The Unpossessed (11 page)

“Oh, ploughing,” Jeffrey said. “Ploughing's fun.” He rose and lightly stretching as though in fine voluptuous retrospect, crossed the room for Bruno's gin. The miracle, incredible, of human beauty, especially in a male, held them silent for a moment.

They sat thoughtful and withdrawn, all single vessels headed for the dark. His hands upon Norah, he longed like a dead man for sensation, envying in Jeffrey a purity of desire that he knew could never be his own. The dumb virility of the extrovert, he thought; needing no Idea to quicken it; whose sex-urge served no purpose but its own; Jeffrey's virility an absolute, an entity, a thing untouched, uncomplicated, always lightly functioning. (So he had instructed young Elizabeth: the casual, the light; avoid the awkward depths, my dear. A tiny germ of pain pricked through his anaesthesia.) His own need seemed a thing belonging rather to his ego than his body; a thing tonight which he longed to create by force to establish some contact again with the living.

“Make them strong,” he called to Jeffrey; “I have my psychopathic difficulties, I can't do justice to your Norah's charms.” “Perhaps I haven't got enough,” said Norah in her husky voice. But any other girl, he thought, amazed, would be insulted. She curled her rich body to one side on his knee. Was she unconscious of her own sensuous movements? of his hands attempting sly and intimate possession of her? For if she were unconscious, then his own faint pleasure must die a shameful death, like a sensitive youth perceiving himself unrecognized at a party; so intellectualized was he, he thought, and sighed, that he could no longer feel even sensation unless it were accompanied by a smile or wink to show the stimulus aware. Idea again! (and he had trained Elizabeth to thoroughly ignore it, preaching purity of sensation!) Deliberately he opened all his pores for Norah's warm invasion; but they seemed clogged with some forbidding consciousness.

“Predicament or no predicament,” Miles walked the room's length restlessly, turned and paced it back, “if we're ever
going
to have a Magazine” “who said we were,” said Bruno “If any of us is ever going to do anything in fact” (Miles paused and kicked a chair as though it were himself) “it's now or never,” he addressed the chair; pulled its leather seat to torture it. “Cigarettes and gin,” he muttered. (Margaret sighed.) “We talk and talk like an old Russian novel,” Miles cried bitterly; “I'd like to know what any of us
do
.” “Personally I don't do anything,” said Bruno; his fog closed over him; he felt that he was dead; “and you?” “I don't do a God damn thing,” said Miles; “I don't do a God damn thing but talk.” In the quick silence they turned their heads from one another.

Like a play too often played before, the whole revolved in Bruno's brain; a play with faulty continuity. What ailed them all, he wondered; and saw them, each in his separate groove, traversing parallels in an endless treadmill; a chorus composed entirely of temperamental first violins. Their energies combined would make terrific force, a powerful and vital symphony; but they seemed each to prefer being first violin in a small puddle to throwing in his lot with the common orchestra. So the strength of each, turned inward on himself, bored like a cancer in the tortured brain; his music, bursting and swelling, remained milling and unexpressed in his own private head. The women barren; the men dead; their common factors being negatives, rebuttals, refutations. (Perhaps Elizabeth was right? to go careening off in space, in any part of the world but home; attempting no rhythm but her own.) And himself? oh, loyal to the code, to the last defeatist ditch. He was dead.

But Norah, gratuitous remnant of an outworn wish, sat like a lump of dough on his lap. Norah, as an opiate, had failed. Tonight his mind forbade his body to react. He tumbled Norah off his lap.

“The investigation,” he announced, “is closed. The show is over. Poor Miss Diamond wants to go home. You may take those figures of speech away now, Norah.” He watched her cross the room, plodding, oblivious, through their dead desires. Poor womanly fool, he thought; she's the only one that doesn't know she's dead; who goes on with her mild and meaningless andante while the rest of us (tongue-tied prima donnas, small-puddle first violins) hold our bows and wait to die.

The silence was suddenly terrible.

HER HEAD was simply spinning!
did
they all know what they were talking about? “I wish I had it down in Braille,” she said to Margaret Flinders; and passed on looking for glasses to refill and pondering the shortage of cookies. And what did they mean, “not a God damn thing but talk”? didn't they eat, sleep, make love—God knows her Jeffrey did! (But life, for people who were clever, was no such simple thing.) Norah liked talking over gates. The best talk she had ever known was hanging over her father's gate and greeting villagers passing down the road. Short; friendly; to the point. “Hi there, Alice May, how's that new puppy of yours?” “Just fine, thank you, Norah, she's doing mighty nicely—the mother too. Have you seen Mary Pickford's latest?” “Why no, I guess I'll
be
seeing it though, before the week is out.” “Well, I'll have to be jigging. So long, Norah.” “So long, Alice May.” Then swing back on the gate with no thoughts in your head but who will come next, the mailman maybe, or old Man Tilton or the Grierson's little girl. Not that there wasn't plenty of talk too, in the Meadows' household; at supper, for instance—she didn't think theater-hour in Times Square could hold a candle to the Meadows family sitting down to one of Mama's stews. I can't hear myself
think
! the Captain used to roar. What a school of them there were! Two big Meadowses (and I mean big! thought Norah proudly) and seven smaller ones; with Norah second to the oldest. And whatever had become of them all, Norah couldn't imagine, stopping to think, was it Johnny, was it Sebastian, who had earned them all a fine spring holiday with the whooping-cough? She'd scarcely heard (they were a large family; but not what you might call a letter-writing family) since they wrote to say that John had married Fanny Stillwater from Cupper's Road. The scab! thought Norah, chuckling; could he have forgotten how the Meadows brood had boycotted Fanny for going on with her hair down her back in curls after the rest of them had looped their braids three times back and forth from ear to ear. . . . Well anyway, she thought (and wondered what had happened to make them leave off talking?) anyway, talk back home was plain; maybe nobody ever said much worth remembering; but down to the baby everyone spoke to be understood. But they were cleverer than she; and of course, if they didn't talk the way they did, they would come to the end of talk too soon. But this silence was peculiar; it must be twenty minutes after something . . .

Well then, thought Margaret, they had been for so long silent that they might have taken root in silence. It welled from all of them. It beat upon her ear-drums. Echoed in her blood.

But this silence was not death, Bruno knew. It was not so much a case of life must go on; but on it went; there was no stopping it. And there was no silence. For if they did not beat their drums and draw their bows across their violins (his old triumvirate!), there was a fearful throbbing in the air, of all their muted instruments; of pallid wings upon the windowpanes; of fear; of death; of life itself.

She was tired, Norah was, after the long day of work; after washing up in haste to make ready for their friends. But she wouldn't let herself drift off till she was sure that Jeffrey didn't need her. Every time the weather changed he started something new; and here was fall and Jeffrey needed watching. Her eyes wandered back to her handsome Jeff (they never left him long), sitting wrapped in his complacent secrecy; his fingers fitfully fluttering, keeping time to the rhythm of the silence. She knew that he was playing games he loved, dashing about doing mysterious things so rapidly that in the end they mystified himself. He never explained things much to her of course (indeed, why should he? she was not clever like the rest, like Margaret, who although she was a woman, often entered conversation with the men—and then, they had sweeter, more wordless things to say when they were alone); only, when his activities collided or contradicted each other, when people called him on the mat for things he had forgotten, then he brought her home the whole mess to untangle, laying it like a broken toy in her lap. Then was her sweetest time; then he cast off the cleverness he wore before his friends, shook himself free of his mysterious games (alone with her his hands were often quiet), and lay like a happy child in her arms. And somewhere in him, though he might ignore her before the others, he never forgot that it was Norah whom he needed most. She never forgot it either. The knowledge was a soft melodic undercurrent to her life. She
was
sleepy, Norah was. But this was not the stillness of the barnyard, this odd, protracted silence; it was not a respite; the pillow was soft to her head, but the silence kept her from sleep.

Time was passing over Miles' head, whirling in his brain. Silence was unendurable. He felt himself on trial. For with his admission to his friends that he did nothing, absolutely not a God damn thing but talk, he felt that he had laid his cards implacably on the table; and not merely before his friends but in his own eyes and the eyes of something like his Uncle Daniel's God. It must be in such a period of concentrated, coiled-up tension that a man would spring to life if ever he were going to. He wanted to leap from his chair and cry to his friends that now was time for action (now!); he felt that if he did not, he would condemn himself to sit in that chair in silence for the rest of his mortal life. The minutes sped and dragged. The silence stood over him like his Uncle Daniel, like the justice of his conscience, exacting promises.

The day was longer than the year; one hour held more minutes than the day held hours; a minute was interminable. And so with life, thought Margaret. The whole flew by. But each step, each tiny interlude, must be swallowed with pain like a mountain. The silence was crossed and criss-crossed by her thoughts; the silence was a thousand cancelled voices; the din was pounding in her blood.

Fumes of silence rose up from the rug. Bruno thought: already through my fog I cannot touch my friends. A day will come when with my own tongue I shall not feel my palate. Has that day come? is this the endless silence? The wildest symphony could be no more terrible than this; the silence died and cried across his nerves.

Jeffrey's watch said twelve o'clock. He flexed his muscles restlessly. The silence was like the Sundays of his childhood spent in church; he could pray better in the school-yard; in church he dreamed of baseball. Now he tried to think. But his eye fell on Margaret's fine long legs. Something had surely gone wrong between himself and Margaret—what was it she had said? He thought of his book; his mind flew to the Filing Cabinet; to Margaret; to his watch; and Comrade Fisher . . . His fingers jumped. He thrust his tell-tale hands deep in his pockets.

She had seen that look in Jeffrey's face before. She must wait till after the others had gone, for that look to turn to her. She had seen it first when for the first time he had said to her, out under the trees in her father's orchard “I am something of a lone wolf, Norah” and she had immediately taken his face between her hands and laid it on her breast. But it was not her breast which he was seeking, not hers which could rest him forever; and soon he would be up again, frightened and eager, a child who having found his wish must seek to find and lose it endlessly. But what had happened to them all? Had they come to the end of talk at last? They seemed, each one, so far away. And Margaret Flinders with her hand stretched out, her eyes a thousand miles away, reaching and reaching . . . (Oh!) Norah gently pushed the cigarettes within her reach.

But after he had let his cry go ringing to the corners of the room, cutting like a sword across the silence, after that, what then? It was now or never, now or never, Miles grimly told himself; and continued to sit on in the silence.

She met Norah's eyes. Something valiant, utterly compassionate there; and sterile; offering a cigarette. Once women gossiped with pins sticking out of their mouths, bending over garments and mending, slipping their fingers in and out with knitting needles and darning eggs; with care, with purpose. Now our laps are empty, our bodies upright, our foreheads broad and scrupulously bare, our fingers lift, not needles, but cigarettes, cigarettes which we hold to our lips competently, puff competently, draw reluctantly out of our mouths. The moment must be swallowed, got down someway. But Margaret sat with the matches in her lap. To the silence she added her own vindictive emptiness; and heard it slap and wash against the walls.

They must have quarrelled, Norah thought; this evening; before they left their house, perhaps. She and Jeffrey never quarrelled. She slipped back deeper in her cushion; closed her eyes.

Elizabeth would draw her, Bruno thought (turning with relief from the men's sharp faces, from Margaret's odd accusing look) as a beautiful female animal, perhaps haloed like a saint, with little inadequate men clamoring to be suckled. Elizabeth? There was a quick tightening joy in his chest as for a swift, involuntary second he touched her through his fog. The muffled band played on in silence; but a fine brave piping sounded through it; off-stage, perhaps; from the marrow of his bones, it might be; from memory, from hope. It was Elizabeth.

Suppose that afternoon he had stood up to Mr. Pidgeon: said be damned to you and your dirty job, take it, keep it, I don't want the stinking thing. What then? What could he turn to? Follow the stony furrows, with his nose close to the ground? let the ache in his back press out the torment in his mind? At least each fall there would be something, something he had planted, helped to grow. It might be sickly; meager certainly; but something. To tend, to watch, to hold to.