Blue Voyage: A Novel (13 page)

ISERY
. Last night as I lay on my pillow—last night as I lay on my bed—last night as I lay on my pillow—I dreamed that my bonnie was dead … You know the story of Strindberg and the mouse? He was terrified by an electric influence, an evil stream, which everywhere pursued and persecuted him. It came through walls, aiming at his heart. He hid his head in the pillow, but the malevolent stream came up through the bed. He ran out into the hall and lay down by the banisters—but a mouse trotted up close to him and looked into his face: and he fled screaming. I am Strindberg. I look at his photograph and a feeling of self-love and self-pity, a profound narcissistic compassion and tenderness, comes over me. Those harassed and noble temples, the tortured deep-seeing eyes, the magnificent head, the small mouth, which is the mouth of the child and of the adder!… I am wise, I am weak, I am persecuted; I am unlucky, I am beautiful, I am strong.
Der Gekreuzigte
. I love my own body. When I was a youth, I used to stand naked before a tall glass, or walk gracefully toward it, transported by the beauty I saw, the exquisitely flexing muscles of abdomen and calf and thigh, the suave Greek brow, the candid eyes. Ah, the profile of the body, with the ribs arched, the lean hollow curve of the belly! The lightly hung and powerful arms, the hands large, fair and strong as those of the David! This is what is now rejected and despised. Therefore it is not beautiful. It is obscene, gross, despicable. It is a whited sepulcher; a mass of secret corruption, of filthy juices and clots of half-destroyed food; an infirmary sicklied o’er with the pale cast of consciousness. I have always been one in whose consciousness illusion and disilluson flashed simultaneously. My hand remains still, because it releases even before it has grasped. Are you listening, Moon? Are you listening, chaste Nymph? I am on the first-class deck beside you, wearing pearl-gray spats, carrying gloves and a silver-topped cane of malacca, a gardenia in my buttonhole. There is no obstacle between us, you are not in love with another man, you have all this time been secretly in love with me. I am your social equal (indeed your superior) and my stick is really the wand of Trismagistus.
How pleasant! Oh, how exquisite! Thy beauty framed for sweet delight! Thy stature like an upright palm! Thy breasts like clusters dropping balm
!…
I my Belov’d first raisèd thee From under the pomecitron tree; Thy careful mother in that shade With anguish her fair belly laid …
Queen and huntress, are you listening?… Listening, but bored, wood louse … I was in a hurry—I hadn’t time to explain to you—I would like to explain to you—explain everything. I had no right on the first-cabin deck, of course—I am in the second cabin. Poverty. Poor but proud. I have often, for that matter, traveled in the steerage. I believe in being democratic, don’t you? I remember you said your brother William … always got along well with people of humble origin … Yes … So do I … I like them. Queer creatures, often, aren’t they? I really like them better than most people of my own class. Why then, apologize for liking them—or why claim it as a virtue?
Tee hee
—nervous giggle. I believe you are a snob, Cynthia. I remember my friend Giles, who met you at a dance in Oyster Bay—Oyster Bay!—said “Battiloro? Oh yes. I remember. An awful snob—looked down her nose at everybody!… One of those damned English snobs.” Ha ha! Apparently you had been rather cool to poor good-natured Giles, Giles with his loud bark and perpetually wagging tail, Giles who at college was known as “Susie.” Poor Giles, a failure at everything, but so disarming, so ingenuous, so eager to please, so nice! How had you the heart to be cruel to him? Are you cruel, Cynthia? Or was it that you thought
him
a snob? Well—perhaps a little. He probably tried a little too hard to show you how much he knew about England, and how many “fish heads” he knew there … Lady Rustlebottom of the Mount, Torquay. Et cetera … He bought a blazer especially for the purpose and spent a weekend there … I was in a hurry—I hadn’t time to explain—I must explain—all—everything—Smith, for example. You probably noticed at once that Smith is not a “gentleman”—in the accepted sense. The way he cocks that absurd great tweed hat! His dingy clerical-looking clothes, and his shoes humped at the toes! A mere ship’s acquaintance, a rather interesting little character. You wouldn’t like him—he would bore you—but you would like to hear about him, the salient features of his career brightly related by Demarest. Of course, you aren’t a very good judge of character! You remember Wetherall? You said, “What a really charming face he has. I’m sure he’s awfully nice!” Ah! The joke was on you. Wetherall was at the moment seducing a little trained nurse who was on board—he told me at every meal of his progress, and dear Billington was so shocked that he could hardly eat … One of their difficulties was that she had two roommates … But the weather, you remember, was warm, they stayed late on deck, and there was no moon. Also, they did not attend the ship’s concert. Wetherall described it all to me—every detail, his kind brown eyes humorously bright, his Bradford accent at its very best. What a curious pleasure it gave me to share in that secret conquest, so passionate, so frankly carnal, so frankly obscene, and so laconically casual, while at the same moment I was conscious of falling in love with you, and falling in love in a sense so antithetical, so ethereal! While Wetherall was turning wine into blood, I was turning blood into wine. Yes. It was magnificent. A slow and beautiful counter-point. Wetherall the bass and you the treble. You remember that afternoon when I encountered you at the foot of the companionway?—you were carrying a book—it was a book of Negro spirituals—and you smiled, and then immediately looked away, frowning, at the sea. You hesitated as if—you were perhaps really going somewhere, you had an errand, you didn’t want me to suppose that … you in any way sought my company. I, too, hesitated—as if I knew that my company could not be of much interest to you, and yet—might we not pause together for a moment, touch our wings together in the air? And besides I—and perhaps you, too (we discussed this problem—so peculiar to ships—a few days later in the train to London, in the light of the queer implicit intimacy which by then had sprung up between us) feared that you might think me trying to avoid you—it is so difficult, on a ship, to avoid the appearance of persecution, or, on the other hand, of avoidance!… “Have you been reading?” I said, and you answered, “I’ve been trying to—but it’s so extraordinarily difficult, on a ship, to
concentrate!…
I’ve had to give it up” … I too had found it difficult—even with
The Spoils of Poynton
. I told you of this, and we discussed Henry James, standing there, as we did so, a little uneasy with each other, or, as Mandeville (is it Mandeville?) puts it, in a mammering and at a stay. And then, taking my flimsy life in my hands, I said, “Shall we go up on the boat deck and concentrate
together
? It’s rather nice forward of the bridge …” Singular and daring remark! You half smiled and turned, we ascended the companionway; and at the forward end of the deck, leaning our backs against the old plates of the
Silurian,
which we could feel buckling as the ship plunged, we talked deliciously for an hour, for two hours. And do you know what gave, for me, a special exquisiteness to that talk? It was my fresh sharp recollection of my conversation at lunch with Wetherall. Behind that forward lifeboat, on the starboard side—where later we played a game of chess, the young student of architecture watching us—behind that lifeboat, the evening before, Wetherall and Miss Kirkpatrick had lain together till one o’clock. They had been discovered and reprimanded. Of all this, naturally, you knew nothing; and still less could you conceive the nature of Wetherall’s confidences to me. You would be astounded—horrified! The grossness of the human being! And the vulgar candor with which one man to another confesses it! Wetherall informed me that Miss Kirkpatrick was, up till then, “inexperienced.” But, setting out for a two months’ holiday in Scotland and Belfast, she had in advance made up her mind that, should a sufficiently attractive man be available, she would give herself to him. Wetherall—a married man, with a daughter of eight—had been the lucky man. He had noticed from the outset that she smiled at him a good deal, and somewhat intensely. On the second evening he kissed her—and as he remarked, “Didn’t she come up to it?… O
Boy
!…” But I give you the impression—are you listening, Cynthia?… Still listening, earthworm … I give you the impression—partly a wrong impression—that this organ point, supplied for our intercourse by Wetherall, was unalloyedly pleasant. No no no no no. Good God. This is precisely what I don’t want you to think. It reminded me, certainly, of my own obscenity; but it also served to show me already the immense altitude of my—flight! Wetherall was precisely what I was proposing, with your support, to leave behind. More precisely still, what I was leaving behind was Helen Shafter: coarse, voluptuous, conscious, witty Helen, who had so ungovernable an appetite for the farcical, and who had so skillfully and swiftly and horribly exposed the essential fleshliness of “love between the sexes!” Yes. The experience was horrible. And how even more horrible was it to come thus to you, before whom I so passionately longed to stand with something of Parsifal’s mindless innocence, bearing on brow and palms the stigmata of that crucifixion!… M
ISERY
… And what intricacy of fate brings it about that again it is from a meeting with Helen that I come to you, and that as I passed you twice on the deck this evening it was of our so miserable affair—Helen’s and mine—that I was foolishly boasting to a total stranger? Is it possible that you overheard it?… Well, that is what I am … Even supposing that we could have … even supposing that you could have …
loved
me, it is impossible that I should always have been able to deceive you—sooner or later I should have had to drop the pretense (so skillful) of refinement and idealism and innocence; you would have seen me for the Caligula that I am … Somebody out in the corridor—a stewardess giggling. And a steward. Mrs. Antherton. “No—NO!” and then a little appealing laugh, ending abruptly in “
M-m-m
,” and then the stifled laugh again. Tompkins is kissing Mrs. Atherton. Intervene, Cynthia! This sort of thing shouldn’t be permitted on shipboard. Now it is Tompkins—I know his voice. “What did he say, eh? What did he say?…” “None of your business …” “Well, I don’t give a damn
what
he said—he can stick it up—the flue” … “
Sh
!” What’s the matter with you? This ain’t inspection time” … “No, but somebody might hear you …”
Murmur murmur murmur
… For God’s sake speak up! I’d like to get to the bottom of this … “and said I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him any more …” “… drunk the first twenty-four hours anyway—lying like a log in his bunk with a wet towel …” “It isn’t the first time either. Voyage before last they had to fetch him … Carter and St. Clair it was … wife … she was standing outside there looking …”
Murmur murmur murmur
. Pause. Have they gone, or is he kissing her again? Have to do it like this, poor devils—on the q.t., late at night. Snatches between watches under hatches … “Good night, then.” “Good night, sweet dreams.” “Cheerio.” Gone: a rustle of starched calico, muffled footsteps, and gone. The Irish girl is breathing heavily and slowly—asleep. What is she dreaming of? Pittsburgh. She is in uncle William’s house in Pittsburgh. Uncle William has grown a black beard, horrible, too long, obscenely alive. His mouth, seen through it, is unfamiliarly round and red, like a great red rose, but too opulent and fleshly, almost mucous. He sits and looks at her. Then he begins speaking harshly and says over and over again, “Thy belly is as an heap of wheat” … Yes. Everywhere this motif—everywhere. You too, Cynthia—who knows? What concupiscent preoccupations, only fleetingly conscious and perhaps obscure, do you perpetually conceal? Eunice—until once I laughed—used to tell me her dreams. She dreamed one night that she was a nun, in a convent. A fire broke out. The nuns ran into the corridors, looking for the fire, but only finding dense clouds of smoke pouring up the stairs. They ran down the stairs, and coming at length to the celler, could see through the smoke every now and then a fitful glare of flame in what appeared to be a deep hole, or arched cave, at one side of the cellar, a sort of underground entrance. The nuns dragged a garden hose down the stairs, thrust the brass nozzle into the cavern, and the fire began to go out … Darling Eunice … I wish she hadn’t got married … disappeared. “Don’t look at me like that!” she said—that was one night when we had dinner on the roof garden. We were falling in love. Blue taffeta. Those sleeves of a sort of gauze. That night she was suddenly sick in the street, and closing her eyes said, “
Oh,
I can’t even love you a
little
bit … so … sorry!” … Then the time we were standing at midnight in the dark portico of the church—the church with the angels blowing trumpets from the tower … We thought we were concealed … but Eunice murmured too much when I put my hand … and the policeman … Good God what a fright he gave us … “Move on, now! haven’t you got any better place than that?…” How delightful to remember it. I wonder if Eunice, married, lying beside her husband, thinks about me sometimes? She liked me, we were happy. But I couldn’t see her often enough. “No—” she said, “this time you mustn’t kiss me … I’m going to be married!” … M
ISERY
. Absurd, if I could face Eunice’s departure with so much equanimity, that this about Cynthia … Different … Not much intellectual or esthetic companionship with Eunice—well-matched emotionally and physically (and her sense of humor—delicious! and her courage!), but not otherwise. My longing to see her now is largely nostalgic. Still—I was frightfully fond of her … With Cynthia—so extraordinarily at one in all things—a kind of shorthand of understanding at the very beginning …
Tschunk
. The lights in the corridor are off. Dark. The engines throbbing; late, the night shift of stokers; sweating like a lot of firelit demons. The shaft, all the way through the ship, gleaming, revolving—ectoplasm. Somebody coming. Faubion? Light! Must be the watchman with a flashlight. At his priestlike task—of bold intrusion … Ship, I am on a ship. Cynthia is on board, but in the first cabin. Shall I transfer to the first cabin? Money enough; just barely. But nothing left for tips and drinks and the train to London. It would look too pointed. Cynthia is on board. Incredible! Anticlimax!… How am I going to see her? Walk boldly into the first cabin looking for her? Besides, under the circumstances, do I want to see her? It would be useless. It would be “pleasant”? Good God … After all these dreams of ships, too! Always looking for Cynthia on ships … When I get to London, I won’t dare to go and see her. No point in it. Spoiled. The whole thing spoiled. The world pulled down and wrecked. Better be like Smith and gather my rosebuds while I may … Poor old Smith! The cherub, in pink pajamas, sleeps surrounded by Faubion’s heliotrope-smelling dresses, and dreams he is dancing with chorus girls. Lottie, Flo, Hyacintha, Vyolette, Dol, Maybelle, Parthenia. They all dance frou-frouishly around him, squealing, ring around a rosy, joining hands, and Cherub Smith stands in the middle, in the grass, with his finger in his mouth, looking coy.