakes
and tea, she sat listening to this neighbour as he spoke French to her
younger brother.
When they spoke in this strange language she was always surprised to
note that their voices became unfamiliar to her—she could not have told
which was which, or if they were themselves at all. Closing her eyes,
she tried to see if this would make any difference, and it didn’t. Then
she slowly raised her small plump hands and pressed them to her
ears—this was better, because now she could not tell that it was French
that they were speaking, it was sound only and might have been anything,
and again she sighed, and was glad that they were less strange to her;
she could not bear this strangeness today, and wished they would stop
speaking in a foreign tongue.
“What are you saying?” she enquired, taking the teacup in one hand,
keeping the other over her ear.
“Talking about the horse,” he said, and went on.
Again Tasha became thoughtful. This horse that they were speaking about
had been on the sands, it seemed to her, for as long as she could
remember. It was a wild thing belonging to nobody. Sometimes in a coming
storm, she had seen it standing with its head out toward the waters, its
mane flying in the light air, and its thin sides fluttering with the
beating of its heart.
It was old now, with sunken flanks and knuckled legs; it no longer stood
straight—and the hair about its nose had begun to turn grey. It never
interfered with the beach activities, and on the other hand it never
permitted itself to be touched. Early in her memory of this animal,
Tasha had tried to stroke it, but it had started, arched its neck and
backed away from her with hurried jumping steps. Many of the ignorant
fisherfolk had called it the sea horse and also “no-man’s-mare.” They
began to fear it, and several of them thought it a bad omen.
Tasha knew better—sometimes it would be down upon the pebbly part of the
shore, its head laid flat as though it were dead, but no one could
approach within fifty feet without its instantly leaping up and standing
with its neck thrust forward and its brown eyes watching from beneath
the coarse lashes.
In the beginning people had tried to catch it and make it of use.
Gradually everyone in the village had made the attempt; not one of them
had ever succeeded.
The large black nostrils were always wet, and they shook as though
someone were blowing through them—great nostrils like black flowers.
This mare was old now and did not get up so often when approached. Tasha
had been as near to it as ten paces, and Pauvla Agrippa had once
approached so near that she could see that its eyes were failing, that a
thin mist lay over its right eyeball, so that it seemed to be flirting
with her, and this made her sad and she hurried away, and she thought,
“The horse had its own defence; when it dies it will be so horrifying
perhaps that not one of us will approach it.” Though many had squabbled
about which of them should have its long beautiful tail.