A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (25 page)

Being Americans they were haunted by America,
the beautiful:
federated valleys of stinking rivers overhung by rickety steeps; cement obelisks with fine steel bones; Blue Laws and Negro boys being burned; wealth, and premature ripeness of exhausted males, of females like porcelain and “two-faced.” “God mutilate America,” MacNeill had prayed when drunk. “Remember the Aztecs, remember the Negroes and Pueblos and pacifists. God give their women to the blacks, keep increasing cancer, burn their theaters full of yet green children.” A bloody fight was due. To determine the quality of something not yet wholly differentiated from what has gone before: Amen.

The contrary was their life: to be despised, to be ignored, to be bullied by an air. To submit to tyrannies, policed indoors at ten, and discomforts, as wet beds and gritty baths, and poisonous diet of cabbage and cold-storage meat. By comment consent; a blessing, to those who had done nothing with masses of men but shout. The gaze here had to be frozen, as prepared for tormented god and, when expectation died, preserved to ward off impertinence. Not a soul, not a friend was to be greeted in the open air. Slapped on the back in Nebraska, they were grateful; belonged, between burlesque and maudlin feeling, to a company whose foreheads were countless as pearls of gravel, but whose love could be made exterior only by the pitch of their voices, faultless, pseudo-Doric chord.

The ancient Puritan, first bred here, was propitiated by the spare joy. The wounded eye, blessed by Henry James, unable to endure its yard and ditch, made of this, statuary; art not life, so the distortion caused no pain. Mouths without appetite or satiety, eternally closed; Greekish faces meeting one another without impact as geometrical lines meet; reticence, as a mannerism of a school of actors, false and lovely; a cold-bitten waste, smelling of hounds, created around the upholders of stale decencies. The pitiful Americans possessed no causes.

Reddish and pinched as if by cold, some affected chapped skin and never to be newly shaved; shabby wool, in which rain beads and does not sink. Hamilton had not abandoned his middle-western styles: too tight suits which creased horizontally from the buttons, and flannel - padded ties, sharp shoes and a vest- pocket full of pencils, pens and patent nail- files; but Valentine enjoyed a black flannel shirt and electric-blue string of silk. Unconsciously an imitator, of eccentrics the gravel and damp lumpy beds also bore. These had Javanese cotton printed with jungle-hens and ovals pointed at one end, and handles of their silverware were of a pre-Gothic animal with the hindquarters of a worm. Men also haughty, some miserably exhausted, but abstracted as if hearing something measured and shrill. One had egg-shaped violet eyes and a mouth like a dead poppy. These were the objects of wit they hoped was normal. Hamilton and Valentine discussed the old evil and new conscience; took the correct position, from the Germans.

The curd-white path unrolled. Pines in spring, the soft one hung with mustard, another a black steeple; and a squat hawk-colored bush. The always shaken-up lilacs started with seedy dark buds. Magdalen’s tower, heavy with shields and rosettes, put up. Along water they wandered, slime-heavy, scratched by twigs and rotten strips, drab dank flood.

Behold, the swan. Not a bird, not a bird. Pallid and bleak, sudden, breaking everything, floating, turning. Recollections of snow rose, foliage of glacier, old stiffened honey—they fell down, serene, heavy, in Valentine’s head. He was appalled, by what he named the bird’s beauty.

A barge of feathers, scale on scale, white which is fusion-of-colors, water-proof, dragging a shadow of black, absence-of-colors; sea-going breast, uncleft breast, all the plumage and the immense elbows covered with down and hung from these bones the oiled linen and woodwork of a giant kite, all the plumage wrought toward the back, where it rose steeply, many-leaved, out of the water; within, black greasy meat, washed in unclean blood, a few bladders of food and slime to be ground by flints; but coiled muscularly on the atmosphere above, the limb of its centuries of power, the neck, the snowy rubber-hose with nib of horn black as ebony.

Breathing heavily the air parted and made shiver the feathers. Silent, plunged its long throat through the soft flood, and perhaps mouthed the umber muck. Deep under the perfumed little-limpid fluid its Negro black feet beat the waves stored invisible there, and these paddles spread their vibration through every quill and small whittled bone. Linked to filth, stainless; and hung in the dirty shadows, heatless light. The bird caught in its strangely placed buttons for eyes the adoration of man, and exhibited its beauty; swayed its shoulders, revolved rigidly, gave itself deeper into the water, put out its neck straight and hard like a tulip.

“Beautiful,” Hamilton said, in a small tone. Then Valentine escaped; from the holy animal that had been a lizard.

They hurried, on the lawn of Winchester, through its fruitless stone. Drained, tricked, subdued; the captivity had been terribly good. And after, a peculiar world, in noticeable perspective like a stereopticon view. What his eye saw was exaggerated so that the intellect also saw. Striding with the motion of one wading through the common life of animals, vegetables, architecture, and men, his friend. Unmixed, of the nature of an element one could call by a capital letter. A man haughtily built: blunt muscles attached without subterfuge to regular bones, interlocking types of flesh and skin of several tints, excellent and harmonious. He watched him walk, and, less eagerly, watched himself walk, as if it were a difficult, a curious performance. At the same time, distracted, he felt that he would break in pieces but for Hamilton, a bulwark to resist sensation. The inside of his head already reeked with fever.

They clattered in the gutter at twilight between houses baptized with bloody color of brick, and recoiled from the acid moisture of their hall, and pushed inward their door, the literal, the carpenter’s idea of door.

Martha Sloe sat there, hands clenched, weeping. Red and sodden against sunken green wall. Getting up, a mere blot in Valentine’s eyes, she appeared to trample the exhausted hearth; and facing Hamilton commanded him pitifully, “Come with me.”

Valentine jumped for his hat and stick. “No, you stay, I’ll go. I need a book, the Union closes …” She took his hands, shaking the tears from her head. “Dear Arthur, dear Arthur, you are good. But your room has murdered me already. If I didn’t deserve it …”

They were gone. Arthur turned very cold and rushed around the room. Fed the fire, filled his pipe, lit it, emptied it. Poured whiskey in a cup, spilled it in the geraniums. Squatted on his feet, painfully cold; cold like marble. Busied himself with the girl, facts he knew: Canadian, dancer in nightclubs before 1914, husband killed in the first month of the war, child dead of something hideous, married again, to a young Communist, and mother again. “I loved my deformed war-child so that I can hardly care for the common lovely one,” she had said. He was sickly suspicious of his pity. The fire licked him, doubled his cold.

In the sitting-room of importance. American son of pallor, exhausting bigotry and shame, he knew well his father: Methodist minister, whiskered priest, warning blandly against Socialists and painters. One morning he had fainted in the road, with pulpy ears full of sand; the seven-year-old boy thought him dead, and sat on the sod, relieved and inhuman, watching the horse - flies buzz over the swollen face. Impotence: to regard other men as muscular and fertile, to buy their tolerance with wit, to wait; to dry up, to go stale, never to know hunger. He was picking at the beauty of boneless fingers, he was a kind of sea- anemone. To build up a slim passion by reflection on the nudes of art, and to watch it wilt. All the wildness and sharpness concentrated in a minor affair, like that beastly bird; then left without a souvenir, and with no idea where to look for it again. The parlor repeated his sickness, in scrollwork, plush tassels in colored marble like sausage. Thank God for Oxford, for decency, for tradition which matters more than private fate, gaiety or belly-aching, for reticence and death.

Hamilton returned. He asked no questions, out of cowardice, but smoked desperately over Matthew Arnold. MacNeill arrived.

“Pall-bearers who have not been introduced. Apparently you think it good form. Mope only before a Hindu or Egyptian, he will regard it as moodiness of god. This is a school for empire. You may as well get the maxims right.” He had an elegant, calamitous face, with broad lips covered with fine wrinkles.

“At any rate, Oxford has a mind, a collection of faiths which dominate,” Hamilton insisted, stretching his weighty torso.

“My dear Leonard, can you tell why we are here? Taught to rule, nothing to rule. Taught to behave like a royal family, to awe inferiors, with the inferiors all dead. Carriage of lions, brains of capons.”

“And I may dine at journey’s end with Landor and with Donne,” droned Valentine.

“Indeed you mayn’t. Not if you rot here with the remains of English Worthies, and go home to teach. To be a little spout of the false Water of Life, mixed by philanthropists, a stinking patent medicine. ‘Whoever shall drink of my blood …’” He glared at poor Valentine.

Hamilton interrupted. “What is Herbert Sloe writing?”

“A forecast of our century; translated into seven languages, including the ideal war. Women’s innards bursting out of their own accord. Miles of standing men, stinking, like the husks of dead crickets. Villagers choking to death, or ripping one another open with pitchforks and axes in a stampede over a puddle to slake their hydrophobic thirst. Sloe hopes to horrify the workers into knocking Lord Curzon and his friends the profiteers on the head, I suppose.”

“And what are we to do?” Valentine cried venomously. “Not being keen to knock …”

“Prepare to meet your God, fool; prepare to die. In other words, amuse yourself.” He was very shrill, and the smile on his curious face frightful and exquisite. “In fact, the increase of degeneracy may save us. Since we haven’t an outside enemy to fear … Europe is one body, the mouth gnawing the legs, the hand ripping the gullet, eating its freshest children. What doomed the Greeks is our hope. Degeneracy: I mean rotting of the aggressive forces, the infirmities of grace and tolerance, courage, rare in strong men, pity and luxury. The gluttonous old men, Foreign Office and munitions workers can exploit all the heroic animal virtues. Only divine weaklings can spoil their game.”

“The icy bowels of the interested …” recited Valentine from Beckford. “The rigorous hand of the man of business.” Hamilton looked annoyed and felt weak and hot.

“Given a pitiful temper, your course is plain. Undermine, undermine. Honeycomb the sword with taste and skepticism, and scorn all corruption, till it collapses in the hand of whomever it profits to use it. Rot the competitive strength of men. Sabotage their reservoirs, make their ideals so elegant that they cannot bear weight, spoil, spoil. Then the hordes of Russians … And we shall be here to tame them. A few parasites in the barbarous tents, but with the body of our faith …”

Beyond this, his mouth could not improvise. In the darkness the bells began like heavy pulses. They went out together.

Night stippled and stained, muse of chemists in sweaty towers. “Here lies the dead love, the dahlia toe,” in rococo script on waxy slabs, on the tombstones in Boston. He saw over a lumpish stream full of heads and chopped-off feet, livers and tongues, a huge fisher standing like a clothes-pin. Hallelujah. Despicable intellect, he said to himself, not even the founder of your own anguish.

Out of the pitchy sky came exquisite gray breakable columns, clasped to the raw street at its edge. A lamp flared and quailed under an arch. He wanted Michelangelo’s woe of muscles, he wanted sobs breaking out like an avalanche; not his corpse of an intellect chewed and worried by dogs. MacNeill was the curse of God. They found a pub.

The walls were plastered with engravings of hunters and dogs as an envelope with stamps. In a hideous hearth a pair of coals, the conventional corrective of an outer sky swelling and sagging like the bag of a balloon. The whiskey had an odious flavor, but the burn excited him. Three men: one hiding a mere fact from the others, one trying sickly to tell his own mind something, one baring the repulsive body of a reality bitterly loved, who kept on pitiously. “You are a painter. And why don’t you paint?” MacNeill went on.

“It is true that I studied two years at the Art Institute in Chicago,” Valentine groaned.

“And then?”

He leaned against the thick wreath on the mantel like a design in dough. Valentine imagined his friend’s hands weighed down with deep-bodied roses, blackish and dense roses, wondering at the inappropriate notion.

“And then? And then?” MacNeill cried as if he were a tuneless trumpet.

“I tired of the hallelujah atmosphere: contention, scandal, appetite. I am a modest organism, do not enjoy such hot palpitating air. Raw, nothing old, nothing inevitable, nothing renounced. Paint what—ugly land the color of an artichoke and flabby women. It is an impropriety to mix thought and experience; in the west there is no institution to prevent it. And all my friends, when unoccupied, battered at my decencies and habits, tireless primitives. At last I couldn’t draw a firm line, and stopped.”

“There is another sort of art,” MacNeill said dreamily. “There is Paris; and the hundred heads in all kinds of stone of Mlle. Pogany— thought that is identical with experience, or experience that is thought. Matter or experience, revolting, perfidious, or just insufficient, the lovely and atrocious insanely mingled—it is there, lies there, like the drowned body of someone you have loved; and you can stoop down and put your mouth to the loose wet one, and breathe into it, breathe life into it.

“Not I, far from it … The product of irreproachable ideals: asceticism and nationalism, the Jesuits and Mrs. McBride. You may have heard, I am a Sinn Feiner. A boy I loved was shot in the stomach in Wicklow, is said to have dragged himself a quarter of a mile, leaving a track. How could I paint? You know what Ireland is now, split again by the women and that holy New York Jew DeValera. Even the Home Office knows I am done for, and lets me go where I like. But—if I were an American …”