A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (4 page)

One of the Indians and the girl with a bunch of violets moved chairs into Philip’s corner, one on each side of him. They found nothing to say. The girl’s look of languid interrogation shifted from her partner to the disguised boy and back again. The Indian pulled his fingers. Then the girl rose and darted out on the porch. Glancing back at Philip with an indefinable expression, the sturdy youth followed. Through the bay window Philip saw a single shadow made of both their figures, and supposed it was a kiss.

The party could not go on much longer in those small warm rooms. An increasing impatience for the dark and the bushes, for long grass in which footsteps would be lost, for soft boughs lost in the sky, was revealed by everyone’s glances toward the doors and windows.

Carl pursued his Irish-Turkish girl from one chair or sofa to another with boisterous but somber violence. Philip waited until they reached the opposite corner of the other room, and then slipped into the hall. No one was there; the door stood open and the freshness of cut grass and blossoming syringas drifted in. He wanted to go out on the porch, but did not dare, because of the sweethearts who had just left him. He sat down a little way up the stairs, took off his gloves and his half-mask, rested his overladen woman’s head in the palms of his boy’s hands …

He was not alone many minutes. The boy in the uniform of no particular country followed him. Neither knew what to say; the soldier sat down on the same step. Philip knew him by sight—his father was a carpenter, his name was Art Sampson. He supposed he must have figured out his identity. Then Art Sampson took his hand and put one arm around him. Philip twisted about in confusion and changed his mind—obviously the soldier did not know who he was. He tried to get up, but one foot somehow caught in the skirt and he was afraid of tearing it. The soldier sighed with his lips pursed. Philip did not know what to do. “Give me a kiss,” the other muttered. The kiss slipped off Philip’s cheek into the scented strands of his wig. He got away, giving the soldier a kick, leaving him to his astonishment. The kick hurt his own foot because Lucy’s slippers were so thin. He came back into the sitting room alone.

Not many of the guests were there. They had gone out by a door which opened directly on the porch. Carl was gone. Two unattractive girls on a sofa were telling secrets. Some boys were playing poker on the floor; paper flowers and streamers lay all about them, crumpled and untwisted. The remaining costumes were also torn and trodden upon. Philip stood there, miserably excited.

Out in the dark, as usual, couples mixed up with the time of night and the porches and the flowering shrubs, one girl laughing under a tree with a shrouded sound (a hard hand was over her mouth), someone trying to play a stringed instrument, secrets being told and being felt, no more misery in the kisses, no more self-consciousness in such games as were being played … Carl was there with his Irish friend.

Everyone had forgotten Philip; he might as well not have come. He could not make up his mind where to sit down. His dress hung askew; he straightened it with boyish jerks under which the corrupted silk gave way. Their hostess, Rita, dressed as a queen, was sitting loosely on a sofa; the other Indian, a slow fellow, held her hand and seemed to be studying it. She looked feverish and disappointed.

Philip decided to go home, and wondered why he had not done so before. He did not want to say goodbye or see the boy in the hall again. So he slipped into the dining room as if to look at the refreshments, thence into the kitchen, from the back porch to the pitch-dark alley, and down the alley to the street.

There he felt frightened for a few moments. Men might be coming home from the saloons, the billiard parlor; some of them were capable of anything; they would think the worst of a woman alone at that hour, in such clothes, and tear off the clothes if he told them who he was. He walked as fast as he could. A boy’s stride went badly in Lucy’s shoes. He stumbled over the dress and tore it. Now he did not mind taking it back to the sisters in bad condition. He would tell them, he thought vindictively, that he had not had a good time—they would be sorry.

The wide sky, he saw, was dappled with stars. He was angry as well as tired. Carl had played a trick on him, neglected him, deserted him. He did not know whether that would bring an end to their friendship or make it more substantial, equalize it. He would make another friend if this one failed …

Under the street lights the lawns foamed with flowering plants. From Rita’s back door he had turned down a side-street to avoid passing her garden, and he did not see anybody in the others.

Perhaps if he had talked to the pseudo-soldier they would have made friends, and laughed at the fraud of the one, the error of the other. Soon he would be enough older for there to be no more disguises, nor need to be taken care of, nor harm in being neglected. He hated women’s clothes; by a deliberate step he tore the ruffled skirt again.

Out of the evening’s misery in retrospect faded all willingness to be unhappy. The only good time had been up in the tree at twilight, the pink satin amid the green leaves forming a world of their own, without excitement or humiliation; then being disguised as a woman had been like being a large flustered bird guarded by the branches. How long ago—it might have been sometime in his childhood. Never, he resolved, would he have such fairy-tale ideas again.

He had to cross the river on a little echoing foot-bridge to get to the part of town in which he lived. An odor similar to that of cucumbers rose from the water and the mud. There down below the brown currents were trickling, the green willows with gentle boughs caressing themselves. He no longer envied the caresses in Rita’s garden. He was sick of the age he had been too long, the age of envy and masquerades, of petty martyrdoms which have a savor of joy, when nothing is satisfactory in solitude; and tried not to think that some of this youthfulness might be natural to himself and so permanent, for he wanted that night to mark plainly an end …

There was no one on Main Street. The pool room and bowling-alleys were closed. He made up his mind to go into one of these places as soon as he could save money from the small allowance which his parents gave him and get someone to teach him to play. He had looked through the windows often enough to know what they were like. The air marbled the smoke, the broad green tables under the light bulbs shaded with green glass swinging gently, the smooth cues manipulated according to complex rules, the ivories rolling, twirling, meeting, hard cheek to cheek, with a little pure click, the men in shirt-sleeves, absent-minded, vain, and skillful; and down below in the basement the alleys of glimmering wood, waxed and exquisitely jointed, stretching away under the great growling balls to the pins in perfect order, and the only Negro in the town to set them up when they fell, his ugly face shining … Philip smiled for the first time since he had been dressed up in these rustling torn clothes. He was too young to be strong; he might never have brutal strength or direct, effective desires; he believed that he could be skillful.

He wished that he had a luxurious house like Carl’s at the other end of town to go home to—the odor of bath-towels and tobacco mounting the wide staircase with classic banisters; and the luxury he wished for was something serviceable and severe like the felt and ivory and the waxed wood behind the shabby facades on Main Street. He wished that he had a rich mother like Carl’s to satisfy once and for all his desire for such things as the satin clothing and soft foliage, in the maple tree after sunset; and robust, indifferent brothers, not to protect him but to be imitated by him. Instead it was to Mrs. Dewey’s boarding-house that he was making his way as fast as he could.

He opened the door cautiously. The dirty stairs were lit by a gas -jet. The room in which Mrs. Dewey slept opened off the first landing. She called, “Who’s that?” He did not answer, but mounted more quietly. By a creaking of the boards inside her door he understood that she was looking through the keyhole. She would think that one of her other boarders, the undertaker’s assistant or the patent-medicine vendor, was receiving company in the night.

Almost everyone felt a greatness of some kind about old Mr. Auerbach; the feeling did not derive from his appearance. Little by little he was going blind, and his eyes, under the necessary lenses of magnifying glass, were unattractive. He had a roly-poly neck, the nape of it strewn a little with snow-white hairs. His lips pouted with no definite shape. All his features were large in proportion to the physiognomical area they occupied. It was an expressive face, waxing with enthusiasm, waning with worry; but in the least emotion, even happiness, he looked as if on the verge of tears, which in one whom you knew to be a man of power seemed absurd.

But no matter; if you could not see you could sense that he was shrewd and honorable in business, and very strict in the more intimate aspects of morality, charitable, intellectual, and art-loving. He was a millionaire retired from a great career of finance management and speculation. In the philanthropies of the ordinary sort he was not only generous but painstaking; yet it was a poor substitute for the big business he had given up. He had also occupied himself acquiring a fine collection of paintings by old masters, working hard at it. But still he had time on his hands, money to spare, and superfluous energy; which made the loss of his eyesight especially hard for him.

One whole year in my young manhood I was employed by him. At the start I had only to read aloud while he ate breakfast and before dinner, and occasionally, for two or three hours after dinner. Certain English and German newspapers interested him, as well as the
Times
and the
Sun
. I knew how to pronounce German and gradually learned what the recurrent words meant. In the evening we concentrated upon highbrow books: biographies, histories or art, and essays.

We read, I remember, an essay entitled “Leisure and Mechanism” by Bertrand Russell, the point of which was that it is better to do nothing and amount to nothing than to do a wrong thing. To make clear what this meant the noble author cited a certain newspaper-magnate who had no vices and slaved away faithfully at his lifework; and, year in and year out, for millions of newspaper readers, set the vulgarest example and advocated entirely evil policies. It would have been better for the world if he had lain snoozing on a miserable sofa or under a shade tree all his life, the philosopher said. The effect of his virtue and industriousness had been only to increase the harm he was in a position to do.

This essay infuriated Mr. Auerbach. He arose and strode around and shook his fist. He had respected Russell as a master- mathematician and admired him as a great liberal and pacifist, but this was the limit! With his most tearful look, shaking his forefinger at me, he maintained that work, hard work, no matter what hard work, was all-essential. It was a good thing in itself, indeed it was the basis of morality. Save for the necessity of it, with the sting of poverty in the lives of the poor and the desire of rich men to get richer, all men would lapse into themselves in drunkenness, lewdness, and every vile, selfish habit, he said. This righteous wrath was my introduction to a form of puritanism which is an important problem today, pro or con. In Mr. Auerbach’s case it was not connected with any religion, although there was an echo of Elijah or Jeremiah in the tone of his remarks. After this he would not hear another word by Bertrand Russell and often referred to him as frivolous and a bad influence on young people.

Now and then he told me what I wanted to know about himself. Like many German-Jews in those days he was romantically pro-German. Born in the United States, the son of an old-fashioned, comfortable banking family, he was sent for higher education to Heidelberg and he never got over it. Our involvement in the so-called World War struck him as a wicked mistake; and after quarrelling with certain relatives and business associates he retired from the firm he had founded, and suffered in silence while Germany was being defeated. Even the charities of wartime were against his principles; and it was then, in the sudden loneliness of his rich Park Avenue apartment, that he was inspired to take up art collecting.

In the spring I accompanied him and his wife abroad in a half-secretarial, half-filial capacity, chiefly to keep him company when she was engaged and to give him my arm at street corners where his failing eyesight was not to be trusted. He took a last look at the museums of Europe through great binoculars, focusing them as close as he could get to one painting after another; and he added a few final treasures to his collection.

Since the War his dearest philanthropy had been assisting the German universities to re-equip their laboratories and to bring their libraries back up to date; and he had to see people in Berlin and Munich about all this, and some very distinguished sociability went with it. Even in England he found a way to be serviceable to the Fatherland, in the correction of prejudices left over from the conflict and its vindication in the eyes of the world. That was in 1923. There was a group of Englishmen just then, half in and half out of government, whose international policy and attitude toward the erstwhile enemy suited him. They were idealists, pacifists, and radical economists, and various liberal gentlemen who simply admired Germany, in its national temperament and culture and political philosophy as it appeared then, more than they admired their own nation or its allies.

Three or four were rather famous figures in 1923; today they have been forgotten. I think that we should be reminded of them and when peace is declared again ponder their example and strange influence. They founded something called the Union of Democratic Control, and they constituted what we should call a brain trust round Ramsay MacDonald while he reversed the foreign policy of Great Britain and abandoned so large a part of its military and naval power. To familiarize the general public with their principles they had a magazine, and it was in this particular that Mr. Auerbach could help them—he defrayed a part of the expense of publishing it.