Blue Voyage: A Novel (15 page)

ISERY
…
Can never change the swan’s black legs to white
. Curious I should have opened to that line when I tried the
sortes Shakespeareanae
. The devilish
double entendre
. Swan—ugly duckling—play-wright=compensation. Black legs=black leg=rotter=inferiority. My abiding sense of sin. The feeling of being dishonest and filthy. This is probably the cause of my curious failure in all human relationships. This is why I try to write plays. This is why, when I feel a friendship failing, feel myself failing to attract or hold by means of personal charm (a fake), I begin trying to
impress
—let my plays fight my personal battles for me. Take my new play MS. to Cynthia tomorrow. Yes—the impulse is perfectly clear.
This
is what I can do—
this
is the angelic sort of being I am! Read and admire! Sound me and wonder! I sit near you with eyes modestly downcast while you read. You wouldn’t think, to look at me, that this rather harmless nice creature harbored in his soul such a shattering power … How disgusting!… Never, never again will I show my work
personally
to a living soul. Publish it, get it performed—yes, since that seems to be the mechanism by which I preserve my sanity. But employ it as a secondary sexual characteristic—a bloodshot erect crest—a rainbow-eyed tail—a mating call!… The Bulgarian weasel. That hideous tramp on the stage who said he would now give an imitation of the cry of the young Bulgarian weasel to its mother. “Mommer!…” in a quiet restrained voice. “Mommer!” … It was during the same performance that the Russian girl, playing the xylophone, looked at me so fixedly and invitingly. Did I go round by the stage door? Can’t remember. Probably not … Perhaps it’s because I fear my rainbow tail won’t be liked, won’t make a sufficient impression——? That would simply add, of course, to my ruling sense of inferiority … I wonder what it was about me that always made people laugh. In streets … On street cars … How I hated to get into street cars or trains, facing all the staring people! Probably only my self-consciousness and sheepishness and furtiveness that attracted attention? Then I would blush. Always blushing—with a sense of guilt, of having been found out … Does your mother know you’re out? That was when I had on that gray Norfolk suit. It probably
did
make me look absurd—with my pale little chinquapin of a face, and sorrowful baby eyes … I went home and looked at myself in the glass, trying to discover what was wrong. As usual, I looked admiringly, lovingly, into my deep deep violet orbs. The eyes of a great man. All-seeing and all-knowing. All-suffering and all-saying … She returned the fifth act without comment—except that she didn’t understand it. “I’m like the servant girl,” she said, “who remarked, when … ‘I don’t
presume
to understand’ …” On board—Cynthia on board, stretched out in a sea berth. Like a dead fish. “It’s rather nice—” she was saying to Billington as I approached—“to be seasick, and just lie there feeling like a dead fish!” … “But I don’t
like
to feel like a dead fish!” I cried, and she gave her exquisite swift laugh, gay and understanding. Ah Psyche from the regions which.
And turn, and toss her brown delightful head
. The conspiracy against poor Billington, to preserve her from his boring attentions. “You owe me a vote of thanks … I sidetracked—took him firmly by the arm just as he was starting toward you … and walked him round the upper deck for over an hour …” She was grateful … She rewarded me later by telling me of poor Billington’s desperate efforts to get himself invited to come and see her aunt in London—he tried in various ways to find out where she lived. Cynthia, leaning over the Irish sea, laughed lightly, slightly—in the act of gently deriding Billington, she contrived to say, “You see—I take
you
for granted—that
you
should come to see us is admitted! Isn’t it?” Yes. And this paved the way. “Shall I encounter you in London, I wonder?” Off Holyhead; the pilot putting out; his sail tossing in the white southwest sea. “Well—if you should go to Battersea Bridge—and turn to the left—and see a shabby little house with that number on it—and ring the bell——!” “I shall do all as instructed” … That afternoon—I saw her sitting in her deck chair, wrapped in the brown steamer rug, a book opened on her lap. Billington—hm—yes—was
kneeling
on the deck beside her, talking, oh so very earnestly, with all of his little academic intellect. What about?—poetry? He had been writing a sonnet series, “
Sonnets to Beatrice
.” As he talked, wagging a finger, he occasionally emphasized the point by touching, with that forefinger, her rug-covered knee. A damned outrage. I was furious. Cynthia—how saturnine, how somberly and unutterably scornful and bored she looked. Twice, when I passed, I saw him do it. Odd that it should have so sickened me. I sat in the smoking room, absolutely trembling with rage and disgust. Partly jealousy? I would have liked to be able to do it myself?… No no no no no. Yes yes yes yes yes … It’s true—forgive me … but only partly true. I would have liked to be
able
to do it, but
not
to do it—to be sufficiently free from self-consciousness, that is. To touch Cynthia’s knee! Good God. Playing chess, I used to forget everything, as we sat cross-legged on the stone-scrubbed deck, and watch her hands. How fearfully beautiful they were, how intelligent, as they lay at rest or moved meditatively to king or queen. The gentle frown—the dark absorption. Her Italian blood. Italian nobility, I wonder? Italian+American=English. She introduced me to her father there on the station platform at Euston. “Father, this is Mr. Demarest—who played chess with me …” The delightful broken accent, the kind and wise face, the greeting at once intimate—“And dances? You had lots of dances on board?” “No—no dances!” “You see, there wasn’t any orchestra!” “Ah! Oh! What a pity!” … It was after that that I went and sat all afternoon in Hyde Park, unhappy. By the waters of Serpentine I sat down and wept. The separation: it was as if half of me had been cut away. How soon could I decently go to see her? Not before a week or two. No. She would be busy—busy seeing all the rich and rare people whom she knew so much better than she knew me. Distinguished people, people of social brilliance, wits, artists, men famous all over the world—how indeed could she allow herself to be bothered by me? I would never dare to go … But after her invitation—I couldn’t dare not to go. I would tremble on the doorstep—tremble and stammer. And what, I wondered was the English formula—“Is Miss Battiloro at home?” “Is Miss Battiloro in?” And suppose a lot of others were there, or a tea party! It would be frightful—I would make an idiot of myself, I would be alternately dumb and silly: just as when I used to call on Anita. The whole day beforehand I was in anguish, wondering whether I would go, whether I would telephone. That time when Anita’s mother answered, and I suddenly, from acute shyness, hung up the receiver in the middle of a conversation!… But of course I
must
go and see Cynthia—otherwise it would be—impossible to live. I gave her
The Nation
as I passed her compartment in the train at Lime Street—“Why, where did you get this?” Delight and surprise. Then later, an hour out of Liverpool, she brought it back—as a suggestion that I might talk to her? “May I?” “Rather!” Her aunt, sleeping opposite, with crumbs on her outspread silken lap, opening her eyes a moment, smiling, and sleepily proffering the folded chessboard, which we declined, looking at each other gaily. Then—no, it was before—we were standing in the corridor, watching the English fields rush by—daisies, buttercups, campion. The hedges in bloom. “I think,” she said, “heaven will be that—a green bank covered with buttercups!” … “Well—heaven might be
worse
than that!” M
ISERY
… And then I went after three days! That was my first mistake … Or no … The first mistake was my going there the day before, in the morning,
just to see her house
! Incredible mawkish folly! Suppose she had seen me? Perhaps she did. Well—there it was. Which window was hers? At the top? A young man coming out, and I crossed to the other side with face averted. Brother, perhaps. Or someone she knew, had known for years. A friend of her brother’s. A cousin. A cousin from Italy. That young artist she had talked about—Rooker … The child crying again—
A a a a h h h … oo … oo … ooo … aaaahhhh
—
oo—oo—oo—oo
. A child crying at sea, crying in the infinite,
noia immortale,
cosmic grief. Grief is my predominant feeling—why, then, in talk, am I so persistently frivolous? flippant? Probably for that very reason. “Demarest has the ‘crying face’”—it was Weng, the Chinese student, who said that. The eyelids are a trifle weary. I wonder why it is. It had never occurred to me before that—it shows how little one is able to see the character of one’s own face. And that day when I said something, jokingly, to M. about “my mild and innocent blue eye,” he replied quite savagely and unexpectedly, “Your eye is blue, but it is neither
mild
nor
innocent
!” Astounding! My eye was not the timid little thing I had always supposed? And good heavens—not innocent! I didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. But it radically altered my conception of myself, and helped me in my painful effort to acquire assurance …
Aaaahhh … oo … oo … oo … oo …
Poor thing—everything horribly unfamiliar. It’s probably crying because it misses one familiar trifle—the light in the wrong place, or the wrong color; the bed too dark; the smell; the humming in the ventilators; the throb, so menacingly regular, of the ship’s engines. Or a shawl, which was perhaps left behind. Everything combining to produce a feeling of frightful homesickness and lostness. The way that kitten must have felt, when we told Martha to “get rid of it”—instead of having it killed she put it down in the street and left it. Poor little creature … It was used to us … Its funny long-legged way of walking, the hind legs still a little uncertain! It liked to catapult back and forth in the hall after dusk; or catching moths. And that night, when it rained and blew all night, shaking the house—where was it? Mewing somewhere to be let in. Lost. How much did it remember, I wonder—how much did it
consciously
remember? A lot, probably. A warm and happy place with kind people whom it trusted—irrecoverably lost. Paradise lost.
Where are they—where is that wonderful house
? Ask the policeman. Good God it was a cruel thing to do—to take it in for a few weeks and then put it out in the streets like that. How horrible the suffering of any young thing can be. Speechless suffering, suffering that does not understand—the child punished by the parent whose nerves are on edge. Struck for reasons which it cannot conceive—dogs and cats the same way. Man’s inhumanity to dogs and cats. Cattle too, driven into the abattoir—no wonder there are complaints by the S.P.C.A. “Those who eat meat do not realize that it is not invariably at the first blow of the poleax——” etc. Falling down on their knees and bleeding, looking at man with surprise—that look ought to be enough to destroy the human race.
Lex talionis
. Cruelty is inevitable—all that one can possibly do is to minimize it. We could live on nuts and vegetables—but I go right on eating beefsteaks just the same … The consciousness, though, of a lost kitten—what an extraordinary thing it must be. I suppose it’s exactly like ours, except that it can’t be partly linguistic—probably almost wholly visual, a kaleidoscopic series of pictures. Memory? Hm. Not so easy. Perhaps in that case all it really felt was the terrifying unfamiliarity, strangeness, and of course the discomfort. It would be sentimental to ascribe any more than that—to think of it as being as aware as
I
was, thinking in bed about it, of the wildness of the night, the wind, the strange shutters banging on strange walls of strange houses, the torn puddles under lamplight, the deluge of driven rain rattling against windows, solid water sousing down from eaves. Yes, I remember how sharply and dreadfully I visualized it—seeing the black street blattering with water, a green shutter hanging from one hinge—and refusing (shutting my eyes) to visualize the kitten as somewhere
out in it
—damned cowardice, sentimental cowardice!… I remember getting out of bed early in the morning and tiptoeing down to the back door to let in the maltese. The time my father scolded me for it. “Don’t ever do it again, understand!… I thought it was someone who had broken into the house—a thief—and I very nearly shot you … Next time, I
will
shoot you!” … Perhaps
that’s
the source—that extraordinary cruelty both to the kitten and to me. I can’t remember what I felt about it at the time—but it must have been appalling. That’s the sort of thing, in one’s childhood, that’s “part of one’s experience of the world”—the discovery of the sort of nightmare into which we are born. M
ISERY
. A voice cried sleep no more. There’s one did swear in his sleep, and one cried Murder. Murder equals
redrum
. That’s poetic justice. I waste a lot of time in logolatry. I am a verbalist, Cynthia—a tinkling symbolist. I am the founder and leader of the new school of literature—The Emblemists. I wear a wide black hat, a dirty shirt, boots with spurs, and shave once a month. Traces of egg can be seen at the corners of my mouth. I am hollow-cheeked, exophthalmic, prognathous: I express my views at any and all times, savagely, and with a conscious minimum of tact. I glory in my dirtiness—I am a Buddhist—I look at you with sleepy cynicism to prove it—utterly indifferent to the needs of the body. Nevertheless, I eat heartily, and I make no bones about the tiresome necessities of sex. I am, into the bargain, slightly mad. I have persecution mania. They try to ignore me—they slander me—they suppress mention of me—they whisper about me and laugh. Insults are heaped upon me, but I stride on, magnificent, a genius manifest; the winds of my poems whirl them about and make them whimper. Ha ha! That last phrase, Cynthia—would you believe it?—was actually used about me by a famous poet in an interview—something I had said annoyed him. “The winds of my poems … make him whimper,”—that’s what he said. That reminds me of an article I saw once—in the New York
Nation,
was it?—called “
Wind in Tennyson