Lilith (26 page)

“Your grandma tells me you’ve given her fifty dollars, Sonny,” he said.

“Yes, sir. I get fifty dollars a week, and I feel as if I ought to pay at least twenty-five into the house,” I said.

“That’s very generous, Lad.”

“Well, I’m twenty-three years old now, and I ought to be helping with expenses by this time. If I was working in Washington or somewhere, I’d have to pay that much for my board and room, at least.”

“Why, I know, Lad; but you’re not working away from home. Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’ve done, but as we can get along all right without it, I think you ought to be putting that money away. You might change your mind about going to college someday, for example, and you’d find it would come in very useful.”

There must be some terrible weakness or vindictiveness in me that I’m afraid I will never learn to overcome: why did I suddenly dredge up out of my memory a remark of his that was made four years ago and quote it back to him in such a heartless way? “Yes, sir, but I think I ought to. We all have debts to pay, every step of the way.” That is
not
why I gave her the money—at least not entirely, not consciously, as honestly as I can determine. How terrible it is when two people who love each other have each irreparably wounded the other, so that they know they can never be truly reconciled!

In spite of this unhappy conclusion, had an interesting and productive day at the Lodge. Worked with Behrendt, Palakis, Meaghan, Thurmond and Hagan. Palakis is deteriorating rapidly, and will probably be back on Third Floor by tomorrow. Spoke rapidly and wildly and was seldom in contact, scattering chessmen across the floor at one point and crying out (apparently referring to his king), “It is useless, useless, to defend him! He is doomed already! Doomed by the guilt of his Manipulator!”

Curious incident with Mrs. Meaghan. When I brought in Behrendt from playing tennis—another inglorious defeat for me!—Lilith was playing her flute, and she (Mrs. Meaghan) was standing at the open door of her own room, staring sightlessly into the corridor and listening with that same look of thrilled attention which I suddenly remembered her exhibiting on the first day that I met her, when Bob and I were playing cards with her in the lounge, and the sound of Lilith’s instrument had drifted into the room.

When I offered her my company for an hour she raised her finger to her lips and said with savage impatience, “Ssh! Be still!” After the music had stopped, and it had become apparent from the length of the pause that followed that it was not to be resumed, she turned her eyes toward me, still dark with anger, and said fiercely in her elegant European voice, “How stupid of you. How very cruel. It was so beautiful.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were listening.”

She stared at me for a moment, her look of anger changing slowly to her more habitual one of cool formality, and murmured, “Of course. I beg your pardon.”

When I repeated my invitation, she accepted it, surprisingly enough, asking me into her room in a rather abstracted way and sitting silently for some time while she stared into the branches of the poplar tree outside her window and tapped with her finger tips the rim of a blue bowl full of floating anemone blossoms which stood beside her on the table. After several minutes she turned to me and said, “I hope you understand. It is just that these are very unusual moments which, in spite of their rarity, are constantly being interfered with—out of policy, indifference, expedience, or some equally callous ‘practical’ reason. It is extraordinary that beauty can exist at all, when there is so much determined opposition to it. Do you like music?”

I said that my understanding of it was limited to rather primitive forms.

“It is nothing to be ashamed of. Folk music is infinitely preferable, I think, to many of the so-called ‘masters.’ How eternally the world is deluded by bombast! Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky—I would exchange them all for one Mass of Palestrina’s, or this tune which we have just heard.”

“It was certainly beautiful,” I said.

“Do you think so?”

“Yes. It has some of the loveliest phrases I’ve ever heard.”

“Yes. I’ve always felt that communication required true simplicity and delicacy, rather than volume or virtuosity. Don’t you agree?” While she spoke she parted the anemone blossoms gently and dipped the tips of her fingers into the water. There was something in her voice and manner that I found faintly annoying and which added to my reluctance to support an opinion which seemed so arbitrarily exquisite and not entirely candid.

“Still, I suppose it could be considered a good thing that there are many different kinds of music, since there are so many different tastes,” I said.

“Perhaps you are right. Perhaps we are fortunate that there is such a vast audience of vulgarians for the commonplace, and that it is only we few to whom the great ones wish to speak.” She lifted one of the blossoms and fondled its stem for a moment, smiling thoughtfully. “When I was a little girl I used to go in the summertime to a lake in Austria, and there were water lilies growing along the bank. I used to lie there in the sun and pluck them up. Their stems are coated with a kind of brown slime that you can strip off in your fingers. There is no more delicious sensation in the world.” She lifted her hand to her mouth and very delicately touched the tip of her tongue to her fingers. “It is a taste you never forget: cool and dark, like olives.”

There was an unaccountable pause, and I asked with sudden discomfort, “Would you like to play cards?”

“No, thank you.”

“We have time for a game of Five Hundred, if you like.”

She turned her eyes toward me slowly and smiled. “I’m sure you think of yourself as a very persuasive young man, but I am really not inclined.”

“As ‘persuasive’?” I said.

“I could not help noticing that when you went on your motor trip the other day you succeeded in persuading Miss Arthur to accompany you—which is really quite remarkable, considering that she hasn’t been on such a trip in months. But I think you will find me a match for you.”

“Well, I won’t insist, if you don’t want to. I thought you might enjoy it,” I said.

“Thank you.” She drew a handkerchief out of her sleeve and clasped her wet fingers in it, inclining her head a little to watch. “You seem to be a very nice young man. Do you write poetry?”

“No, I don’t.”

“May I ask why you are working here?”

“There doesn’t seem to be anything else I can do,” I said. “And I enjoy it.”

“Really? I don’t think I would enjoy it at all. Are you married?”

“No.”

“I should think it would be a most depressing kind of work—entertaining eccentric spinsters, pushing witless girls about.”

“That isn’t quite the way I think of it,” I said.

“Of course it isn’t. I’m sure you are very
serieux.
You have that strangely anxious look about you of men of principle. You remind me, if you will forgive the comparison, of a priest.”

“I don’t think I deserve it,” I said.

“It is less flattering than you believe.” She finished drying her fingers and spread them out like the spines of a fan, studying them gently. “Principles will bear examining, you know. That is something the young are always too proud, and too busy trying, to practice them, to discover. There was a young nun, for example, who used to be very kind to me when I was a girl. My parents were killed in the war, and I was sent to a Catholic orphanage. I was very lonely and miserable at first, and I often used to cry all night. This nun would come into the dormitory and sit beside my bed, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, to comfort me. But curiously enough, it seemed to cause her considerable distress. I remember once, when she took me into her arms and held my head against her breast, that she was weeping. I thought at the time that it was a religious emotion—charity, or simply pity for a lonely child—as indeed it would have been accepted by anyone who witnessed it. But not long after this she asked to be released from her vows, and left the orphanage. Do you know what it was that troubled her?” She paused, creating a deliberate and skillful suspense, to which I found myself extremely vulnerable.

“No.”

“She wanted a child. It was an instinct whose strength she had never fully realized until she held a lonely little girl in her arms, and which she then had desperately misinterpreted as piety for as long as she was able. But she could not continue to deceive herself.”

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Because I met her many years later, in civil life, at a little mountain village in Austria. She was happily married and had three children, to whom she was joyfully dedicated. We had tea together one afternoon in Zell-am-Zee, watching them swimming in the lake in front of us.”

“But surely it was
because
of her principles that she was able to make the break,” I said.

“Exactly. Because of her
examined
principles. There are forms of activity which are incompatible with certain temperaments—they are too exalted, perhaps, too disciplined, or too full of temptations for one’s nature. And the person of real integrity will be honest enough to relinquish them, rather than making a mockery of his whole life, or deforming his nature by attempting to extend it too far. It is worth remembering.”

She tucked her handkerchief into her sleeve and, while I stared at her with a vague and confused sense of dismay, began musingly to rearrange the anemone blossoms in the blue bowl. Our conversation ended with mumbled inanities on my part and an air of courteous detachment on hers.

What a disturbing woman she is—both for the devilish insight which she appears to have into my own misgivings and the cruelly sophisticated way in which she is able to express it. I had an impression of profound and finely controlled hostility—even of threat—from her, and am afraid that in any conflict she may choose to ordain between us I will find her more than “a match for me,” as she put it.

I had intended to stop in and speak to Lilith for a moment, as it is several days since I have seen her, but I felt so strangely debilitated by what Mrs. Meaghan had said, and was so preoccupied with sorting out its implications, that I decided not to. I must do so tomorrow, however, or she will feel that I am deliberately avoiding her; must make some effort to show that I don’t bear her any childish ill-will for her behavior on the picnic, and try to repair the bad impression I must have made on her with my own. Also, I have not yet given her Warren’s message, which I promised to do. Every time I see him in the second-floor common room, or pass him out walking, he gives me a long anxious look of inquiry, which is beginning to get quite irritating. I think I have made a mistake in allowing myself to accept the role of confidant—even to the extent that I have—and will have to guard against this indiscretion in the future. (It seems to me I have made this resolution before!)

I am going to find it difficult to be conscientious about keeping this journal regularly, with Jung to look forward to every evening. I have read myself to sleep with it the last two nights—and what a wonderful and illuminating experience it has been! Can’t remember being so delighted and rewarded by a book since Eric introduced me to
A Passage to India.
Find I can’t read more than ten or a dozen pages at a time, however, as this is enormously profound and complex writing. What an original and brilliant man he is! And how unfalteringly honest—when not inspired—in his opinions! I intend to copy down every evening a passage that has been particularly significant for me, and make it a sort of text for the day. How much I will have learned in a year’s time, if I keep this resolution! Yesterday, for example, in his essay on “The Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” I found these lines:

How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole . . . psychology has profited greatly from Freud’s pioneer work; it has learned that human nature has also a black side, and that not man alone possesses this side, but his works, his institutions, and his convictions as well. Even our purest and holiest beliefs can be traced to the crudest origins. . . . It is painful—there is no denying it—to interpret radiant things from the shadow-side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naïveté, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really “final” truth that, when carried to the extreme, opposites meet.

Can’t explain my excitement on reading this passage. It seems to me that in every line of it there is more honor, hope and pride than in anything I have ever heard from my sweetheart, my minister, my neighbors, or my officers. Maybe if I had had a father he would have told me such things. But it doesn’t seem very likely, from the way they talk about him.

“Not since the picnic,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to stop in every day, but something always seems to come up.”

“Well, I wish you would. She may be brooding about it. See if you can get her outside for a while; but if she won’t go, spend half an hour or so with her in her room, anyway. She gets herself locked in there for weeks, sometimes, and we don’t want that to happen again.”

“I haven’t been quite certain of what attitude to take about the picnic,” I said.

“I’m sure it will occur to you on the way up.” She smiled and clapped her hands together in a facetiously pedagogical way, as if she were quoting from a text: “Frankness, and perfect self-possession, if such a combination is possible. It’s never wise to put on a great show of magnanimity—because our feelings
are
involved, we
do
get honestly annoyed or alarmed sometimes—but on the other hand we don’t want any recriminations; that’s never the way to help, or to heal. I must have said all this before, but I know it helps to hear it again, sometimes.”