The Unpossessed (17 page)

“I love everything,” she said. “The whole blooming works.” She had grown careless about her dress; it was shabby—he remembered it when it was new, fine wine-colored wool, fitting closely to her shoulders. It was much more beautiful now, faintly worn, slightly darkened under the arms; the collar limp about her neck. It looked like her.

“I love that dress,” he said.

“This old rag.” She laughed. “I love it too.” Her eyes floated again, that absent look shining brightly in their depths. “And no new ones this year,” she said in a ringing voice.

“Maggie, I forget: are you supposed to be a beautiful girl? I can't seem to tell any more. You've got such a great big light where your face used to be.”

“Idiot, balmy idiot,” she said. A happy, volatile film rose in her eyes. He took her hand. “We
will
be late,” she said, almost as though even she could bear no more, was frightened. “And what did the papers say, darling,” she mocked him tenderly. Her laugh reached him like the lapping of small warm waves. Smoke rose from the toaster. They sprang apart laughing as though the toaster had caught them out; their eyes parted slowly. He watched her rise and carry the burned slices competently to the sink. Every movement fascinated, comforted him. He had an excited sense that he was living in a house with a woman, his own private woman.

“That will teach us,” she said, turning on faucets, turning them off, wringing her hands in the strange gestures of a woman rapidly cleaning house. “Teach us to be balmy at breakfast, my love. If you will hand me the cups, my good man; and the butter in the ice-box, please. My hat, my gloves, my handkerchief—has Mr. Salvemini been for the garbage yet?”

“Five minutes ago,” he said. “We're late! But
we
don't care—let Mr. Pidgeon and Mr. Worthington burn in hell.” He found her a little absurd, a little beautiful, in her last year's Empress Eugénie hat. “Margaret, before I go to Mr. Pidgeon,” he said; and hovered like a small boy with a confession to make, watching her pull the wool sleeves down over her wrists, hold them in her fingers as she slipped into last year's coat.

“Margaret, there are times . . . Margaret,” he said uncertainly. But she would not help him out; she had grown sure of her joy and stood there laughing at him. Well, well? she seemed to say; come my New England lover, come my little wooden boy, come all of the way by yourself, I'm betting on you, darling. He couldn't make it. She turned to go, still smiling. He was miserable, stood rooted in his New England tracks. “Margaret, wait a minute, I love you,” he said painfully. He had said it before; but never, he knew, from such binding necessity as he experienced now. He kissed her till her ridiculous hat perched on the back of her head; till it fell on the floor; till his hands trembled and his voice broke and the world tolerantly stopped moving and the irrelevancies fell off and there were left only himself and Margaret and whatever it was they dared to bring into the world together, out of their love and joy, their sequestered island of light. There was a rumble and clatter from the world: Mr. Salvemini had returned the garbage pail and left it, with a fine Italian delicacy, outside the door.

THE WEB, thought Jeffrey (smiling into Mrs. Middleton's eyes) was growing closer; the bloods of antipathetic persons forming (through him) into a nucleus, one fine comprehensible kernel; the loose strings (he thought of the old triumvirate) tightening, gathering together, the separate ideologies (Merle Middleton kissed him with aristocratic restraint) all beautifully merging; himself in the center, at the political switchboard, at the pivot (he thought of Comrade Fisher); the strings in his hands, the tactics in his head; intellectual, aristocrat (he grew drunk on Merle Middleton's perfume), merging, clasping hands in his own personal brain, their common meeting-place his heart. . . . “I think I hear my husband coming,” said Merle Middleton fearfully.

They sprang apart and picked up papers pertaining to the Magazine, knotting their brows and moving their lips as they glanced over the typewritten lines. “I am very much interested,” said Mrs. Middleton primly, one hand on her hair—but it was only March, the butler, entering with the Middleton canary who had just returned from a bird-hospital where it had sojourned for a week. “I am a fool about that bird,” said Mrs. Middleton, abstracted; “I know he gets as lonesome as a human.”

“He looks very well, Madam,” said March kindly; and before beating a butler's retreat he uncovered the well-appointed cage with a name-plate on the gate. He passed from the room and Jeffrey's consciousness like a fat and ancient sleuth.

On a swing which was supported by a pair of miniature tropical trees the Dickie-bird sat wearily, a convalescent smile upon his face. “He knows me, he knows me,” cried Merle Middleton softly, and gave him her finger to dodge. “Doesn't it know its mother,” she crooned—and blushed girlishly: “oh Jeffrey, if Doctor Vambery could hear me now!” She turned and smiled; and Jeffrey caught the wistfulness, the loneliness, what he interpreted as an appeal of some kind to himself.

He kissed her outstretched hand. “Santayana,” he said (a throw-back to his pre-Bruno, pre-classconscious youth) “reduced everything to a common denominator, to different numbers of atoms floating democratically—all of equal importance—in the general life-stream.” He was faintly puzzled by his words, as he was often puzzled by his writing; wondered if he attributed them rightly to Santayana, or whether he had made them up himself. “You are like me, Merle—unconsciously a mystic; the canary means as much, a part of life, a part of happiness. . . .” He was lost. He found himself by taking her in his arms and kissing her. “But my husband
will
be here soon,” she whispered reluctantly against his chest.

He was unaccountably relieved. “When will we ever be alone,” he said tragically—and renouncing her, his hand upon his own moist brow, felt tragic. He paced the floor in circles round the Dickie-bird. “This bourgeois substitute for love, this unwholesome play which is never finished, this is a sin, Merle, a sin, when we feel like this about each other.” She abandoned the bird again and came and pressed his hand with ice-cold fingers. “I am something of a lone wolf,” he said pathetically.

“Next time, next time,” she whispered with the timidity of a virgin, assumed, he felt, to tempt him further. “Let us talk more about the beautiful project, the Magazine . . . did you say it was to be translated into several languages abroad?”

He nodded, thrilling to his dream of Foreign Offices—his own the French branch, situated on the Seine. “But we are crossing bridges,” he said, smiling. “Naturally that may not come about for some time—for six months, or a year.” The months skimmed by like so many days in his excited mind. “Meantime we have America.” He rose to go. “I have a number of things to attend to,” he said. His hands began to twitch as though they counted. When he had seven things to do, they came so often rushing through his mind that they multiplied to seventy. And now he remembered Comrade Fisher; and the fragrance of Merle's expensive perfume suddenly pricked his conscience vaguely. “I
must
go,” he said with dignity. Tender and reproachful, he gazed his farewell into her really lovely, frightened eyes; she smiled back; and he straightened the tie that Norah had chosen that morning for him to wear.

He came out on the street, and in the sunshine the seventy things in his mind multiplied gayly to seven hundred. His fingers wove constructively as they ran over the rest of his day. Meanwhile the sunshine was a blessing; passersby were friendly; the city was his own. Life was too short, the day was too short, his heart was too small—for all the merry and important things his hands conceived. He knew he must hurry. For he was between books now; he was luxuriously and unbearably energetic and ambitious—what Bruno called his “manic” period. He was building things in his mind so rapidly that he was tearing them down to replace them with larger things before he had completed the plans for the original. He must work fast; for he knew in some distant portion of his brain that spring might find him, as it had before, gently living with Norah again and starting another book.

A telephone booth was what he needed next. He found one in a drug-store on Madison Avenue, and quieted his nervous fingers with a pencil. The innumerable telephone calls he had felt he had to make dwindled miraculously under the pencil's matter-of-fact touch, to two. He telephoned to Bruno and reported on his successful transaction with Merle Middleton. He listened impatiently (tapping the pencil on the sides of the telephone booth) to Bruno's report of his labor on the Manifesto; Bruno—or anybody—on the other end of a telephone wire was so remote, unreal, that Jeffrey resented the normal responses which interfered with his own. “Come
up
?” he said incredulously to Bruno. “Come up to
your
place?
Now?
You're crazy! I've got seven thousand things to do. I haven't had time to
eat
all day. The Manifesto? I know, Bruno, but good God! these other things have got to be attended to!”

A little irritated, he inserted his second nickel to call Comrade Fisher. (Damn these women anyway, he thought, humorous at his own expense; they've all got offices to be in just when I want to see them.) “I've had a most successful meeting,” he said to the distant Comrade Fisher, incredibly taking dictation for her living, “I've just come from Mrs. Middleton. I've persuaded her . . . she will give money . . . she's very much interested.” He wondered with chagrin what Bruno would say when he learned that Comrade Fisher was a woman. “I'm so tired, Comrade,” he suddenly said (the operator asked him for another nickel); “and worried; it's like selling my old friends, a little,” he said, aware that he voiced an atavistic bourgeois sentiment, “planning things that they don't know about.”

“Your loyalty, Comrade,” Comrade Fisher spoke grimly over the wire, “is pledged to something bigger than personal friendship. Your friends, the Magazine, may be useful weapons. If not, you'll have to chuck them overboard, if they've outworn their usefulness. . . . You stand in a most strategic spot, Comrade, I've told you: the pivot . . .”

The pivot. Again he felt his blood go round, rising proudly to meet the boast. The pivot; around him the drug-store, the world, turning, women dancing, political movements revolving. His hair might go gray; he might rot in jails; he might lose his friends, his livelihood—before the world would know him for a Comrade. “I know, I know it, Comrade,” he said, grateful to her for this piecing together of separate parts of himself. “I know that I must keep my finger on the bourgeois pulse.” A ribald joke possessed him, about the delicacy and charm of the very bourgeois pulse of Mrs. Middleton; but this kind of humor was foreign to Comrade Fisher, who once passed a night in jail. “And you ought to see me in action,” he said as much as he dared, “I am developing into a first-class strategist.” He flexed his muscles in proud retrospect. The telephone booth was too small to hold him.

“I notice you never take me along, on these strategic adventures,” said Comrade Fisher faintly over the wire. “Remember, Jeffrey, there's such a thing as capitalist consciousness, this Middleton woman is playing some game of her own at the same time you are. You've got to distrust them every time . . . class enemies . . . Mrs. Middleton is an upper-class whore. . . .” It cost him another of Norah's nickels.

“Of course,” he murmured back, remembering that extravagant perfume. But there was something feminine in Comrade Fisher's fears. It turned his awe for her into something faintly condescending; as Merle was ultimately a small item in his important schemes, so some day Comrade Fisher too, her usefulness outworn . . . “I'm awfully sorry, Ruthie, about this afternoon . . . I did think I could stop by for you, but I can't . . . too much to do . . . I'll see you when I can. . . . I've really
got
to say goodbye.” He hung up, left her to take dictation at twenty-two dollars a week.

He observed with a feeling of gratitude that the drug-store clock had travelled thirty minutes. It left but two more hours of the too-short day. He strolled to the counter and bought some cigarettes. “Give me some nickels in change,” he said to the clerk. Two minutes had gone by. He paused at the door of the drug-store; it was pleasant outside; it was pleasant behind him, in the drug-store. He was a little irritated, in retrospect, at Bruno's peremptory command to come on down to his place—as if Bruno belittled his duties and thought they could be dropped at any moment. And then his hands began to worry again.

For how was he to explain to Bruno that not merely was Comrade Fisher not a man, but she was also not a comrade. Not properly speaking, that is. Comrade Fisher was no straitlaced communist (so she had told him many times, lying on her narrow cot beneath the photograph of Lenin); she despised what she called the “American movement” as it was and lived chiefly to reform it, to bring it to its senses, to remind it of the principles of Lenin which it had forgotten under the rule of Stalin. Comrade Fisher had learned it from the inside; she had been to Russia on a six-week tour; she had been in prison for a whole night while the police made certain she was not a member of the party; and above all she had been secretary and lover to two young party leaders. After which, ironically, ridiculously (after a trip to Russia! after twelve long hours in jail!) the party had refused her membership unless she went and studied at a Workers' School! (Jeffrey turned and ordered himself a malted milk.) “It was this,” Comrade Fisher had explained, “this hide-bound bureaucracy, that finally made me suspicious of the party.” After that she had made investigations, rounded up a group who had been treated by the party in the same ridiculous way, and together she and her new friends had made a study of the party's defects. They termed themselves “sympathizers,” “fellow-travellers,”—amusingly enough “outsiders”; but actually, she had explained, they were on the inside, the inside of “the real thing,” the inside of what Lenin and Trotzky had meant to bring about and which now they saw perverted in less immortal hands. He finished his malted milk with vague dissatisfaction. It was clear enough to him, but Bruno was often as hide-bound as Ruthie Fisher described the communist party.