The Unpossessed (4 page)

“I'm a hard guy to live with,” he said. “But have patience with me, Maggie.”

Between them, first Bruno, then Margaret, they had taught him to take pride in the childhood he had thought so barren. Margaret had made him remember what he thought had never been: the good things, the warm bits, the isolated rays. He had found for her the story of his first hay-wagon ride, his uncles drinking corn and singing with the farm-hands; he had given it to her baldly, take it for what it's worth. She had looked at the story; taken it up in her hands and breathed on it; turned it round, admiring it (from her own flat urban background); and handed it back a story he could feel. He found himself proud of his stern uncles relaxing (with Uncle Dan's permission) and getting drunk; of his own solemn self jigging up and down with the motion of the wagon; proud that before God had died, before he had found a friend and then a wife, before Tenth Street and Charles Street, he had known long dusty roads with rocks piled on their sides, farm-hands singing in the harvest moonlight, and little jumpy hay-ticks hopping from his grimy hands to his bare scratched knees.

So he was a man with a childhood behind him like any other man, and why couldn't he lean back in peace against his wife's soft breast. He had earned it, he deserved it, like any other man. He leaned back now, knot by knot unravelled in his mind. His stiff joints eased, his dry bones bent. Only, he could not come all of the way. One breath caught on a snag; he sighed, lightly, inquiringly. There must be more than this?

But Margaret was wise, he countered, allowing himself momentarily to be seduced. She was not like his befuddled aunts who would have made him into someone else than who he was. She took him (if you were a gangster! she had said; if you were a one-armed paper-hanger!
I
don't care!) demanding nothing—but surrender of his restlessness. Whatever I am, she loves me, her message is that we can be “happy” together (my Uncle Daniel used to say his
pigs
were “happy.”) “We have each other!” she could say. With what joy, what faith! She needed (it would seem) no other purpose, no other God; perhaps that “balmy” look was holy? perhaps he must respect it, as one sits dumb in the presence of another person's religion? For him there
was
no longer religion—curious that what was
rational
could be so incompatible with man's emotion!—and what else was there, once one's God was dead? Margaret herself was the greater sceptic, born and reared in flippant, urban agnosticism; yet Margaret, blandly, with that “balmy” look, faced life and lived it, asked no questions, sought no answers; like a calm angel, he thought; like a woman rocking a cradle, he thought; like a cow chewing her cud.
Was
Margaret wise?

She sat as still above him as though she had gone to sleep. He knew that she had not. He knew she was there, a pillar of consciousness, awake to his smallest movement, ready to open and take him in if he asked for it in the subtlest way; ready, her face gone “balmy” with her ecstasy, to swallow him whole. He knew that she reduced even her physical being to suit his, softened her breathing now so they could breathe together in a common rhythm. He knew that she was physically so minutely aware of him that he had only to put up his hand for her to find it. Her consciousness rebuked him; lowered on his head a debt it irked to meet. He wanted to breathe in his own private rhythm. The nearness of her female flesh, her female awareness, surrounding him with warmth he did not want, was stifling.

Yet peace sat on his eyelids. Gently his head rose and fell, drifting on the ecstatic tide she strained herself to regulate. Drift! Drift off together, floating out of the world to ecstasy, to sweet oblivion. Ah! if he only dared! if Pinocchio only dared give in! Give in to the blessing of forgiveness without punishment, give in to love. Let the world (which Margaret—blindly? wisely?—hated) with its hideous turmoil spin over their heads, unheeded. “We have each other!”

But that was death! cried out agonizingly the one knot still holding open parched eyes in his breast. That is surrender! cried the part of himself that to this day felt itself the cause of Uncle Daniel's death, for wishing it to be. Save me! cried the little boy who turned from love as Uncle Daniel turned from drink. Peace—such peace as he saw ahead was death.

His sense of wrong against Margaret turned slowly to a sense of injury. What sort of woman had he got that offered her man the breast when he needed the sword and the power behind him of her own resentment? And what sort of weakling was he, standing meek while he was
cut
(cut so his wife, earning more than he did, was left more of a man than himself) to come bleeding home and forget his wounds. . . .

He found his bones going dry again, his shell closing over.

A drafty doubt against her stood in the road and winked to him. Loyalty struggled and died. He sensed conspiracy in the pressure of her arm about his shoulder. Woman is man's temptation, Uncle Daniel sternly said, classing Miles' mother (whom Margaret said he must have loved to have hated so) as a Limb of Satan for her sin of being pretty. The real class struggle, twenty years later Bruno dryly said (but one never knew what Bruno really meant), is the struggle between the sexes . . . from an old Chinese adage, he added hastily to dodge responsibility.

The pressure now of Margaret's arm: too light to be love, too deliberate to be unconscious. Coaxing, rather, as his aunts once urged him out to play, like “other people's” nephews. Was it seduction? proselytism? was she carrying on the aunts' campaign? On the floor the bundle he had pushed looked on with its ear expectantly cocked like a pleasant little animal, signalling her above his head.

Conspiracy! Her touch said nothing at all to him; it spoke beguilingly to her hope of what he might become, the prototype of the boy “like other boys” his aunts had wooed. She wanted him soft. She offered him the bribe of female flesh. So the mother tempts the child; so the rich man soothes the poor; so a woman bribes her man. Perhaps she was pleased his pay had been cut? hoped it would melt him down? hoped that the cut emasculated him? “You will be bringing home most of the bacon,” he had said casually; and she had made no reply. But perhaps her arms had gone round him in triumph? And “Jeffrey called you,” he had said; she had ignored it as one would a child's obsession. (Yet he had said it only to torture himself; it miserably failed; was even the sharp joy of pain to be denied him?)

The real class struggle, Bruno said, is the struggle between the sexes; and rebellion begins at home.

He squirmed in her arms.

Her hold relaxed at once. He was shot like a lonely arrow out into the void again. (She gives up easily, he thought with bitterness.)

“I've been cut twice,” he said, shattering the silence grimly as though he had thought of nothing else.

She quivered behind him loosening her hold. “As if it mattered!” she said; but he could detect defeat in her voice and it gave him subtle pleasure.

“Next I shall be fired.”

She stood before him now, straightening her dress. She seemed less like a woman straightening her dress than a soldier pulling his uniform in place after leave. Her “balmy” look was gone. She looked oddly militant to him.

“No doubt you will,” she said with her kind of cheerful malice; “as long as you reckon so consistently, as Bruno puts it, that the world owes you a beating.”

“Just think,” he said, roused by the challenge in her tone, “just think of the men all over the country, sneaking home to their wives tonight, their tails between their legs. ‘Darling, the big shots cut me again today.' Not unlike being castrated, you know (let her have it): the word
cut
has an admirable folk-basis. And the wives, who ought to feel themselves cheated too . . .”

“I know!” She laughed, pulling her dress firmly over the shoulder. “ ‘How much, darling? oh, only ten per cent? well, we can get along on
that
?' ”

He shouted with laughter, his tension momentarily snapped. “You do know how to put a man in his place, don't you, my gentle little wife?” This was how he valued her, brittle sword in hand.

But her face went soft again. “It's a place I don't much like to see you, dear.” Her damned face looked sick again, like weeping. “Oh Miles! I wish you trusted me more. I wish you let me
help
.” Her voice broke on the
he-elp
unbearably; like a tragedy actress in the sticks.

“And just how could you help?” he asked her dryly. “Can you find me a job that's interesting? can you fix the world so it's a decent place to live in? can you even” (oh let her have it strong, let her suffer from what was eating him, let her damned female superiority cower in knowing inadequacy) “can you even share my ideas? my indignation? can you help me to express them?”

Discouraged she looked, but resourceful; as though no child could come hungry to her and find her without cookies in her apron. He could see her searching through her meager cupboard.

“There's Bruno's Magazine,” she said thoughtfully; and her eyes brightened, wistful, as she offered him her findings.

“The Magazine!” he uttered, strong in his rejection; it was like offering him warmed-over cake, his last year's love. “There'll never
be
a Magazine. Try again, Missis Flinders,” he said for the recollection hurt him.

“What did Jeffrey
want
?” she said calmly.

“Oh yes, of course,” he said quickly. “I said if you liked, we'd pay them a visit. I suppose you'll want to hurry with supper?”

“Hurry?” Her eyebrows raised, she was gathering the bags up off the floor. “Hurry?” she said; and wearily he saw that her patience had snapped, that a quarrel between them was imminent.

“Why yes. To change your dress for Jeffrey. Let me help with the supper.” He spoke with gentle malice.

She gave him the onions to peel.

THE CABLE lay conspicuously on his desk, adding to his gloom. “
Professor Bruno Leonard
(the
professor
, he felt, was ironic)
Am threatened with marriage and slightly drunk please advise. Elizabeth
.” A modern odyssey, he thought, could be hardly better couched: phrased to conceal the meaning, to understate the feeling, to ridicule the appeal still (one didn't entirely outgrow being human) humanly necessary. He pushed it aside; the business of the Magazine—or Jeffrey's interpretation in terms of filing cabinets—must come first. It seemed today the world was out to frame him, force him to decisions when he much preferred to float. First his peaceful bachelor life disturbed by a ridiculous cablegram (and she might be already married); and then his placid dream-world ruthlessly invaded under the nervous adolescent eye of Emmett Middleton, by a Filing Cabinet arrived unheralded in the moment of his worst confusion.

The business of the Magazine came first; but his eye like his mind returned tortuously to the cable. The form as well as the wording was so pathetically fitting, so hauntingly recalling Elizabeth at her most ambiguous and lost; what could be briefer and fleeter than a cablegram? it touched him to see how she had put all she had to say in ten short words. He thought for a mad second of cabling her a wedding-present, a check the exact amount of her passage home, alone; but her marrying or not marrying had really nothing to do with him. Twice he had kept her from marrying, fifty times altered her life in some other way; mustn't there be an end to this interfering like an aged uncle in other people's lives? But a fine Frankenstein he was, he thought, and almost groaned aloud as he saw his Idea turning on him and become reality embodied in a Filing Cabinet, emerging green and indisputable like fate under the salesman's crafty hands.

“Listen, my good fellow.” He addressed the back of the man who fed his wife but not, from the look of him, his own vanity, by demonstrating Filing Cabinets. “Don't unwrap that thing, I hate it. I didn't order it. I haven't anything to put in it. For thirty years man and boy,” he said grimly, “I've hated Filing Cabinets. My young secretary there will tell you.” He designated Emmett Middleton wavering on the window-sill, backed by the campus outside. “Filing Cabinets and progress—explain my defeatist inclinations, Emmett.”

Emmett squirmed inadequately in his flimsy undergraduate shell. The salesman, resigned as he was to the legitimate vagaries of the upper classes, smiled his faint, thin, up-state smile; and continued to rip heavy paper from his livelihood.

“It's only fair to tell you,” Bruno concluded firmly, “that you haven't a devil's chance of selling me that thing. It's a pink elephant in a china shop and I don't care for it.”

“That's perfectly all right, professor,” the salesman muttered soothingly; “my orders is to set it up. Orders is orders,” he added insincerely. His loyal goiter trembled.

“Look—” Bruno relapsed into a coaxing tone. “That thing was ordered for my Magazine. . . . But I haven't
got
a Magazine; I'm not even sure that I want one.”

“That's perfectly all right, professor,” the salesman said. “You haven't got a Magazine, today—no. But then” he said wisely, “there's no use having an inferiority complex, is there? Is there, son?” he said nodding with wistful brightness to Emmett. “No, there isn't,” he answered himself, crestfallen and obedient; and winding a little ball of cord about his finger dropped it with trembling assurance to the floor.

Bruno subsided in bewilderment. Where there's a Filing Cabinet, he reflected uneasily, can the Magazine be far behind? One ought to have time to think things out—yes, and he had had, he reasoned dryly, only about ten years of playing with the Idea. The Filing Cabinet (like the damnable persistence of the cablegram on his desk and in his mind) was profoundly disturbing by its concrete presence. One could deny its implications no more than one could deny its being Saturday. And Saturday in Paris too; it must be nearly midnight there. Too late to get married tonight, young Elizabeth! “Nothing,” he said thoughtfully, “is more baffling than an assistant editor who orders Filing Cabinets. . . . After all,” he ended with a despairing glance at the silent Emmett, “it's as well to remember, just by way of practice: there
is
no Magazine.”