Part 53 (1/2)
”It feels like a surprise,” Mrs. Purse said. ”I speak firsthand, a few of my wild oats were sown in moons.h.i.+ne. -Don't tell Purse that I'm not a cradle Friend,” she explained to me. ”Purse's family all are. Temperance people too. I turned myself inside out when I turned Purse. -Isn't that indolence for you? That's just the laziest baby I ever saw. Look at that, a slack Purse. George Fox, aren't you always harping on being your brother's keeper?-when you're not b.l.o.o.d.ying his nose. Henry David! You're daydreaming aggrandizement I can just see it. Carry him off, boys.”
Accordingly the Mahatma was raised between them as on a palanquin. Halfway down the hill he squirmed free and waddled frantically away. They tagged him. He tagged back, screaming. They encircled him. He screamed, laughing violently. He sneaked under the fence of their arms. They overtook him. The sun oiled him with a white glaze. He was permitted to escape. Confident of his perfection and of the perfection of earthly joy, he jogged off. They pursued the burnished body of the little soulless G.o.d. Then all three were invisible. Plumes of noise chastely ascended, with no source but lungs. The G.o.d had a belly, b.u.t.tocks, a neck like one firm finger, holy genitals pathetic in miniature; the G.o.d had grandiose lungs.
”Well it stands to reason you'd be more worldly than most,” Mrs. Purse chirped on, ”growing up that way in an Amba.s.sador's family. Did Mr. T. say Amba.s.sador or Consul? I can't remember which-I imagine the difference in way of life is significant?”
”Not significant at all,” I said rea.s.suringly.
”You are worldly. How refres.h.i.+ng that is.”
”Not refres.h.i.+ng at all,” I said. And: ”Here's your husband back from his walk.”-Purse was emerging from a wrinkle in the green curtain of wood. He scampered out with the urgency of a man shaken underfoot by the pressure of millennia striving upward against the soles of his tennis shoes like great prehistoric nudging elbow-bones. He was reminded of time by the lower geological strata and what they might hiddenly contain: it made him break into a run. He arrived with his mouth hollowly sucked in, concealing puffs. ”Good Lord,” said his wife, ”you carry on exactly as though you'd found an old bone in there. Have you ever known any paleontologists?” she suddenly asked me.
I thought of William: William as incredible boy. And what if bones had taken him in the end after all, instead of rocks? Would he have gone in for the marrow of things or finished just the same, on the rock of the law, on the hard outside surface of feeling? ”No,” I said, ”I've never known any.”
”Well,” she gave out decisively, ”they're snoopers. All of them. They have this fixed idea that you never can tell where you might hit on a mastodon. You didn't find a mastodon in there?”
He sat down on, one of the kings' chairs and silently breathed.
”You didn't find anything in there?”
”Groceries,” he said.
”In the woods? Now what in the world-”
”Dozens and dozens of cans.”
”Oh, well, cans. It's no trick to find empty cans-”
”Not empty. Full. All rusted through and years old. Piled up right behind an old gate-house. I cracked one open just by standing on it and out came a mess of green peas.” He pressed his forehead on his hands. ”A real stink to it.”
”Boy scouts,” Mrs. Purse guessed.
”And stakes pounded deep. For tents. I counted thirty-eight, that means better than a dozen tents in and out of the trees.”
”Well, there you are! Scouts.”
”A funny place for scouts,” Purse said, ”on private property.”
”Don't think about it. You don't have to bring your conscience into everything. Just pretend it's a public park,” Mrs. Purse said consolingly. ”Try and feel at home. Meditate on one hotel bill times nine.”
He glared at me as though the dishonest suggestion-conversion of the private to the public-had been mine. He was not unlike William. Perhaps all paleontologists, the proto- as well as the perfected, have the drive toward stern moralities uncontradicted by frequent (though impersonal) sp.a.w.ning. One remembers those mediaeval scholars who kept skulls on their tables to speak of the disintegration of the flesh and the eternal glory of the spirit. There is something of the ascetic in men who deal in tangible human parts. (Was he Purse's son, the splendid savage child tagging on the nether slope of the hill?-Ecstatic howls still flew, like the caw of a bird. -Or had Circe coupled with a hero while Purse lay bound in the snores of an aging athlete?) A faintly celibate odor-like snuff-came from Purse: the smell of the bossy Inner Light? unbelievably moving fragrance of the prehistoric, which can survive only in the pitiable thinginess of fossil?-Enoch had dealt in smoke merely, which escapes us; therefore he could remain engaged and engrossed in the world. Not so Purse, who pondered a concrete mystery. ”Someone died in there,” Purse said. ”Did your father tell you that? There was a death in there.”
”Was it those bones you were looking for?”-gently.
”Ghastly,” Mrs. Purse clattered; it was the tone she kept for ”Charming.” ”Really you shouldn't joke about it. It upsets Purse considerably.”
”We're living in a cemetery,” Purse said.
”Not living, just visiting. Think of it that way. And day after tomorrow we'll be gone.”
”Some of us will,” he said; he took me in with swift covert accusation.
”There'll be a poor showing,” she agreed, ”without Purses. You don't think the boy scouts did it?”
”Did what?” said Purse. ”What boy scouts?”
”Killed someone in the woods. Though it'd be against their oath. It wouldn't be a good deed. Maybe,” she speculated comfortably, ”Mr. T. did it. You see that's what Purse really believes, though he won't come out and say so to Mr. T.'s face. Now if Mr. T. did it, he wouldn't've told us about it in the first place, would he? It stands to reason he wouldn't. Unless you're thinking of the Reverse Psychology of the Boastful Criminal.”
”Bah,” said Purse, and leaned down to pull Dee's spade out of the ground. ”The fact is he didn't tell us. Polygon's j.a.panese did, and when I put it to Tilbeck he couldn't deny it. You can't deny what's public knowledge ”
Mrs. Purse clasped her hands like an opera singer, signifying pleasure. ”It's just that Purse suspects your father of romantic things in general. -And a murder would be so lovely and hilarious. -Oh look, now you've gone and yanked off the handle, Dee will be wild. Give it here, I'll glue it back-I've got some glue in my box. Well. Let it wait then-I'm afraid my box is still down on the beach. Did you see it down there last night? My tool-box?”
”No,” I said.
”I left it right down there in the middle of everything. Father and daughter,” she explained to Purse, ”they were down on the beach last night together. I knew it wouldn't rain with the moon up like that, so I just never went to bring up my tools. Just left them out. I wonder how you missed them.”
”There was a mirror-”
”Yes, yes, then you didn't miss a thing. -She didn't miss a thing down there. -Do you imagine your father's capable of anything like that?”
”Like what?” I said coldly.
”Oh, you know, what the boy scouts did in the woods. Though I feel perfectly safe with him, no matter what Purse insinuates. -You don't mind this sort of talk? It's all in fun.”
”All in fun,” Purse echoed. ”Fee fie foe fun.”
”Now don't be spooky with Miss Tilbeck. That's all very well with Harriet-”
”Miss Tilbeck,” he said with slow invoking care. ”Do you answer to that?”
”Purse,” said Mrs. Purse.
”Miss Tilbeck. You jumped last night.”
”Purse.”
”Now never mind. Did you or did you not jump last night?” Grimly he invigilated me. ”I said good night to you with perfect cordiality and in return for it got a jump like a shot.”
”I'm afraid that's right,” said Mrs. Purse. ”You did jump a little. Now that it's been brought up we might as well look right at it. I wouldn't explore this at all if Mr. T. were here, you understand that. We don't like to embarra.s.s him-he's been so good to us. -I wish you'd remember that,” she hinted at her husband. ”There's no profit in embarra.s.sing a Samaritan, you've said it yourself often enough.”
The appeal to restraint was without effect. ” 'Good night, Miss Tilbeck'-that's just what I said, no more, no less. And you jumped. You don't deny you jumped? You're never called that? It's unfamiliar to hear yourself called that? Taken by surprise? Not used to it?-Well, don't go!”
But I was already yards away. Behind me a dialogue floated up clearly and slowly, as though written on those pinkish, tissue-like, airy and undulating ribbons dirigibles used to trail from their whalish rears: the picture of the Zeppelin, the famed von Hindenburg, which burst in the sky while my mother sat enunciating Kant in Adam Gruenhorn's hole, carrying after it a sign like a cloud of light or blazing afflatus, Heil Amerika or something just as glorious-more seriously than surrealistically the idea of this slow, clear, speaking and pursuing great balloon had ladled itself inexorably out of the jargony nonsensical lingua franca of Ralph Waldo Emerson's badinage (Emerson the humorist), and though I made a rush downhill for the saving edge of the horizon, the terrible banners of the monstrous Zeppelin-a vast navel creating the sky-flapped close and sent their subtle winds slapping and dipping after me: ”He lied about everything,” said the wind that came from Mrs. Purse, ”you ought to've seen her face. Contradicted every word. She's no daughter-nothing to him.” And Purse's wind said, ”There's a resemblance still and all,” and Mrs. Purse's wind said, ”Yes, they both have the usual number of arms and legs. Doubtless made use of them too, last night on the beach,” and I hurtled out of the path of the talk freighted dirigible listing with surmise, and ran beyond the caress of its awful ribbons (bearing a heraldic crest marked Purse-stare et Price-stare), and flung myself among the tag-players under the hill.