The Unpossessed (37 page)

Mr. Terrill, drunk, threw a wad of paper napkin which landed at Bruno's feet. As though it were a signal Bruno stepped up closer to the crowd and waved his arms till he was a large and frantic cloud above the Black Sheep's heads. “Pardon my dandruff,” he bellowed at the crowd; and fastidiously flicked the thousand scraps of paper. They screamed again; he reared reproachfully and rapped with his empty envelope for silence. “FRIENDS,” he shouted—but at the very sound of his voice they roared again; comfortable, assured; a happy audience.

“FRIENDS, INTELLECTUALS, FELLOW-SCEPTICS:” (Emmett's eyes opened wide in terror for this was not the opening they had planned). “I am with message.” (
O I could die
, wheezed Ermine-tails.) “The world is up a tree. Three movements are abroad to lure it down, led separately by Einstein, Vambery, and Mary Baker Eddy; we will omit the communists because no one present ever saw one.” (
O my God
, moaned Emmett.)

“To the future this era will be known as the great age of panaceas, of patent medicines, of Little Magazines. Friends, as intellectuals it's time we took our stand.

“Are we as intellectuals going to remain sitting on the fence, watching Christian Science fight with Freud? are we going to twiddle our thumbs and stew in our juices while the world is on the breadlines, the redlines, the deadlines? are we going to dope ourselves and stuff ourselves, intoxicate ourselves, anaesthetize ourselves, against all decent feeling—and meanwhile miss the bus?” He tottered, swayed; the laughter held itself as when the clown, hanging from a ladder too high above the audience, swings out and threatens the safety of the crowd. He recovered and straightened, bowed with a homosexual Tammany smile and waved his empty envelope to show them they, as well as he, were safe. “The answer is: WE ARE.” The laugh broke out, relieved, the merry cocktail laugh, the self-indulgent, self-effulgent upper-class champagne laugh.
O my God
, moaned Emmett.

“But comrades! need I tell you” (he brandished the envelope with an arm emotionally aquiver) “we must have competent defeatist leadership; without it we are lost.

“Friends, it's time our party organized; I offer you a leader. My candidate stands on the slippery platform and the sliding scale, the only frankly anti-progress program in the country: the old barbed wire fence.

“Our party is of the intellectuals, by the intellectuals, and naturally against them. Down with revolutions, resolutions, Magazines, and all attempts to put this country on its feet. We believe in nothing but aspirin and sex. The full bladder is our only goal. We sponsor: sublimation, constipation, procrastination, masturbation, prevarication, adumbration, equivocation, prestidigitation, moral turpitude, split personalities and rape; pornography, salacity, apostasy, hypocrisy, erotica, neurotica—in plain words, fellow-victims, anything that's phony or a fake.”

“Leonard for president,” Al Middleton cried—for he had caught a look of terror from his son (standing now, side by side with Bruno's green-clad cousin)—and the horror dawned upon him; a horror to be drowned, or drunk, enough to annihilate a father. “Second the nomination,” cried Mr. Terrill recklessly.
O my God
, moaned Emmett. “Middleton for commissar of sex,” Lucius Whitman (his hand on Mrs. Draper's knee) cried gayly. “I decline,” shouted Al, mounting the buffet table and standing with one foot in a Virginia ham, “I'm no intellectual, I practice, I can't preach.” He dragged Miss Powell up beside him; the merry olives flew.

“Fellow dope-fiends!” Bruno cried. “Observe your host in position one of a most important object lesson, proving that the greatest opiate the intellectual has ever known is SEX. There are those who will tell you that all activity is sublimation, a substitute for sex. Don't believe the lousy academics, gentlemen: TO THE INTELLECTUAL SEX IS THE SUBSTITUTE FOR ACTIVITY, THE HIGHEST SUBLIMATION, THE FINAL OPIATE.”

“Hurray for opiates!” cried Mr. Terrill drunkenly. “What's position two, there, Middleton!” cried Mr. Draper. “What am I bid for this lovely pony?” shouted Al, revolving Miss Powell on the buffet table; “what am I bid for the Magazine in cellophane, unseen by human hand? what am I bid for one half-baked revolution, guaranteed not to bite, scratch, or come off?” Miss Powell laughed her dress half off her shoulder; Al reached behind the one remaining turtle-neck, pulled down the banner of the Hunger Marchers, and used it for a screen. “Position three,” he cried, and disappeared behind it; laughing olives skipped from Miss Bee Powell's feet. Oh very good, ve-ry good, said old Miss Ballister feebly.
O my God, Elizabeth, can't you stop him? why don't you move? are you drunk?

“. . . for too long,” Bruno was calling hoarsely, unheard, into the growing din, “for too long we have wandered unorganized, unwitting members of the lost tribe, the missing generation, the forgotten regiment; outcasts, miscasts, professional expatriates . . . accidents of birth—for many of our fathers were farmers or tailors or jewellers—we have no parents and we can have no offspring; we have no sex: we are mules—in short we are bastards, foundlings, phonys, the unpossessed and unpossessing of the world, the real minority.” (Was she looking at him, thought Jeffrey, was Elizabeth's strange and beautiful stare for him? or was she staring still at Bruno? Never in all his life had his blood surged with such violence.) “We have no faith,” cried Bruno: “we are scared till the blood in our veins runs thin and we hop from one faith to the next because to believe is too unbearably exactly what we want.” (Oh Margaret, Margaret, let's go home . . . darling, darling, I am frightened too—perhaps he's drunk.) “We have no class: our tastes incline us to the left, our habits to the right; the left distrusts, the right despises us. Our race, one time the aristocrats, the philistines, the high-paid prostitutes, is dying out; our function's dead, our blood is blue. Have you read today's assignment in Pushkin, young men? ‘Strike me dead, the track has vanished, Well, what now? We've lost the way . . .' ”

“Oh he's starting on the Bible, Mrs. Middleton, can't we have some music,” cried Miss Titcomb and Miss Milliken. The band was tuning up. Miss Hobson kissed Mr. Terrill passionately (and knew that he would never marry her), Miss Ermine-tails squeezed her fur pellets till they bled between her thumb and forefinger, Mr. Tevander felt sick at the stomach and didn't know why, Miss Powell screamed in sensual amazement and scattered more olives from behind the Hunger Marchers, Miss Titcomb permitted herself to smile with chaste pleasure at the ‘Spaniard,' Graham Hatcher, the efficiency expert got rid of his wife to someone else and reminded Emily Fancher that she was a merry widow now, and Mrs. Whitman sucked her pearls on Mr. Draper's lap. The music blared out, as much under control as it would ever be—and Al and Miss Bee Powell kicked aside the Hunger Marchers and leaped down to dance, Miss Hobson sprang up with Mr. Terrill in her arms, in no time the floor was covered with dancers spilling out like beads from a box, melting rhythmically in one another's arms. “Dance!” cried Elizabeth, waking like a mechanical doll (she
was
looking at him, thought Jeffrey, with a sudden fear), “dance, Jeffrey, dance, partner!”
O my God
, moaned Emmett.

“Listen, comrades!” shouted Bruno in a fury. “Don't wait for the bandwagon to steamroller you, the ghost brigade is forming now, the corpse parade, the fellow-traveller charade; limp up and join us now, there's room on our fence for every individual straddler in your number. Are you a tired radical? are you a parlor pink? are you a political pansy? are you a morbid individualist? are you a victim of the twentieth century social disease? do you have singed or clipped left wings? then climb right up and straddle with us. . . .”

Bruno saw them moving, swaying (Elizabeth whirling in her stiff bright lettuce-green, her little-girl skirts flying gayly) one-dimensional figures on a shaking paper screen; but close to his vision and moving strong and sudden, their number multiplying, he saw six others, flesh and blood: the Black Sheep rising in a body.

He looked down, meeting Firman's eye, prepared to meet irony with irony or anger with anger. But to his endless shame and horror the eyes of Firman and of all the Black Sheep were lit with pity for him; as though like some youthful jury they had sat in judgment on him and grown mellow; sure of themselves and mature at last they were suddenly able to get on without him, able to endure with sorrow their master's vast defeat.

“Where are you going, you adolescent fools!” he roared; “didn't you hear your professor, Literature 71 with full credits, didn't you hear—‘strike me dead, the track has vanished' . . . where do you think you're going?” He threw back his head as though they had struck him, and addressed his speech to passing, non-committal dancers. “There is a band of decadent optimists among us, traitors to their class—Black Sheep in fact—who refuse to stay drinking and dancing on our merry sinking ship. Like rats they will desert us. Very well,” he cried with drunken dignity, “we can dance, we can drink, we can fornicate on our graves, without you. . . .” He resumed his lost professorial grace and spoke with a familiar mingling of his irony and sincerity. “My advice to all young rats and Sheep,” he lowered his voice and spoke closely to the band of youngsters, “is to get out, here and now; go west, young men, go south, go north—go anywhere out of our God damned city. New York is the precocious head of the adolescent body of America. America is still growing—I presume it is, if it exists at all—still angles and painful joints, and it's too big for New York to coordinate. The city's got dementia praecox, and the intellectuals along with it. . . . Maybe as intellectuals we've got some part to play; but take it from the old Chinese: this army of the lame, the halt, the blind, will come to an end, will be wiped out from start to finish, before the workers' movement will be widespread and successful . . . if there
is
a workers' movement,” he revived his cynical eyebrow with gallant insincerity. “The only way,” he continued as though he pulled his finger from his verbal dykes, “to come to this cause is to come ‘clean'—that is to come not in order to solve one's individual neuroses, but to come already free of them. My friends and myself are sick men—if we are not already dead. Our values were mixed in our intellectual cradles; we've muddled the idea of love and sex until we are psychically incapable of either; from being ashamed and afraid we have thrown out one and degraded the other to the level of show-window exhibitionism, or taking of twentieth century snuff. . . . You may think me sentimental; but the lie in our private lives is important, it makes our public lives unreal and fraudulent—a man can't do good work with an undernourished psychic system. . . . In each individual case a Vambery could give you valid special reasons—but when an epidemic's so widespread, it has a deeper basis than the individual. I suppose we're victims of the general social catastrophe in some way we're too close to to figure out. . . . So we come, each of us, believing in nothing and certainly not believing in ourselves, equipped with little but our private hate and the symptoms, each one of us, of our own personal disease . . . and play at making revolutions for a band of workers we've never even seen. . . . Our meetings are masterpieces of postponement, our ideologies brilliant rationalizations to prevent our ever taking action. . . . I think I'm talking life, not communism—all I know is myself and my friends have never had a good look at either. . . . Listen, you kids, get out of it, get out of it while you can, leave us rotting in our blind alley, we've lost the way, we've dug ourselves in . . . you kids get out. . . .”

“Don't worry about us, Doctor Leonard” (their voices rang with triumph) “we want to say goodbye” “and thank you” “gosh, you've done a lot for us” “please tell the Dean” “to hell with hot-house education” “we've started breaking the rules already” “Firman and Corny got married this afternoon” “and now” “hell with the ole diplomas if they won't take us back” (their voices rose in concert) “we're going anyway” “we're going to bum our way to Washington and see the Hunger March”

He reeled as though their flag were too bright for his eyes. They stayed a minute—he thought he saw Cornelia's eyes go misty—as though like crusaders on their way they might pause to succor the sick. He waved them savagely away. “Go on, go on, get to hell out of here, beat it—I don't believe there
is
a Hunger March—go on, why don't you, what are you waiting for, I'll give your message to the Dean. . . .”And as they still lingered, as though at the end of their childhood they hoped for one last sanction from their elders he shook his fist in warning, smiled like a very old professor over the top of his glasses: “Run, Sheep, run!” They smiled, Firman and Cornelia, Irish Kate and Little Dixon, both the Maxwell brothers—or were there more of them? were they all the decent children in the world? were they the vanguard of the newest intellectuals who, not remaining aloof with their books and their ideas, had strength to mingle with the living and bring their gifts among them?—and about-faced, marching from him, marching from the ballroom to “bum” their way to Washington, their flag one piece at last.
O my God
, moaned Emmett; and followed his generation to the ballroom door; but he was too weak, or else the Sheep were ruthless—for Bruno saw him turn and mount the stairs, like a lost child climbing to the nursery. He caught sight of Elizabeth, whirling, whirling, gay in Jeffrey's arms, he caught the look of pain in Miles' tortured face as Miles saw his second God killed before his eyes, he laughed to Margaret Flinders who sat, her beauty gray and troubled, he waved to Norah dancing bewildered and unwilling in a stranger's arms, turned his eyes from Elizabeth's merry glassy stare over Jeffrey's shoulder. . . . “Listen, fellow-bastards!” roared Bruno unheard at the punchbowl; “drink, drink with me! Up with your glasses, down with your hopes! TO THE REVOLUTION, FELLOWLICE: THE MOST INGENIOUS OPIATE OF THE INTELLECTUAL.”
O my God
, sobbed Emmett, trailing up the stairs.