Part 11 (2/2)

She looked desolately down into the bed of her open hand, where the key with all its cold big limbs and juts was laid out like a figurine: and in the moment when with small commotion she locked the door, unaccountably the lost word returned, the” picture of the word, and where it had lain, neither at the beginning nor the end, but in the very center, of the letter, like the inking of a figurine primitive and jagged in the letter to my mother (for I did not believe that Enoch claimed it), the letter from the private visitor who had not yet arrived, that Nick whose name was quicker than himself, for whose sake the train even now could be heard barking into the distant wounded hills without us: the lost word unimportantly returned and prophesied, to my disappointed curiosity, nothing. ”Confer” might have promised some enlivening; and ”career” surely (my mother cared for nothing of Enoch's so much as this); and ”cross” and ”church” some bright procession; and ”curse” might signify imaginings and rich complexities. But this!-the real word was simpler and duller than any; it was not worth having been teased and tormented for; it shut off all hope for the spectacular, and failed to tantalize.

Nick had written ”child” merely.

So it no longer mattered how my mother had come by that pointless paper which inexplicably she treated as dangerous and secret. It did not attract me now; no seed of event or fable could grow from that name or word. It was as she had avowed: ”business,” and I was all at once convinced of the justice of her slap-administered to a meddler-and forgave her. But on the same ground I could not forgive the locked door: for their business was always the same; it was barbarous; and I wanted nothing more than to avoid their dealings, and keep cleanly away, and go sailing home to America.

Meanwhile I thought, for pleasure's sake, of all the days on board, and of certain birds that nip fish out of the s.h.i.+p's fat wake: but very soon the locked door (wood painted white, and set in the wall like a nose) and the slow turnings of my dress in a faint moist draft took my musings from me. I felt the void of my nakedness, and the void of the rain, light and continuing, barely ticking like a wrist.w.a.tch held in concentration against the ear, a rain without voice, and sitting on the bed nearest the window (through which the garden gate and the duck in the hedge and beyond these a bit of cobblestoned road all mingled with the sway, farther still, of mist-blackened waves) I said into the empty room: ”Nick Nick Nick” and then, a moment later, ”Nick Nick Nick Nick Nick”-as though that could somehow rouse the stillness and the lurking void.

7.

He came finally. It might have been in an hour, or less, or more-I had no clock to tell me how long. Worn out by idleness, I had fallen, without seeming really to sleep, into a sort of density, where a long row of torches went round and round a black stone; and the stone itself was a vast nostril from whose edge a great stabbing jewel menaced, clinging by means of a clip: and the fires, which kept going out, were brought in darkness to be rekindled in its phosph.o.r.escent heart. Behind all, in all, a knocking and a rattling, as though the torches (but there were no bearers) jostled one against the other, clanking their wide hollow flanks in a sound so gnawingly familiar that without delay I awoke and ran to the window and saw, leaning against the hedge, an old blue bicycle. It stood tilted and twisted, with its front wheel doubled back on itself, like a stork preening its tail, and the handle bars thrust almost into the rear spokes: and tied to the back fender, under a newspaper tent which the wind shortly ripped away, was a sharp-cornered bundle very much in the shape of three or four books. It looked harmless enough, this vehicle, and inconsequential, quite as though it belonged to some student lad or (except for the books) to a younger laborer, to anyone but the private visitor whom my mother feared. For plainly my mother feared the private visitor, and suspected in him influences and powers, and regarded him as an enemy, and supposed him to be formidable and dire and sly: hardly the sort to come jangling up on an old blue bicycle, with a missing front fender, and a searchlight clamped to the tubing, and a pile of books strapped and wrapped against the rain in thin green paper, and every metal part, frame and chain and hidden rusted screw, bouncing like a rope of bells. Nevertheless I heard behind the wall the sudden peopling of my mother's room, and steps both confident and leisurely (not my mother's walk, for she unhesitantly hopped and sped, nor Enoch's, uncertain, slow, rhythmically unpredictable), and the brief shriek of a chair pulled across wood, and the closing of a door-and then, at that moment after the settling and confrontation when voices always rise to frequent a first meeting: nothing, no noise or sound of any kind. I leaped to the other bed, and listened close to the wall, and still nothing, not a whisper. And I wondered whether the three of them were somehow stunned and could only sit and gape, or whether no one had come after all, and the bicycle, like the torches, were part of some dread viscosity of imagination. But there it was; I saw it in the garden, embedded now by the force of its own weight deep in the hedge; and just next to its rear reflector, from the protruding point of a little stick, hung a fragment of cloth. It fluttered wetly, then sagged, then once more was blown full, and I thought it was perhaps a handkerchief the wind had mistakenly impaled there, or else a bit of wayward rag, until I looked again, and recognized it for what it was meant to be: an adornment, a declaration, a tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, a boast even. A tiny American flag stuck up, waving fitfully-the kind seen at carnivals, and growing out of houseplants, and in the clutch of celebrants-a mean, wild, alien, homeless and comical little flag, heralding not so much nationality as temperament. And I fancied how on downward grades it unfurled and showed all its petulant shabbiness-but workingmen and serious scholars pedaled unbedecked; and gay students went in for squirrel-tail plumes or colored ribbon-streamers rippling from the hub-nut, and then only if they followed the United States trends-and so I took it (not just then, but afterward, when I learned about the categories into which certain persons w.i.l.l.y-nilly throw their lives) for a badge of Bohemia. It gave notice, at least, of. an irregular ident.i.ty, not energetic, not enterprising (American virtues which these particular stars and stripes, faded but dripping-dark, half-folded, limply dangling from a casual stick, denied-no, scorned), but rather calmly wistful, even hopeful, even optimistic. It put a favorable construction on things (with reservations), antic.i.p.ated a favorable outcome, flapped in the most favorable, of all possible breezes. And again turning from it to listen (face down in the bare crotch-and-armpit-smelling mattress) to the doubtful silence in the next room, I tried to see Nick astride that loosely-jointed self-spanking metal ganglion, all spinning teeth and rim and wheel, fife-and-drumming down some narrow street with sparrow-rump of flag upright behind him, part-gypsy, part-scout, his shoulders bundled into the very rucksack my mother claimed to remember from some undisclosed long-ago; but it did not work; the picture had too much of the jolly vagabond, in spite of all I had overheard, and sputtered and failed. My vision persisted in producing a sombre dark stark fear-figure, one who would more likely deliver himself out of the black maw of a government-sleek Rolls-Royce-but no, he was poor, they had said he was poor, Nick was poor, and nothing I dreamed would do. nothing would account for the perverse uncanny absurdity, the stupidity, the sinister out-of-placeness, of an American flag sticking straight out of a soaked French hedge.

So it would not come right; the look of the invaded garden would not come right: even the silence, humming out of my mother's room, did not seem a proper silence, and breathed with mysterious interior exchanges. Whatever their business was, it kept them mute, it seemed; it kept them dumb. But in a moment, while I lay on the bed close to the damply flowered wall, the hush on the other side gave out a motion of expanding, opening; it revealed latent murmurs, loudening distinctly into troughs of conversation, like a distant iron s.h.i.+p ploughing nearer: the strain and creak and hollow rumble come groaning through the sea, and bobbing like a bell afloat it dongs and calls; yet until it is upon us we think it soundless and do not perceive those light circ.u.mspect signs of its approach (a rush of cawing fowl, a running hump among the foremost waves, and certain busy warnings in the ocean-quiet) which expectation might have detected-while all the time, for miles of audibility, in creak and strain and rumble the iron s.h.i.+p has been crying out its coming; and we would have heard had we believed in its existence. In the same way I listened for the vigorous wrestle of a bargain made, or a blatant quarrel, and could conjecture no other relation behind the wall; and expecting this (as who, in a day of steel, would guess at an iron s.h.i.+p?) I did not know how my mother might ceremonially change, face to face with the private visitor, and how her voice might grow thin and high and stiff, like telephone speech accidentally filtered over a crossed wire. It rose and narrowly hung, a thread of something spectral, difficult, to recognize as hers or anyone's; wordless yet glutted with words; a line of sound glimmering with unintelligibility, like the line of sound that the oscilloscope converts to a cruel fence of notched and palpitating light. It was strung, quivering, over the bed: a voice made of wires: and I thought of the tremor in the border-wire when the killing shot sprang out of Germany, and the one-legged giant broke; and how at his huge fall the pulse ran halfway round a country in that slender girdling fence, strummed like a guitar-string by the feet of leaping soldiers: and how I had stained the dust with bilious contours, surfaces, realms.

Realms and a map: it was another map beneath me now, in the shallow place where so many transient bodies had warmed themselves. I found that groove easily; it rolled me down, and took my bare belly comfortably and naturally, as an old bed will, and when I stirred on the mattress a private odor crept from it-a public sort of privacy, intruded on by a public change of sheets, and a public pair of hands smoothing out the marks of night. Shapes and configurations gleamed there, though not of nations and still less of continents-it was not that sort of map: rather, it resembled strewn human features, and now and then an anatomical drawing-the curved sac of a human stomach, a section of a leg with tracing of the circulatory tree, the channel of a nostril all finely haired, a large, bold, wide-open eye-and all of it cleverly and indelibly delineated An old blotches, streaks, soiled islands. Water, wine, urine and blood (the essential liquids) had made that map. The water left only outlines, flat airy pancreases; the urine flamed and faded; the wine bit deep, and ate the fabric (it was the wine, wild and sour, that sent out that secret visceral scent); but the blood had dried to clean black spots. All shone like crenulated scars and entrails.

Meanwhile the negotiations continued-led mainly by my mother's slender unusual wail, and often cut off, still trembling, by a laugh. It was a laugh of confidence (unlike my mother's familiar laughs of self-delusion) and I thought for a moment it was Enoch's, but when it flew out to claim the room, the window, the yard, I caught the a.s.sault hidden in it and knew it was not. And immediately after its intrusion my mother began to speak again, so the laugh had no victory. Her tone was new and perplexing-it was a kind of plea that streamed from her. She was alone against the laughter. Enoch did not support her, although he was not far-a series of small noises revealed how he moved in halting circles, a habit of his when he went punching his pockets for the feel of cigarettes: his step approached and diminished regularly. And still the laughter hung and wafted, while my mother demurred, waiting for it to pa.s.s (how remorseful that little gap in the rhythm of her voice!), and then again took up her tireless whirr, yielding it like the yawn of a wind through the wall. Now and then it was almost provoked into meaning-the semblance of a word rose and faintly beat, then shrank back as though whipped-and even at the window, where I went to pull a finger through the drops acc.u.mulated on the wide dusty sill, they were still phantom notes she sent murmuring out. I drew a calligraphic ”Nick” in the dirt, and extended an arm far over to measure the sill-it was wider than my whole arm from the shoulder, so with considerable care (for the garden looked strangely miniature below) I lifted out first one knee and then the other; and found myself on a long stone block, edged with a spiked railing, which ran like an abbreviated balcony beneath a row of s.h.i.+ning windows. I turned myself around, clumsy with caution, and crept a little way out; my kneecaps were pitted with granules of lime, and the rain licked gauzily down my back-until suddenly it was lifted away: I looked up and saw the upper eave overhead, cozy as an umbrella, and the gutter spilling beyond reach of me, and all unexpectedly I had a view of my mother's room.

It was stung with light; the panes gleamed with double reflections; the ceiling was a lake of light. A brown curtain came winging out of the window, and behind it lapped a vague seepage of voices. The curtain stirred, and blew back into the bright room: its film of shadow swam across the ceiling like a cloud or wash of fog. My mother was remonstrating-”No,” I heard her bleat into the wool of the other's derision, m.u.f.fled by his fresh and stupendous roar-”Oh, no.”

I could see the corner of the high bureau, and the worn nape of an armchair, and the bulbs blinking with uneven current, and I dared myself to crawl out a foot farther along the ledge, and then another longer s.p.a.ce, until the flat grey sky swung obliquely into sight in the big oval mirror on the bureau.

”Don't talk to me about terms,” my mother moaned. I was astonished: her words had leaped into clarity. ”What do terms have to do-”

”With you and me?” the visitor asked pleasantly.

My mother rasped. I heard the coa.r.s.e congregation of spittle in her throat-she might have been breathing in my ear, so close and wounding was her cry. ”You said you were coming to talk at arm's length.”

”All right, then say I have a short arm.” The visitor sent out one of his rattling laughs, and the sound of cold rain running from the gutter went gurgling through it. It seemed to chill his mirth. He resumed, a trifle spitefully, ”Still, I only reach for what I can get. The world won't blame me for that, will it?”

”I'm not the world.”

”But you run it-it comes to the same thing. It's all in the literature of social protest-anyone who can pay off the gendarmes runs the world.”

”Then you saw in the papers we were here!” my mother exclaimed. ”You saw all about it!” she said with the thickening note of satisfaction.

”In the papers? I'm afraid I gave up the papers months ago. They're no good without a war.”

”But how-”

”They're getting stupidly political, haven't you noticed? Or else they're full of blown-up International Society news-it's part of the trend toward world Americanization. All the editors are becoming surly as a result. Every time you read a column you feel someone's picking an argument with you. I'm a man of peace, I hate to be disturbed. A regular war's more sensible-the news worries you, and when you're worried about a thing of that scale you feel important, and when you think you're important you feel flattered. -And I really like flattery, you know,”

”I gave you credit.” my mother began weakly.

”Oh, look, that's not flattery!” He waited a moment before flus.h.i.+ng the room with his laughter. ”Not when it's cash I've come for!”

Inadvertently she abandoned the tone of entreaty. ”I did give you credit. I really thought you might have some vestige left of-”

”Vestige!” crowed the visitor. ”Vestige! If I've got anything. it's got to be a vestige!”

”Self-perception,” my mother finished.

”Oh, good, that's much better. I thought you were going to say decency. Human decency, in fact-that usually runs in vestiges.”

”I didn't believe it was an ordinary liaison. A simple ordinary liaison,” my mother went on with unexpected scorn.

”Annie, you mean? You want to call it a liaison, you go ahead and call it that. They call it something else in Dutch.” He gave an artificial half-sneeze, a sardonic noise just between humor and malice, which seemed to emerge from the flooring; he might have been squatting or bending in some imitative or satiric motion. Whatever the gesture, it could not, according to his satisfied snort, have been obeisant. ”The poor girl really did get in Dutch with you, didn't she? I suppose you've already fired her?”

”Of course. She went last night.”

”Expeditious! I congratulate you, M13. Vand.”

”The child can do without that sort of influence.”

”At all costs?”

”At no cost,” my mother spit out.

”Oh, you're very determined, I can see that. But it's all to the good-it shows you administer a good bringing-up. According to all the rules of pedigree-the horse code. No vestiges.”

”None,” my mother agreed sharply.

”Then I'm glad I came. I really had misgivings-I didn't think we'd be on the same side! I'm very, very glad. That's from the heart, you know.”

”I wish you'd state your business and keep your heart out of it.”

”It bothers you, my speaking from the heart? You don't like me to be sincere?”

”You talk about sincerity!” My mother gave an automatic cough, for poise; I heard it very clearly. ”Don't be obscene.”

”If I can't be sincere I've got to be something. It isn't enough to be vestigial, after all. You think it's pleasant to come here and find I'm looked on as a sort of refurbished fossil-”

”Oh, you don't have to worry about that-you can't be a fossil if you were never alive to begin with,” she a.s.sured him.

”That's the tone to take!”

”I'm not taking any 'tone'.”

”I beg your pardon, wasn't that Mrs. Vand's tone? The high and mighty tone of the high and mighty Mrs. Vand?-I've heard about it.”

”You've heard a great deal-your friend didn't keep back a thing. Apparently there was nothing she denied you.”

”Very few people deny me what I ask for, Mrs. Vand.”

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