I should probably, in my own flaccid way, have lost all track of Susan,
if it had not been for certain ugly things that befell in Bob's
four-room house one breathless evening--June twentieth of the year 1907.
It is a date stamped into my consciousness like a notarial seal. For one
thing it happened to be my birthday--my thirty-third, which I was not
precisely celebrating, since it was also the anniversary of the day my
wife had left me, two years before. Nor was I entirely pleased to have
become, suddenly, thirty-three. I counted it the threshold of
middle-age. Now that eleven years have passed, and with them my health
and the world's futile pretense at peace, I am feeling younger.
This book is about Susan, but it will be simpler if you know something,
too, concerning her scribe. Fortunately there is not much that it will
be needful to tell.
I was--in those bad, grossly comfortable old days--that least happy of
Nature's experiments, a man whose inherited income permitted him to be
an idler, and whose tastes urged him to write precious little essays
about precious little for the more precious reviews. My half-hearted
attempt to practice law I had long abandoned. I lived in a commodious,
inherited mansion on Hillhouse Avenue--an avenue which in all fairness
must be called aristocratic, since it has no wrong end to it. It is
right at both ends, so, naturally, though broad, it is not very long. My
grandfather, toward the end of a profitably ill-spent life, built this
mansion of sad-colored stone in a somewhat mixed Italian style; my
father filled it with expensive and unsightly movables--the spoils of a
grand European tour; and I, in my turn, had emptied it of these
treasures and refilled it with my own carefully chosen collection of
rare furniture, rare Oriental carpets, rare first editions, and costly
_objets d'art_. This collection I then anxiously believed, and do still
in part believe, to be beautiful--though I am no longer haunted by an
earlier fear lest the next generation should repudiate my taste and
reverse my opinion. Let the auction rooms of 1960 decide. Neither in
flesh nor in spirit shall I attend them.
The tragi-comedy of my luckless marriage I shall not stop here to
explain, but its rather mysterious ending had at first largely cut me
off from my old family friends and my socially correct acquaintances.
When Gertrude left me, their sympathies, or their sense of security,
went with her. I can hardly blame them. There had been no glaring
scandal, but the fault was inferentially mine. To speak quite brutally,
I did not altogether regret their loss. Too many of them had bored me
for too many years. I was glad to rely more on the companionship of
certain writers and painters which my scribbling had quietly won for me,
here and in France. I traveled about a good deal. When at home, I kept
my guest rooms filled--often, in the horrid phrase, with "visitors of
distinction."
In this way I became a social problem, locally, of some magnitude.
Visitors of distinction--even when of eccentric distinction--cannot
easily be ignored in a university town. Thus it made it a little
awkward, perhaps, that I should so often prove to be their host; a
little--less, on the whole, than one would suppose. Within two
years--just following Ballou's brief stay with me, on his way to
introduce that now forgotten nine-days wonder, Polymorphous Prose, among
initiates of the Plymouth Rock Poetry Guild, at Boston--my slight
remaining ineligibility was tacitly and finally ignored. The old family
friends began to hint that Gertrude, though a splendid woman, had always
been a little austere. Possibly there were faults on both sides. One
never knew.
And it was just at this hour of social reestablishment that my birthday
swung round again, for the thirty-third time, and brought with it a
change in my outer life which was to lead on to even greater changes in
all my modes of thinking and feeling. Odd, that a drunken quarrel in a
four-room house toward the wrong end of Birch Street could so affect the
destiny of a luxurious _dilettante_, living at the very center of bonded
respectability, in a mansion of sad-colored stone, on a short broad
avenue which is right at both ends!
V
"Never in this (obviously outcast) world!" grumbled Bob Blake, bringing
his malletlike fist down on the marble top of the parlor table.
The blow made his half-filled glass jump and clinkle; so he emptied it
slowly, then poured in four fingers more, forgetting to add water this
time, and sullenly pushed the bottle across to Pearl. But Pearl was
fretful. Her watery blue eyes were fixed upon the drumhead of the banjo,
where it hung suspended above the melodeon.
"I did so paint them flowers. And well you know it. What's the good of
bein' so mean? If you wasn't heeled you'd let me have it my way. Didn't
I bring that banjo with me?"
"Hungh! Say you did. What does that prove?"
"I guess it proves somethin', all right."
"Proves you swiped it, likely."
"Me! I ain't that kind, thanks."
"The hell you ain't."
"If you're tryin' to get gay, cut it out!"
"Not me."
"Well, then--quit!"
This was shortly after supper. It was an unusually hot, humid evening;
doors and windows stood open to no purpose; and Susan was sitting out on
the monolithic door slab, fighting off mosquitoes. She found that this
defensive warfare partly distracted her from the witless, interminable
bickering within. Moreover, the striated effluvia of whisky, talcum
powder, and perspiration had made her head feel a little queer. By
comparison, the fetid breath from the exposed mud banks of the salt
marsh was almost refreshing.
Possibly it was because her head did feel a little queer that Susan
began presently to wonder about things. Between her days at the
neighboring public school and her voluntary rounds of housework, Susan
had not of late years had much waking time to herself. In younger and
less crowded hours, before her father had been informed by the
authorities that he must either send his child to school or take the
consequences, Susan had put in all her spare moments at wondering. She
would see a toad in the back yard, for example, under a plantain leaf,
and she would begin to wonder. She would wonder what it felt like to be
a toad. And before very long something would happen to her, inside, and
she would _be_ a toad. She would have toad thoughts and toad
feelings.... There would stretch above her a dim, green, balancing
canopy--the plantain leaf. All about her were soaring, translucent
fronds--the grass. It was cool there under the plantain leaf; but she
was enormously fat and ugly, her brain felt like sooty cobwebs, and
nobody loved her.
Still, she didn't care much. She could feel her soft gray throat, like
a blown-into glove finger, pulsing slowly--which was almost as soothing
a sensation as letting the swing die down. It made her feel as if
Someone--some great unhappy cloudlike Being--were making up a song, a
song about most everything; chanting it sleepily to himself--or was it
_herself_?--somewhere; and as if she were part of this beautiful,
unhappy song. But all the time she knew that if that white fluffy
restlessness--that moth miller--fluttered only a little nearer among
those golden-green fronds, she knew if it reached the cool rim of her
plantain shade, she knew, then, that something terrible would happen to
her--knew that something swift and blind, that she couldn't help, would
coil deep within her like a spring and so launch her forward,
open-jawed. It was awful--awful for the moth miller--but she couldn't
_not_ do it. She was a toad....
And it was the same with her father. There were things he couldn't not
do. She could be--sitting very still in a corner--_be_ her father, when
he was angry; and she knew he couldn't help it. It was just a dark slow
whirling inside, with red sparks flying swiftly out from it. And it hurt
while it lasted. Being her father like that always made her sorry for
him. But she wished, and she felt he must often wish, that he couldn't
be at all. There were lots of live things that would be happier if they
weren't live things; and _if_ they weren't, Susan felt, the great
cloudlike Being would be less unhappy too.
Naturally, I am giving you Susan's later interpretations of her
pre-schoolday wonderings; and a number of you would gasp a little,
knowing what firm, delicate imaginings all Susan Blake's later
interpretations were, if I should give you her pen name as well--which I
have promised myself not to do. This is not an official study of a young
writer of peculiar distinction; it is merely an unpretending book about
a little girl I knew and a young married woman I still know--one and the
same person. It is what I have named it--that only: _The Book of Susan_.
Meanwhile, this humid June night--to the sordid accompaniment of Bob
and Pearl snarling at each other half-drunkenly within--Susan waits for
us on the monolithic door slab; and there is a new wonder in her dizzy
little head. I can't do better than let her tell you in her own words
what this new wonder was like.
"Ambo, dear"--my name, by the way, is Ambrose Hunt; Captain Hunt, of the
American Red Cross, at the present writing, which I could date from a
sleepy little village in Southern France--"Ambo, dear, it was the moon,
mostly. There was a pink bud of light in the heat mist, way off beyond
East Rock, and then the great wild rose of the moon opened slowly
through it. Papa, inside, was sounding just like a dog when he's
bullying another dog, walking up on the points of his toes, stiff
legged, round him. So I tried to escape, tried to be the moon; tried to
feel floaty and shining and beautiful, and--and remote. But I couldn't
manage it. I never could make myself be anything not alive. I've tried
to be stones, but it's no good. It won't work. I can be trees--a little.
But usually I have to be animals, or men and women--and of course
they're animals too.
"So I began wondering why I liked the moon, why just looking at it made
me feel happy. It couldn't talk to me; or love me. All it could do was
to be up there, sometimes, and shine. Then I remembered about mythology.
Miss Chisholm, in school, was always telling us about gods and
goddesses. She said we were children, so we could recreate the gods for
ourselves, because they belonged to the child age of the world. She
talked like that a lot, in a faded-leaf voice, and none of us ever
understood her. The truth is, Ambo, we never paid any attention to her;
she smiled too much and too sadly, without meaning it; and her eyelashes
were white. All the same, that night somehow I remembered Artemis, the
virgin moon goddess, who slipped silently through dark woods at dusk,
hunting with a silvery bow. Being a virgin seemed to mean that you
didn't care much for boys. But I did always like boys better than girls,
so I decided I could never be a virgin. And yet I loved the thought of
Artemis from that moment. I began to think about her--oh,
intensely!--always keeping off by herself; cool, and shining, and--and
detached. And there was one boy she _had_ cared for; I remembered that,
too, though I couldn't remember his name. A naked, brown sort of boy,
who kept off by himself on blue, distant hills. So Artemis wasn't really
a virgin at all. She was just--awfully particular. She liked clean, open
places, and the winds, and clear, swift water. What she hated most was
_stuffiness_! That's why I decided then and there, Ambo, that Artemis
should be my goddess, my own pet goddess; and I made up a prayer to her.
I've never forgotten it. I often say it still....
_Dearest, dearest Far-Away,
Can you hear me when I pray?
Can you hear me when I cry?
Would you care if I should die?
No, you wouldn't care at all;
But I love you most of all._
"It isn't very good, Ambo, but it's the first rhyme I ever made up out
of my own head. And I just talked it right off to Artemis without any
trouble. But I had hardly finished it, when----"
What had happened next was the crash of glassware, followed by Bob's
thick voice, bellowing: "C'm ba' here! Damned slut! Tell yeh t' c'm ba'
an'--an' 'pol'gize!"
Susan heard a strangling screech from Pearl, the jar of a heavy piece of
furniture overturned. The child's first impulse was to run out into
Birch Street and scream for help. She tells me her spine knew all at
once that something terrible had happened--or was going to happen. Then,
in an odd flash of hallucination, she saw _Artemis_ poised the
fleetingest second before her--beautiful, a little disdainful, divinely
unafraid. So Susan gulped, dug her nails fiercely into her palms, and
hurried back through the parlor into the kitchen, where she stumbled
across the overturned table and fell, badly bruising her cheek.
As she scrambled to her feet a door slammed to, above. Her father, in a
grotesque crouching posture, was mounting the ladderlike stair. On the
floor at the stair's foot lay the parchment head of Pearl's banjo, which
he had cut from its frame. Susan distinctly caught the smudged pinks and
blues of the nondescript flowers. She realized at once that her father
was bound on no good errand. And Pearl was trapped. Susan called to her
father, daringly, a little wildly. He slued round to her, leaning
heavily on the stair rail, his face green-white, his lips held back by
some evil reflex in a fixed, appalling grin.
It was the face of a madman.... He raised his right hand, slowly, and a
tiny prismatic gleam darted from the blade of an opened razor--one of
his precious set of six. He had evidently used it to destroy the banjo
head, which he would never have done in his right mind. But now he made
a shocking gesture with the blade, significant of other uses; then
turned, crouching once more, to continue upward. Susan tried to cry out,
tried to follow him, until the room slid from its moorings into a
whirlpool of humming blackness....
* * * * *
That is all Susan remembers for some time. It is just as well.