Nightwood (12 page)

'Yes,' she said, 'but—'

'Now, wait a minute! It's all of a certain night that I'm coming to, that I take so long coming to it,' he said, 'a night in the branchy pitch of fall —the particular night you want to know about—for I'm a fisher of men and my gimp is doing a
saltarello
over every body of water to fetch up what it may. I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.

'Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes, this is its wonderful unhappiness—and now I am come to Jenny—oh Lord, why do women have partridge blood and set out to beat up trouble? The places Jenny moults in are her only distinction, a Christian with a wanderer's rump. She smiles, and it is the wide smile of the self-abused, radiating to the face from some localized centre disturbance, the personification of the "thief". She has a longing for other people's property, but the moment she possesses it the property loses some of its value, for the owner's estimate is its worth. Therefore it was she took your Robin.'

'What is she like?' Nora asked.

'Well,' said the doctor, 'I have always thought I, myself, the funniest looking creature on the face of the earth; then I laid my eyes on Jenny—a little, hurried decaying comedy jester, the face on the fool's stick, and with a smell about her of mouse-nests. She is a "looter", and eternally nervous. Even in her sleep I'll pronounce that her feet twitch and her orifices expand and contract like the iris of a suspicious eye. She speaks of people taking away her "faith" in them, as if faith were a transportable object—all her life she has been subject to the feeling of "removal". Were she a soldier she would define defeat with the sentence: "The enemy took the war away." Having a conviction that she is somehow reduced, she sets about collecting a destiny—and for her, the sole destiny is love, anyone's love and so her own. So only someone's love is her love. The cock crew and she was laid—her present is always someone else's past, jerked out and dangling.

'Yet what she steals she keeps, through the incomparable fascination of maturation and rot. She has the strength of an incomplete accident—one is always waiting for the rest of it, for the last impurity that will make the whole; she was born at the point of death, but, unfortunately, she will not age into youth—which is a grave mistake of nature. How more tidy had it been to have been born old and have aged into a child, brought finally to the brink, not of the grave, but of the womb; in our age bred up into infants searching for a womb to crawl into, not be made to walk loth the gingerly dust of death, but to find a moist, gillflirted way. And a funny sight it would be to see us going to our separate lairs at the end of day, women wincing with terror, not daring to set foot to the street for fear of it.

'But I'm coming by degrees to the narrative of the one particular night that makes all other nights seem like something quite decent enough —and that was the night when, dressed in open-work mittens, showing the edge of a pantaloon (and certainly they had been out of style three mothers behind her), Jenny Petherbridge—for that is her name in case you'd care to know it,' he said with a grin, 'wrapped in a shawl of Spanish insight and Madrid fancy (as a matter of fact, the costume came later, but what do I care?), stepped out in the early fall of the year to the Opera—I think, and I am not mistaken, it was nothing better than
Rigoletto
—walking in the galleries and whisking her eyes about for trouble—that she swore, even after, she had really never wanted to know anything about—and there laid her eyes on Robin who was leaning forward in a box, and me pacing up and down, talking to myself in the best
Comédie-Française
French, trying to keep off what I knew was going to be trouble for a generation, and wishing I was hearing the Schumann cycle—when in swishes the old sow of a Danish count. My heart aches for all poor creatures putting on dog and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it from. And I began to think, and I don't know why, of the closed gardens of the world where all people can make their thoughts go up high because of the narrowness and beauty, or of the wide fields where the heart can spread out and thin its vulgarity (it's why I eat salad), and I thought, we should all have a place to throw our flowers in, like me who, once in my youth, rated a
corbeille
of moth-orchids—and did I keep them? Don't get restless—I'm coming back to the point. No, I sat beside them a little while having my tea, and saying to myself; "You're a pretty lot, and you do my cupboard honour, but there's a better place awaiting you—" and with that I took them by the hand around to the Catholic church, and I said, "God is what we make Him, and life doesn't seem to be getting any better," and tiptoed out.

'So, I went around the gallery a third time, and I knew that Hindu or no Hindu, I was in on what was wrong with the world—and I said the world's like that poor distressed moll of a Jenny, never knowing which end to put its mittens on, and pecking about like a mystified rook, until this particular night gave her a hoist and set her up at the banquet (where she has been sitting dumbfounded ever since), and Robin the sleeping and troubled, looking amazed. It was more than a boy like me (who am the last woman left in this world, though I am the bearded lady) could bear, and I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you'll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on and eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin. You, who should have had a thousand children and Robin, who should have been all of them; and Jenny the bird, snatching the oats out of love's droppings—and I went mad, I'm like that. What an autopsy I'll make, with everything all which ways in my bowels! A kidney and a shoe cast of the Roman races; a liver and a long-spent whisper, a gall and a wrack of scolds from Milano, and my heart that will be weeping still when they find my eyes cold, not to mention a thought of Cellini in my crib of bones, thinking how he must have suffered when he knew he could not tell it for ever—(beauty's name spreads too thick). And the lining of my belly, flocked with the locks cut off love in odd places that I've come on, a bird's nest to lay my lost eggs in, and my people as good as they come, as long as they have been coming, down the grim path of "We know not" to "We can't guess why".

'Well, I was thinking of you, a woman at best, and you know what that means? Not much in the morning—all trussed up with pain's bridle. Then I turned my eyes on Jenny, who was turning her eyes looking for trouble, for she was then at that pitch of life that she knew to be her last moment. And do you need the doctor to tell you that that is a bad strange hour for a woman? If all women could have it all at once, you could beat them in flocks like a school of scorpions; but they come eternally, one after the other, and go head foremost into it alone. For men of my kind it isn't so bad, I've never asked better than to see the two ends of my man no matter how I might be dwindling. But for one like Jenny, the poor ruffled bitch, why, God knows, I bled for her, because I knew in an instant the kind of a woman she was, one who had spent all her life rummaging through photographs of the past, searching for the one who would be found leaning sideways with a look as if angels were sliding down her hip—a great love who had been spared a face but who'd been saddled with loins, leaning against a drape of Scotch velvet with a pedestal at the left twined with ivy, a knife in her boot and her groin pouting as if she kept her heart in it. Or searching among old books for the passion that was all renunciation and lung trouble, with flowers at the bosom—that was Jenny—so you can imagine how she trembled when she saw herself going toward fifty without a thing done to make her a tomb-piece, or anything in her past that would get a flower named for her. So I saw her coming forward, stepping lightly and trembling and looking at Robin, saying to me (I'd met her, if you call it meeting a woman when you pound her kidney), "Won't you introduce me?" and my knees knocking together; and my heart as heavy as Adam's off ox, because you are a friend of mine and a good poor thing, God knows, who will never put a stop to anything; you may be knocked down, but you'll crawl on for ever, while there's any use to it, so I said, "Certainly, damn it!" and brought them together. As if Robin hadn't met enough people without me making it worse.'

'Yes,' she said, 'she met every one.'

'Well,' he went on, 'The house was beginning to empty, all the common clay was pouring down the steps talking of the Diva (there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust!) and how she had taken her high L, and all the people looking out of the corner of their eyes to see how their neighbours were dressed, and some of them dropping their cloaks rather low to see the beast in a man snarling up in his neck—and they never guessed that it was me, with both shoulders under cover, that brought the veins to their escorts' temples—and walking high and stately—the pit of my stomach gone black in the darkness that was eating it away for thinking of you, and Robin smiling sideways like a cat with canary feathers to account for, and Jenny tripping beside her so fast that she would get ahead and have to run back with small cries of ambition, saying wistfully, "You must come to my house for late supper."

'God help me, I went! For who will not betray a friend, or, for that matter, himself, for a whisky and soda, caviare and a warm fire—and that brings me to the ride that we took later. As Don Antonio said long ago, "Did'st thou make a night of it?" And was answered (by Claudio), "Yes. Egad! And morning too; for about eight o'clock the next day, slap! They all soused upon their knees, kissed around, burned their commodes, drank my health, broke their glasses and so parted." So Cibber put it, and I put it in Taylor's words: "Did not
Periander
think fit to lie with his wife
Melissa
after she had already gone hent to heaven?" Is this not night work of another order also, but night work still? And in another place, as Montaigne says: "Seems it not to be a lunatic humour of the moon that
Endymion
was by the lady moon lulled to sleep for many months together that she might have her joy of him who stirred not at all except in sleep."

'Well, having picked up a child in transit, a niece of someone Jenny knew, we all went riding down the Champs Elysées. We went straight as a die over the
Pont Neuf,
and whirled around into the
rue du Cherche-Midi,
God forgive us! Where you, weak vessel of love, were lying awake and wondering where, and all the time Jenny doing the deed that was as bad and out of place as that done by Catherine of Russia, and don't deny it, who took old Poniatovsky's throne for a water closet. And suddenly I was glad I was simple and didn't want a thing in the world but what could be had for five francs. And I envied Jenny nothing she had in her house, though I admit I had been sort of casting my eye over a couple of books, which I would have spirited away if they hadn't been bound in calf—for I might steal the mind of Petronius, as well I knew, but never the skin of a calf—for the rest, the place was as full of the wrong thing as you would care to spend your inheritance on—well, I furnished my closet with phenomenal luck at the fair, what with shooting a row of chamber pots and whirling a dozen wheels to the good, and every one about me getting nothing for a thousand francs but a couple of velvet dogs, or dolls that looked as if they had been up all night. And what did I walk home with for less than five francs? A fine frying pan that could coddle six eggs, and a raft of minor objects that one needs in the kitchen—so I looked at Jenny's possessions with scorn in my eye. It may have been all most "unusual", but who wants a toe-nail that is thicker than common? And that thought came to me out of the contemplation of the mad strip of the inappropriate that runs through creation, like my girl friend who married some sort of Adriatic bird who had such thick ones that he had to trim them with a horse file—my mind is so rich that it is always wandering! Now I am back to the time when that groom walked into my life wearing a priest's collar that he had no more right to than I have to a crupper. Well, then the carriages came up with their sweet wilted horses, and Robin went down the steps first, and Jenny tearing after her saying, "Wait! Wait!" as if she were talking to an express on its way into Boston, and dragging her shawl and running, and we all got in—she'd collected some guests who were waiting for her in the house.'

The doctor was embarrassed by Nora's rigid silence; he went on. 'I was leaning forward on my cane as we went down under the trees, holding it with both hands, and the black wagon I was in was being followed by a black wagon, and that by another, and the wheels were turning, and I began saying to myself: The trees are better, and grass is better, and animals are all right and the birds in the air are fine. And everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget—the design of life; and good when we are forgotten—the design of death. I began to mourn for my spirit, and the spirits of all people who cast a shadow a long way beyond what they are; and for the beasts that walk out of the darkness alone, I began to wail for all the little beasts in their mothers, who would have to step down and begin going decent in the one fur that would last them their time. And I said to myself: For these I would go bang on my knees, but not for her—I wouldn't piss on her if she were on fire! I said, Jenny is so greedy that she wouldn't give her shit to the crows. And then I thought: Oh, the poor bitch, if she were dying, face down in a long pair of black gloves, would I forgive her? And I knew I would forgive her, or anyone making a picture. And then I began looking at the people in that carriage, very carefully raising my eyes so they would not notice anything unusual, and I saw the English girl sitting up there pleased and frightened.

'And then at the child—there was terror in it and it was running away from something grown up; I saw that she was sitting still and she was running, it was in her eyes, and in her chin, drawn down, and her eyes wide open. And then I saw Jenny sitting there shaking, and I said: God, you are no picture! And then, Robin was going forward, and the blood running red, where Jenny had scratched her, and I screamed and thought: "Nora will leave that girl some day: but though these two are buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both."'