The Unpossessed (25 page)

Womb versus world, he thought, silently removing his shoes, his clothes, in dread of waking her. For Margaret, women in general, lived in their wombs; put their womb before their wits; all things grist to their wombs, all the time drawing their men to those rapacious female caverns, striving to make them forget the world, their rival.

A part of him wanted to go and fling down at Margaret's side, crying that he wronged her, crying that he had come from the world outside and nothing there was palatable, that nothing was worthwhile but that they two hide and hide in ever smaller corners until at last they had hidden themselves from any onslaught from the world; then they could creep beaten but unashamed into each other's arms and curl still smaller until at last they would be utterly, shamefully safe, for there would be nothing left to breathe but each other's flesh. For a passing second he felt nothing for her but tenderness and compassion, as though she were a day-old kitten curled for comfort, that would never dare open its eyes and see the world. A man could devote his life to shielding such a kitten, to guiding it down safe paths to safe bowls of milk, and in doing so could forget perhaps his tortured longing to be of meaning to the world, to work out by giving his life the sentence of endless guilt pronounced in childhood. No, no! he cried to himself, and it was as if his Uncle Daniel stood above him, exacting promises again. Margaret, he thought in a flash of insight, has wisdom, more than I; but she has the intelligence only of a homing bird.

He climbed unwillingly into the bed beside her. She stirred like a faithful watch-dog ever on her guard; he knew that he could wake her easily. But he lay with his head (on the pillow, his childhood's symbol of unmanliness) turned from her and closed his eyes to shut her out. For if he let her wake, if he acknowledged her, she might reach and touch him, might soothe and lull him, might carry him back to that shameful world-obliterating peace. Her end was peace and his was truth and they must be enemies (he discovered it again as a fact he would never in future ignore) as their ends were enemies. They could not both win. In the bottom of her soul Margaret wished him to lay aside his restlessness and his fine nervous seeking (though they might be the very things she loved him for) and in exchange she offered him oblivion, an entirely personal world of vegetables; in which only a vegetable could endure. She wanted him to surrender.

Like his aunts, he thought, she wanted to frame him, to shame him. Afterward she would in her soul despise him, she would have crushed out the man in him and subdued him to merely the father of her child. Outwardly he would seem then more of a man; he could bow and smirk in public; he would be gallant, flying to pick up her handkerchief—he would be the puppet of a man and she could pull his strings, dangle him this way and that. Inside he would be nothing. And she, having narrowed their world, having furnished it with a baby's crib, flooded it with soothing syrup, would sit back satisfied.

The larger fight went on without her. Being a woman she was capable, he thought, of only a personal revolution, a sex revolution, having its boundaries in her own air-tight world. She offered him a sop, a compromise; permitted him to play with Magazines and politics; and stayed herself plotting at home, preparing a downy cage to catch him in. So he had stepped out, tonight, without her, into that larger world, gone with his faith and his eagerness; and found it lacking, found his friends scarcely nearer than she to the reality of one empty stomach that had sent them all reeling home to defeat. And here he was, on the brink even now, with her female body curved so close to him, of seeking consolation (he thought with horror of Jeffrey), of hiding in a woman's insides from a world he couldn't face.

A world where friends did not trust friends (but it was a sinking ship, the ship that the intellectuals were afloat in, and perhaps it must be a case of each man for himself?) The terrible compromises, the endless postponements . . . his mind went over irresistibly into the rutted treadmill of the evening's happenings. It struck him with full force for the first time that all their arguments were loaded; they were engaged in continually proving to themselves that activity was futile. And the evening, the constant meetings, the Magazine itself . . . were they not all of them rationalization, an elaborate plan on his part and his friends' (the old triumvirate! he bitterly thought) for postponement of some stand? For clearly if they felt a common cause (like the Sheep who knew what it was to go hungry) they would sink their differences and act in common. He saw them suddenly, coming together less from their belief in revolution (did any of them really believe a revolution would take place?) than from some terrible inner need in each of them to lay out his own personal conflicts in terms of something higher, to solve his private ends camouflaged as world-problems, secretively in public. Had Bruno or Jeffrey or himself listened to each other, except in a desperate sort of way, for reassurance, for purpose of identification with some other human, some stick on which to pin a banner? The Black Sheep came the nearest to his notion of what revolutionists should be; but he thought with distaste of their taciturnity, of their coldness, their matter-of-factness . . . Miles was looking for something higher (higher even than Bruno's search for what he called “integrity”), something that would sweep him, lift him, as nothing had done since the look on his Uncle Daniel's face when he killed his own dog without flinching: some faith, some belief that enabled men to act sharp and decisive and know the reason why.

And he himself, Miles Flinders? He loathed his daily job; he kept his job. He talked bitterly of what he hated, righteously of what he favored; and bought his tobacco of a communist. He condemned Bruno, condemned Jeffrey, couldn't swallow the hard materialism of the young Black Sheep; and threw up smoke-screens between himself and himself so that he could never come to action. He longed with all his heart for Mr. Pidgeon to fire him so that he might be prodded to life again against the jutting rocks of reality like the stones in his childhood's earth. Let the world struggle be brought to his door, injected in his veins; let him come to grips with that struggle, let the struggle be his own. Let there be but two sides, without this intellectual's no-man's-land in between, let him believe in one side or the other as he had once believed in God (as the youthful triumvirate had believed in pacifism), let him fight for it, live for it, die for it, with all his Uncle Daniel's strength. . . .

The pillow was unbearable beneath his head. He remembered Margaret's cry, in the early days of their marriage:
I'm going to make you so happy, Miles, I'm going to teach you to sleep with pillows, we're going to be so happy darling
. Happy! his Uncle Daniel always said his
pigs
were happy. And now she planned to soften him further, melt him down further, provide him with the irrelevance of a child. Ignore the lumps in the mattress, lay a pillow over them; ignore the world and bring forth a child to hide it further from their consciousness. The world at which she never looked, a world where people starved, where friends did not trust friends, where nobody believed in anything—into such a world she would dare to bring a child: to satisfy her inner physical needs; to compromise; to veil; she would bend and stoop and take what was not the real thing and feed it and nourish it and take it to bed with her and never know (with her blind passion for peaceful ignorance, for living what she called a personal life), that it was not the real thing, that she had brought forth a counterfeit planted in filth, to grow stunted and unwholesome in the tainted air. The pillow underneath his head was hot and soft, a bribe, a snare, reeking of the feminine . . .

He turned from Margaret, from her generous warmth (her body stirred lightly as though even in sleep she was conscious of him); and felt again the fervor, the high hope, with which, a frightened, stoic child, he had locked away his pillow in the closet. More joy in those early nights of unaccustomed hardness than in a thousand pillows, more valid peace than in a thousand women's arms. He moved away further, and her arm followed him out; he slid away until his head, leading the way back to loneliness and courage, to the endless search for God, had left the pillow quite behind, till it hung like a severed fruit upon the edge.

“COME ON,” said Bruno sternly; “one for mama, one for the Dickie-bird, and one for mama's psainted psychoanalyst.” He took the bottle from his own lips and held it to Emmett's, tipping it so the whiskey ran like tears down the boy's white cheeks. Emmett gasped and choked, spluttered like a helpless baby. In a pair of Bruno's large pyjamas he looked about five years old and faintly girlish. “Are you tight yet?” said Bruno grimly.

“Not m-me,” said Emmett, wavering proudly, “I guess I inherit a cap-p-pacity from my . . .”

“All right, keep going. One for Commissar Jeffrey. One for the Reverend Miles” (the memory of Miles' stricken face was something, like Cornelia, which Bruno wanted blotted out), “one for Uncle Bruno, the tiredest radical of them all. And one for poor Miss Diamond.” He raised the bottle and saw that it held just one more swallow. “And one to bigger and better opiates”; he forced the last drop between Emmett's laughing lips and crashed the empty bottle against the filing cabinet: which remained blind and impervious, and though shattered a little, though ringing metallic and insulted, righted itself at once and went on doing its duty. He remembered its duenna, the patient Mr. Harrison; and remembered how though he had denied to Mr. Harrison almost the existence of filing cabinets, Mr. Harrison (because the cabinet was his living) had gone on quietly unwrapping it; just as Cornelia, to whom he had carefully expounded the non-validity of hunger, had quietly and insolently fainted from it.

Emmett shook with laughter as though someone had blasphemed in church. “If he
is
my f-f-father,” he stuttered with a kind of lewd irreverence, and shivered like a dissipated baby.

The boy filled him with loathing and pity and a keen sense of his own depravity. He didn't know what urge (conquering repulsion, conquering a half-wish to be alone), had let him answer Emmett's cry and bring him home. His mind leaped forward to Elizabeth. But he discovered himself, now that so few hours remained to their meeting, totally unprepared for it; a bridegroom who had rehearsed, who had dressed himself, who had got ready too far in advance—so that when the hour was at hand and his mind, like his tie, impeccably in place, some extraneous event served to shatter his composure. Take Emmett home? when Elizabeth was coming? Preposterous! but why not, he thought the next moment, in defeated relief, in drugged tranquillity. The symphony he thought he heard had died; Elizabeth had been a part of it—when he thought of her now he thought of her as he did of himself and his old triumvirate, as static, as ironic ghosts, as dead beyond recall. Why not? he thought (glancing with a pang at the room he had with childish pleasure got ready for Elizabeth; the flowers shaking in a vase; her own brand of cigarettes scattered liberally to make her feel at home; even the piano, long unused, was open for her)—why not? and with an unhappy knowledge that he took Emmett not so much from pity as for his own protection he put his arm around him, and loathed the boy and loathed himself.

“Drunk yet?” he said. He wanted the last vestige of anything human wiped from Emmett's face as he wanted the last concern for Elizabeth violently removed from himself. He wanted to see Emmett weak and helpless, he wanted to destroy him for the reflection of his own despair.

The smile was frozen on Emmett's lips but suddenly his eyes grew wide and frightened again, he shrank away in Bruno's large pyjamas. “Bruno . . . I can't forget . . . Cornelia . . .” He buried his head pitiably in his arms and sobbed again.

“None of that now,” said Bruno abruptly, rose and found another bottle. “You're slipping up. Remember you're not supposed to be human, you're an intellectual. Humor is the intellectual's favorite opiate and rationalization is his strongest virtue—an old slogan, my boy, from the early Roman days. Pour it down, Emmett. Good ole whiskey. Prove that Al's your father.” He drew the boy's shoulder against his and held the bottle for him.

Emmett swallowed obediently, sank back mollified with his head against Bruno. “So terrible,” he murmured sleepily; “hungry—in my own house, I've never been hungry, but I felt it, I felt so funny in my insides, Bruno. Bruno, you know what it felt like? It felt to me like loneliness, like the way I used to feel when I f-f-found myself away from home; and l-l-lots of times when I was in it. Bruno, do you think hunger could feel anything like l-loneliness? is that silly, Bruno? . . .”

His head lay so helpless on Bruno's shoulder; so easy to reach out a hand and gently stroke it. Bruno's hand shrank back as though identification with Emmett meant identification with final defeat. He took a drink himself (of Elizabeth's welcome home bottle, of a mellow Bourbon that he knew she loved) and watched with disgust a few drops fall on Emmett's head; his hair was childishly thin and soft, the scalp shone through vulnerable and fair like a baby's; the drops of whiskey glistened.

“Can't be compared, Emmett,” he said. “Hunger is a crude thing any fool can feel; loneliness is subtle, refined, complicated pain—only a sensitive, well-bred palate can feel it. . . . Good God, Emmett, what's upsetting you? Can't you take an object lesson?” He loathed himself. “Take another drink, Emmett,” he said roughly.

“Must I?” Emmett stirred, his lashes fitfully fluttered. He drank again, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and settled more heavily on Bruno's shoulder. “But Bruno—” his voice came troubled, reminding Bruno of Elizabeth so many years ago, asking him to bound eternity. “Bruno, if hunger doesn't really count . . . what
is
the object of the game? I mean . . .” He paused, unhappy; frightened as Bruno was, at what he said.