Blue Voyage: A Novel (26 page)

“Π
ᾶ
σα θάλασσα θάλασσα,” said Smith absent-mindedly. “‘Rich happiness, that such a son is drowned.’”

“Well!” cried Cynthia into the sea-darkness. “Why not? We must all, in that sense, drown someday. Is Silberstein’s drowning at twelve any worse than ours at twenty?”

“I like it,” said Faubion. “Isn’t it really better, a good deal, than all the refined hypocrisy of the honeymoon?… Always supposing that the honeymoon is the first!”

“Was it—with you?” Smith’s voice had a chuckle in it.

“Of course not! I didn’t live in a village for nothing …”

Her voice trailed away like the dying sound of a wave. A sea gull, floating astern, and crying, with turning head,
Klio
. Where do the sea gulls go at night? The sea gulls in mid-Atlantic? Do they sit on the waters?…
Klio klio
. The five blue corposants preened their blue phosphor-feathers. Demarest, leaving lifeboat No. 14, walked aft again, sucking at his cold pipe. The five people moving eastward with the ship. Five corposants. Five sea gulls.
Klio, klio
. Interchangeable. If one thinks in terms of quality-complexes, then a very slight dislocation of affects will give one a world in which no identities are permanent. An alarm clock rises in the east. A sky swarming with stars, at two in the morning, is merely the sensation of
formication
—ants crawling, as when one’s foot is asleep. Faubion, uttering a short word quickly, with averted head, is a sea gull going downwind, crying, with turning head,
klio …
The corposants are five celestial voices, singing in the tops of the trees. They ululate softly in chorus, while the treetops thresh in the wind, as the mad nymphs ululated when Dido and Aeneas fled into the cave from the thunder.
Angels follow her—gravely, slowly—with silver and vermilion and rainbow wings—One, more luminous: lost in his own light: sits on a cherry-tree bough, and sings—Blest be the marriage of earth and heaven! Now, in the round blue room of space, The mortal son and the daughter immortal … make of the world their resting-place …
The marriage hymn, prothalamium, for my wedding with Cynthia, the stained-glass widow. Stained-glass window.

“Poor Demarest!” Cynthia was laughing, in the darkness. “Poor darling Demarest!”

“Am I so much to be pitied?”

“Is he so much to be pitied?”

“Much to be pitied?”

“Pitied? Pitied?”

“Pitied?”

The bird voices echoed one another,
klio klio,
wheeling and screaming. The sea claws and sea beaks pitied him, and the waves, too, coming louder from the southeast, their surfy voices the voices of destroyed universes of bubbles, sea-froth, evanescent as human pity.

“Of course he is to be pitied. And loved, too, in his fashion—as Silberstein said we love the hurrying moon and the angelic corposant. Loved, therefore, and pitied, as we love and pity ourselves. Who is this William Demarest? this forked radish? this carrier of germs and digester of food? momentary host of the dying seed of man?… He came to me to play chess, a copy of
The Spoils of Poynton
under his shiny coat sleeve.”

“Ha ha. Demarest, the goldfish chess player.”

“Fool’s mate. Watchman, what of the knight? The psychiatrist beat him in ten moves. The mandolin player gave him his queen, and then drew the game. Nevertheless, he considers himself a very talented chess player. Poor Demarest.”

“Treasure him, nevertheless, for he is a mirror of the world.”

“We cherish him as we cherish ourselves. Is he not an epitome of universal history? Here he stands, on the deck of a dark ship, which is moving eastward at fifteen knots an hour. The steersman shifts the wheel, his eyes on the bright binnacle. The stokers stoke. The second engineer carries a long-beaked oil can up a clammy iron ladder. The first engineer lies in his stuffy bunk, reading
His Wife’s Secret
. Under the ship are two miles of sea, and under the sea the half-cold planet, which rushes through freezing space to destruction, carrying with it continents of worthless history, the sea, this ship, Demarest … Who is this little, this pathetic, this ridiculous Demarest? We laugh at him, and also we weep for him; for he is ourselves, he is humanity, he is God. He makes mistakes. He is an egoist. He is imperfect—physically, morally, and mentally. Coffee disagrees with him; angostura causes him anguish; borborigmi interrupts his sleep, causing in his dreams falls of cliffs and the all-dreaded thunderstone; his ears ache; his nostrils, edematous; frontal headaches … Nevertheless, like ourselves, whose disabilities differ from his only in details, he struggles—why? to avoid the making of mistakes, to escape the tyrant solipsism, and to know himself; like us, he endeavors to return to God. Let him cry out as he will, let him protest his skepticism ever so loudly, he is at heart, like every other, a believer in perfection!…”

Klio klio
! Cynthia’s was the harsh melancholy voice of the sea gulls. The five sea gulls wheeled and screamed over the brown mud flat, at the edge of the eelgrass, where the obscene fiddler crabs scuttled in and out of oozy holes. Brown viscous froth, left by the receding tide. Cape Cod. What is that dark object that attracts them? A dead man. The corpse of Charlie Riehl, the hardware man, the suicide. The bluefish have picked at his head and hands these six days, since he jumped from the bridge; and now the sea gulls flap over him, crying, and the fiddler crabs advance with buzzing fiddles, crepitant army of mandibles.

“A believer in perfection.”

“A believer.”

“Perfection.”

“Rich happiness, that such a son is drowned.”

The five people crossed the meadow, stepping carefully among the fishing nets which Mr. Riley had spread out to dry. The hot sun drew a salt smell out of them, marshy and rich, fish-scaly. Passing under the arrowy-leaved ailanthus tree, and then rounding the sand-banked corner opposite Mr. Black’s forge (Mr. Black was shoeing a horse) they stepped upon the wooden bridge, tripartite, the first and third sections of which crossed the two branches of the forked river, the intermediate section being merely a built-up road-bed on the tongue of marsh. The telegraph wires were singing multitudinously in the wind, a threnody. A metal windmill clanked. They crossed the first section of bridge, looking into the deep and rapid water, and seeing the red sponges that wavered deep-down on the pediments of barnacled stone; and then paused on the squeaking path of trodden and splintered scallop shells, which was bordered with starry St. John’s Wort, coarse sappy honeysweet goldenrod, and scarlet-blistered poison ivy. Leaning then on the red wooden railing, they watched the two Rileys and Mr. Ezra Pope, the town constable, rowing the dirty dory toward a point at the farther end of the marsh. Low water. Sea gulls rose in a screaming cloud as they approached. The younger Riley, in red rubber boots, jumped out and pulled the dory up into the eelgrass. The two others got out, and all three moved slowly into the marsh, lifting high their knees. They were stooping over. Then they rose again, carrying something. It was Charlie Riehl, who had drowned himself rather than appear as a witness at the trial.
Klio klio
! At five in the morning it was: there among those red sponges. Feet first; with his pockets full of lead.
Klio
!

“Those are holes that were his eyes,” murmured Smith. “Nothing of him but hath fed——”

“Narcissus! He sees himself drowned, like this Charlie Riehl. And pities himself. Well, why not?
That’s
normal enough …”

Faubion held up her hands, on which the blue corposants were beginning to fade.

“Scavengers!” she cried. “That’s what we are. Devourers of the dead: devourers of ourselves. Prometheus and the vulture are one and the same. Well! I
will
not countenance it. Any more than Demarest does.”

She gave a little laugh, and the others laughed also, lightly and bitterly. Something had gone wrong with the scene. Disruption. Dislocation of affects. Quarrel of ghosts. Fecal coloring of imagery. The night falling over like a basket, spilling miscellaneous filth. No! Only the atom in the brain! falling infinitesimally, but by accident wrecking some central constellation. The five ghosts quarreling on the deck with harsh voices were the five sea gulls in Trout River. Charlie Riehl was himself. Drowning was consummation. It was all very simple—you turned a screw, and everything at once changed its meaning.
Klio,
said Cynthia.
Klio, klio,
sang the mad nymphs for Dido, ululating; and the vulture, tearing with sadistic beak at the liver of Prometheus—
klio, klio
! it cried, turning the Semitic profile of Silberstein … But this was disturbing! One must pull oneself together—set the basket of stars on end again. What was it that had caused this trouble, this quick slipping brain slide, vertigo, that sent everything skirling and screaming raucously down the abyss? Whirlpool. Cloaca. Groping for trout in a peculiar river. Plaster of warm guts. Clyster. Death, with your eyes wide open.
Christ
!… He leaned hard on lifeboat No. 14 (the motor lifeboat—they took off the canvas cover to test the engine, and stepped a little wireless pole in the bow thwart) and shut his eyes. Think. Project. Sublimate. Everything depends on it. In the sweat of your brow, the ventricle contracted, the dew dripping——

“Is it not possible, then”—he cried—“this perfection of understanding and interchange? Cynthia?”

“Oh, as for that——” Cynthia’s voice seemed to come from farther off, floatingly.

“As for that!” jeered Silberstein.

“That!” quacked Smith.

He opened his eyes. The four figures, in the now almost total darkness, were scarcely perceptible—mere clots in the night. The stars had been engulfed.

“He came to me with a shabby chessboard under his arm! And he had forgotten to button——”

“Please adjust your dress before leaving …”

“He permitted me to pay his fare in the bus! Yes, he did! You may not believe it, but he did!”

“Rear seat reserved for smokers … Lovers with umbrellas at the top——”

“And do you know what he said when I asked him if he would like to come one afternoon to hear my brother William play Bach on the piano? Do you know what he said, delicious provincial little Yankee that he is and always will be?… ‘
You bet
!’”

“Ho ho! Ha ha! He he!”

“Suppress that stage laughter, please. Silence! His impurial highness——”

“I beg you,” said Faubion, “I beg you not to go on with this!”

“Silence! His impurial highness, greatest failure as a dramatist that the world has ever known, supreme self-devouring egotist, incomparable coward, sadist and froterer, voyeur and onamist, exploiter of women—William Demarest, late of New York, and heir of all the ages——”

“
Stop
!”

“What’s the matter with Faubion? Is she in love with the idiot?”

“Perhaps she’s right. We ought to be sorry for him. More to be pitied than blamed. After all, he’s an idealist: a subjective idealist.”

“Who said so? An automaton like the rest of us. Nigger, blow yo’ nose on yo’ sleeve, and let dis show pro-ceed!”

“You must remember that we are only figments of his——”

Klio!
klio! klio
!

The gulls, the waves, the corposants, all screamed at once. The wave in Caligula’s dream. The sea ghost, seaweed-bearded, with arms of green water and dripping fingers of foam.
Oo—wash—oo—wallop
—are you awake—King Buskin?… And he never said a mumbalin’ word. The blood came twinklin’ down. And he never said a mumbalin’ word … Tired, tortured, twisted; thirsty, abandoned, betrayed.

“—Silence! The transfiguration scene will now begin. Dress rehearsal. Special benefit performance for Mr. Demarest. At the first stroke of the bell, Miss Battiloro, arch snob and philanderer, several times engaged, virgin in fact but not in thought, she who stood on a June day perspiring and admiring, adoring and caloring, before the unfinished Titian, will take her place beneath the mainmast, on the port side, facing the stern. Her head will be bowed forward meekly, and in her hands she will clasp lightly, with exquisite Rossetti unlikelihood, a waxen lily. At the second stroke of the bell, the five angelic corposants will unite in the air above her, singing softly, as they tread the wind, the verses written by Mr. Demarest for the occasion—
King Caligula
. No weeping, by request. Listening to this heavenly music, with its message of healing for all mankind, Miss Battiloro will lift her eyes, in the attitude of one who sees, at long last, the light that never was on land or sea. While she is in this attitude, the third stroke of the bell will be given by the shipboy; and on the instant Miss Battiloro will be transformed, for all time, into a stained-glass widow. Beg pardon, I mean window. Now is everything in readiness, please? Shipboy, are you there?… He says he is there. Is Miss Battiloro ready to make this noble and beautiful sacrifice?”

“Ay ay, sir.”

“Miss Battiloro says she is ready to make this noble and beautiful sacrifice. And Mr. William Demarest—is Mr. William Demarest present? Mr. Demarest, please?”

“Oh yes,
he’s
here, all right!”

“Very well, then, we will proceed … Shipboy, the first bell, if you will be so kind!”

It was painfully true, every word of it. The bell note fell down from aloft, a golden ingot of sound, and Cynthia was standing under the tall tree as announced; like a charade for purity and resignation; clad in white samite; and clasping a tall lily with unimaginable delicacy. Wasn’t it perhaps, however, more Burne-Jones than Rossetti? It was a little dark, and therefore difficult to see; but Demarest thought so. Yes. And at the second bell note—three minutes have elapsed, silent save for the hushing sound of the waves—Cynthia lifted her meltingly beautiful eyes, and the five blue seraphim, treading the night air above her, began softly, sighingly, to sing. This was very affecting. In spite of the warning, it was difficult to refrain from tears. Smith, in fact, gave an audible sob, like a hiccough. At the words “
resting-place,
” the five seraphs disbanded, two deploying to starboard, two to port, and the fifth catapulting straight up toward the zenith. At this moment, Demarest experienced acutely a remarkable temptation. He desired to rush forward, kneel, bury his face passionately in the white samite, and cry out—γύναι, ἴδε ό ὑιόϛ σου! Before he could do more than visualize this action, however, the third stroke of the bell was given. The whole night had become a Cathedral. And above Demarest, faintly luminous in the cold starlight that came from beyond, was a tall Gothic window, where motionless, in frozen sentimentalites of pink, white, and blue, Cynthia was turned to glass.