Blue Voyage: A Novel (12 page)

“I think I’d stay in New York if I were you—you have there such a priceless sense of freedom——”

She turned, somber, and looked down at the black and white of water. She had used that phrase in a letter.

“I hate it,” Demarest said with surprising bitterness.

“Do you?”

Cynthia smiled at him amusedly. He must, somehow, mention that he was not in the first cabin—that he was a sneaking interloper; just what he had always been
afraid
of seeming! It was a perfect nemesis; caught red-handed. How surprisingly tall she was: how transparently young and beautiful. He remembered Wetherall’s remark, “too innocent.” Also Wetherall’s comment on the ugly way her skirt hung, creased, at the back: that brown tweed skirt, with a small rip in the hem at one side. Blue woolen stockings. The rip stretching against her knee as she sat opposite him—sitting on the deck itself—playing chess, one hand supporting her (the long arched fingers crossing a tarred seam), the other touching her cheek. Sea gulls. And now, everything so complicated and difficult—her mother with her (who had disliked him)—and someone else.

“Yes, I really like London much better.”

“It is lovely, isn’t it! I can hardly
wait
for London in the winter!”

As usual, when they talked, he had the sense of their partaking of a secret communion, exquisite and profound: a communion in which their idle talk, fragmentary and superficial, and even their physical identities, had the remoteness and smallness of the trivial and accidental. It seemed merely to be necessary that they should be together: that they should stand together for a moment, saying nothing, looking at the same falling wave or the same white sea gull; or talk a little, lightly; or loiter a little, with lazy bodies. This had been true from the beginning—it was still true. And yet—was it? There was this other man. The communion could hardly, therefore, be as perfect as he supposed. And indeed, had it
ever
been? Was it conceivable that already, when he had met her a year ago, she had been in love? Was it possible that her luminousness, her lightness of heart and body, her delightful, delighted swiftness in meeting him, had been simply the euphoria consequent upon that:—and might it not have been precisely her love (for this other man) that he had fallen in love with?… On the other hand, there had been something—well, just lightly destructive, the loosing of a gay arrow, explanatory but not apologetic, in the quick laughing announcement “
I’m going to be married
!” This seemed to refer to a marked consciousness of former communion: to refer to it and to end it. As if she said, “I liked you—but how much better I like
him
!”

“It is astounding that we should meet again like this!”

It was a mistake—but Cynthia met it lightly.

“Isn’t it? It makes one feel——” She hesitated, and gave a little laugh in which there was no tension, but rather an assumption of security and distance, the perfection and inviolability of her personal view, which she need not, if she did not wish, bother to communicate to him.

“How small the world is?” laughed Demarest.

“Oh, that! if you like … I was thinking rather, that it made one feel like Buddhists, or some such thing—meeting, reincarnated, every thousand years or so; and always in the same way; and always inconsequentially; and always with tremendous surprise.”

She smiled at him delightfully, again rocking back with Hindu-bright elbows, on the railing, which burned vivid and real against the darkness of the sea. The familiar shape of her arms, the familiar gesture and attitude, the colors, the youthful frankness, all these, together, suddenly released in him a torrent of remembered feelings.

“Pilgrims,” he said—falling in with her image, in which she had so candidly delighted—“who meet once in every cycle for the exchange of a remark on the weather? If they
have
anything so mundane as weather in their purgatories and paradises!”

“
And
infernos.”

“Yes!”

The two women approached, slowing their steps a little.

“Mother—you remember Mr. Demarest?”

“How do you do.”

“How do you do.”

To the pale girl, who stood under the light, waiting cynically, he was not introduced. Flight, prearranged, was in the air.

“I’ll let you rejoin your friend,” said Cynthia, moving off slowly. Smith! His friend Smith!

She smiled: Demarest smiled and nodded: and the three women walked swiftly away. Good God—Good God—said the blood beating in his brain. He moved blindly toward the companionway. He must rejoin his friend—by all means. Yes. And he must take his friend down to the other deck—he suddenly felt that he didn’t want to face them again, particularly with old Smith by his side; Smith and his comic-opera tweed hat. Nothing first class about Smith! Ha ha. Nor about himself either. He hadn’t had time, worse luck, for the necessary light touch on that point. How awful. She would look for him in the passenger list, and not find him, and laugh. How much it would explain to her! “Mother—how very funny. Mr. Demarest must be in the second cabin!” “Funny? It doesn’t especially surprise me—I always felt there was something——” Et cetera. Then that pale girl, cynical—she would laugh, too. They would all laugh merrily together, with heads thrown back. What the Spanish call
carcajada
—loud laughter, boisterous and derisive. Sexual laughter, the ringing scorn of the female for the defeated or cowardly male, the skulker … He rounded the corner, but there was no Smith. Instead, at the far end, he saw the three women coming toward him. Cynthia appeared to be talking, the others turning their heads toward her. He must escape. Irresolute, he began pretending (absurd) that he was looking for a lost friend. What—he isn’t here? Then I’d better turn. He turned, went briskly around the corner again, then rattled down the companionway.

In the smoking room, as he paid for his glass of port, Smith reappeared.

“Well, who’s your swell friend?” he said, composing himself in the corner.

“Ah, that’s the great chimera I was telling you about.”

“What! The one you were going to see? How come?”

“The chimera—more so than ever,” murmured Demarest. “Have a game?”

“Sure, I don’t mind.”

IV

Zring, went the Irish girl’s bed curtains again, and
tschunk
went the electric switch on the wall, leaving dark the reticulated grill over the upper berth; and then the bunk creaked, and creaked sea-sawingly; as the Irish girl got into it, and creaked as she corkscrewed her Irish body down the ship-folded bedclothes; and an elbow thumped the matchboard partition close to Demarest’s ear, and then grazingly bruised it again, and then a padded round knee bumped, and the elbow again more softly knocked … Who’s there, i’ the name of the devil?… Is it you, strumpet? Knock again. Knock at the door, or come in without knocking. Is it you, darling? In the dark? where? Listen to the wind moaning, humming through the ventilators. Listen to the sea, the vast sound of sea, pouring down into the infinite, cataract of the world. What are we? We are silences drowned in an abyss of sound. The ship is sinking. The world is sinking. God is sinking. What difference, therefore, does it make who you are? Don’t pause to knock, but approach swiftly through the night of sound and water, step serenely from thrum to thrum of the ship’s engines, from heartbeat to heartbeat of the terraqueous god. Is it you, with the candle in your hand, you in a nightgown? Ah Psyche with the regions which! You with a pocket flashlight? In, in brief candle! We’ll fear not for scandal. But diddle and dandle. And fondle and fry. Seven bells; the ship, sleepwalking, tintinnabulates like a gipsy. The shipboy, hearing bells below him, looking down at the dark ship, and dark decks, and dark sea, and the dark bow lowering into a wide dim wash of white, and the dark waves coming white-maned and flattening in white—the shipboy sleepily strikes once the small sea bell, and the bird of sad sound flies on short quick wings into the infinite misery … M
ISERY
… Misery is consciousness. Misery is death. Misery is birth. Misery is creation. Rain is falling in Portobello Road, the evening is winter, the cobbled mud is inferno, and the cold rain slowly falls in large, fat flakes,
larghe falde,
snowflakes falling into slime and grease. The man, shuffling, undersized, leans pushing the barrow, on which lies the two-year-old boy under rags of sacking, unmoving, turning only his large eyes full of pain. The woman hobbles beside the barrow, weeping, pressing the back of a blue hand against her cheek, turning her shrunken face to one side and downward as she whines. The man is silent, pushing the barrow rapidly; the woman trots. Rain falls into the boy’s eyes. They are hurrying home … The man is thinking, while the dirty water runs under his cap and down his face, he is used to it, he doesn’t mind the cold trickle among his hair and down his neck—but this other thing he is not used to, he wants to shout out something horrible about it, shaking his fist, except that he is too tired and can’t find the words. Let me dictate for you a course of action which will satisfy this longing. Begin by shouting at your woman—“For Christ’s sake shut your jaw and stop your bloody whining. Stop it, or I’ll knock your damn teeth out.” Continue by striking her once in the back of the neck, so that she stumbles and falls into a puddle, moaning, and kneels there, moaning, as if unable to move. Grab her arm, twist it, and wrench the slattern to her feet. Hit her again, this time in the face, your fingers open—the slap will warm your hand. Shout at her, so that all the people in Portobello Road will hear. “What’s the matter—are you drunk? I’ll black your eye for you if you don’t get a move on you.” Think again. Think of nothing but misery, of Portobello Road endless and eternal, of yourself and your slut and your paralyzed boy walking there in the winter rain forever. Do you require speech? Would it do you good to abuse her, to call her a draggle-tailed, snaggle-toothed, swaggle-bellied, broken-gaited ronyon? Enumerate her physical defects. A wart over her left eye; a wart on her right eyelid; a wart (with hairs on it) on the chin; a pendulous wart, like a little pink cauliflower, coral-hued and corrupt, between the lean breasts; and a sore on the right thigh. Scars on the legs, bluish or coppery. Puncture wounds on the inner surface of the left arm, below the joint: five, and red. Five corresponding puncture wounds on your own left arm. Blest be the marriage betwixt earth and heaven! Now,—in the open sore of space,—the mortal son and the daughter immoral, make of the world their trysting place. Ten positives in succession, the hollow steel needle pricking and sliding under the taut skin, and into the swollen vein, the glass tube steadily filling with poisoned blood as the little steel piston withdraws. The blessed spirochete. Swarms. The blood boiling with hook-nosed spirochetes. M
ISERY
. Horror, the maggot, hatches and quarries in the very pulse of love. Rain is falling in Portobello Road, hissing in the paraffin flares that light the barrows and crowds, illuminating the bestial faces and dirty hands. Barrows heaped with kippers. Rotten cabbages, rain-soaked. Collar buttons and woolen stockings. Terracotta Venuses. Winkles. Toy balloons. Detumescent pigs singing like cicadas on a hot night in New Jersey. The man, undersized, leans pushing the barrow on which the boy lies unmoving, turning an apathetic eye toward the smoky flares. The woman trots, moaning. Announce your grief. Stand at the corner where the crowd is densest, and shout it to them pitilessly—“You think you are miserable, do you! Well, look at me, look at us! Syphilis, that’s what we got, syphilis!” … This was where Goya lived: in Portobello Road. The man pushing the barrow was Goya. The woman, trotting and whining, with averted eyes, was Goya. Goya was the paralyzed boy lying numb and cold under wet-glazed rags. Goya sold maggoty kippers from a torchlit barrow: he inflated the singing pig, over and over again.
Nga-a-a-a-a,
sang the pig, Goya holding it up by the spigot on its back before the circle of dirty-faced children …
Goya drew a pig on a wall … The five-year-old hairdresser’s son … saw, graved on a silver tray … the lion: and sunsets were begun … Goya smelt the bull-fight blood: The pupil of the Carmelite … Gave his hands to a goldsmith, learned: to gild an aureole aright … Goya saw the Puzzel’s eyes: … sang in the street: (with a guitar) and climbed the balcony; but Keats (under the halyards) wrote “Bright Star” … Goya saw the Great Slut pick The chirping human puppets up. And laugh, with pendulous mountain lip, And drown them in a coffee cup; Or squeeze their little juices out In arid hands, insensitive, To make them gibber … Goya went Among the catacombs to live
…
He saw gross Ronyans of the air, harelipped and goitered, raped in flight By hairless pimps, umbrella-winged: Tumult above Madrid at night
…
He
HEARD
the
SECONDS IN
his
CLOCK CRACK
like
SEEDS
, D
IVULGE
and
POUR
a
BYS
mal
FILTH
of
NO
thing
NESS BETWEEN
the
PEN
dulum
AND
the
FLOOR:
Torrents of dead veins, rotted cells, Tonsils decayed, and fingernails: Dead hair, dead fur, dead claws, dead skin. Nostrils and lids; and cauls and veils; And
EYES
that still, in death, remained (Unlidded and unlashed)
AWARE
of the foul
CORE,
and, fouler yet, The
REGION WORM
that
RAVINS
There
…
STENCH
flowed out of the second’s
TICK
.
And Goya swam with it through
SPACE,
Sweating the fetor from his limbs. And stared upon the
UNFEATURED FACE
That did not see, and sheltered
NAUGHT,
but
WAS
and
IS
.
The second gone, Goya returned, and drew the
FACE
;
And scrawled beneath it, “This I have known” … And drew four slatterns, in an attic, Heavy, with heads on arms, asleep: And underscribed it. “Let them slumber! Who, if they woke, could only weep
” … M
ISERY
. Say it savagely, biting the paltry and feeble words, and overaccenting the metronomic rhythm, the same flaccid-syllabled rhythm as that of King Caligula. Say it savagely, with eyes closed, lying rigid in the berth, the right foot crossed over the left, flexing and reflexing against the coarse sheet. Explore the first cabin in your pajamas, find the passenger list and the number of Cynthia’s cabin, and putting your absurd chin (in which the bones are slowly being rotted by pyorrhea) over the window sill, recite in the darkness … not this, not this, but something exquisite, something young.
Awakening up he took her hollow lute, tumultous; and in chords that tenderest be He played an ancient ditty, long since mute, in Provence called
“L
A
B
ELLE
D
AME
S
ANS
M
ERCI
.” The boy stood on the burning deck. Eating peanuts by the peck … Cynthia! are you awake?… Yes! Who is it?… Saint William of Yonkers. Listen! I will tell you all about my childhood—everything. You will see how pathetic it was. You will see what long, lonely, lugubrious life I have led. The Irish girl, separated from me by one inch of painted wood, is trying to attract my attention, knocking with her sweet little elbow against the wall. Last night I replied, tentatively. Tonight, so great in your heavenly influence upon me, so permeated is my gross body by your beauty, that I pay no attention. Are you listening?… Yes, darling … I am a man full of pity and gentleness! My face is the face of one grown gently wise with suffering—ah, with what years of untold suffering! I have been misunderstood—I have blundered—I have sinned—Oh, I have sinned; but I have paid the price. My father was cruel. When I was five, he burnt off my left hand because I had been striking matches … I begged in the streets, having no money to buy the necessary books; for even as a little child I had a passion for knowledge and beauty. A Chinaman gave me a quarter, and I bought … what was it I bought?
Nick Carter in Colorado. The Arabian Nights. Almost Fourteen
. Fiske’s
Cosmic Philosophy
. Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil
. Espronceda’s
El Diablo Mundo
. The Icelandic
Voluspa. An Essay on the Trallian School
. A Variorum edition of
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,
in eighteen volumes. A Variorum edition of
Thank You Kindly Sir She Said,
in two hundred volumes. Are you still listening, Cynthia?… Yes, beloved … I adore you, Cynthia. I have been a fool—I have lost you—but I adore you, and I will adore you forever. Your physical defects—do I not know them? A nostril just a suspicion too “painfle.” A voice exquisite, light, Shelleyan—but lacking in those deep-throated qualities, voluptuous and resonant, with which I love a woman, now and again, to turn challengingly upon me. Breasts a little too low and large; a gait a shade too self-conscious; a bearing rather too much in the tradition of the “expensive slouch.” But these are immaterial—forgive me for mentioning them. I adore them, I do not desire to touch them, nor to touch you. My feeling for you is wholly sublimated: I can trace in it no physical desire. I should fear and distrust any impulse to bring your tall body into contact with mine. I should like only to live with you in some strange, rarefied world—cold, clear, translunar and spacious; a world of which you know the secret, and I do not; a world of the subtle and the fragile, of the crepuscular and the vitreous, of suggestions dim but precise, of love inexpressive and thought unconcealed. An imparadised Amalfi, marble terraces of orange groves and camellias, rising out of the violet of the sea and ascending into the violet of the empyrean? No? Too much like marzipan? Let us, then, leave the world as it is; but make of it, by knowing all its secrets, our terrestrial heaven … Are you listening, Cynthia?… Listening,
smutsfink …
Tomorrow I will write out for you the history of my childhood. All sorts of exquisite things will be in it—delicate perceptions, gentlenesses of feeling, of which you would not have supposed a mere male to be capable. I have always been kind to birds, dogs, children, cats and mice. Particularly mice. Once I found a swift, imprisoned in a house. I saw it flapping against the window as I passed, flapping against the curtains. The house was empty, deserted. I walked miles to get the key, wondering how I would capture the poor thing when I returned. It wasn’t necessary—I opened the window and he flew out. He had fallen down the chimney.… This, and many others … I would narrate them humorously, of course—but you would detect the gentleness and pity … A kitten—I climbed a telegraph pole, when I was eight, to rescue a kitten, which had got all the way to the top and was afraid to come down. I had stationed my brother and another boy on the roof of the chicken coop—they were to hold out a towel between them, into which I was to drop the kitten. Unfortunately, Tom (he’s a darling, Tom—you’d like him!) let go of his end. Still, the kitten wasn’t hurt … A dog, I saved once from drowning at Keswick … Blind men I have led across the street … Old women I have helped in and out of trains—several thousand … The woman who fainted in the Grand Central Station—I helped to carry her into the waiting room—how extraordinarily white she was. Beggars. Hurdy-gurdy men. The tramp in the ditch, who said, “You might as well be cheerful, especially if you’re miserable!”—and went on singing … Yes. All the unhappy world—the overworked, the starving, the starved for love, the deserted and lonely—M
ISERY
… Like the vampire I have been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; like the lobster, I do not bark, and know the secrets of the sea. I am shy, I am sensitive, I am impressionable. How many lovely things, how many horrible things, I remember! This you would love in me if you loved nothing else: this treasure house, this golden thesaurus, of my memory. If only I had succeeded in showing this to you before you fell in love! You would have been astonished—perhaps … Perhaps perhaps perhaps perhaps … On the other hand, you might have thought me not sufficiently masculine?… A sentimental introverted weakling, with that tendency to sudden cruelty which all the injured manifest. But my trick of unexpected reticence, my impassivity of appearance, my proneness to fatigue and indifference, the rapidity with which I tire of people—no matter whether they be angels or devils—these characteristics give an air of masculinity which might have deceived you? Are you listening, Cynthia?… Listening, mud-puppy … My absurd chin is on your window sill in the dark, but I am like Fama, and my feet are not at all on this deck, as you might imagine, but way down upon the Sewanee River, far, far away. I am like Daisy Dacey—England and the United States rolled into one. To see all is to be all. But it is above all my childhood that I should like to put into your lap—my romantic and beautiful childhood, my suffering and pitiful childhood. I was disliked and distrusted. I was cruelly beaten. I was humiliated. My pride and will were broken before I had come to my seventh year. I was in a state of continual terror. I sneaked in and out of the house, mouselike and secretive, my only purpose to attract as little attention as possible. My favorite story—would you believe it?—this is very touching—was the story of the ugly duckling. This held out a ray of hope for me—I would revenge myself—someday—someday—by turning into a swan. I read this story over and over, memorizing every detail, and as I read it I searched in my soul for signs of the wonder that was to come. How was this to be? What gifts had the good fairies given me, that I might someday astonish and confound my cruel father, my forgetful mother? It could not be strength, for I was weak, and I was constantly ill. It could not be courage, for I hardly ever forgot what it was to be afraid. It could not be beauty, for beauty was not a prerogative of boys. Could it, perhaps, be wisdom? This was conceivable—it was only by my teachers that I was ever given encouragement. I remember how I was overcome, how I blushed, when one day Miss Baring said aloud in the classroom (there was a drawing of Julius Caesar on the blackboard behind her head), “William will some day be successful. He is intelligent, and he works.” Successful! What a blaze of glory, what a bursting of stars of light, was in that word. Like sky rockets on Christmas Eve! Like Roman candles vomiting their colored balls of fire and slow streams of fading sparks! So perhaps it was in this way that I began to associate knowledge with success; or mental skill of some kind. I began by copying the drawing of Julius Caesar—I showed my drawing to Miss Baring, and this too she praised … Eight bells … Changing the watch. With heavy boots, with oilskins, with a black oilskin hat, he climbs the ladder to the crow’s nest. A fine rain falling on his face and hands. All clear, Bill?… A light two points off the port bow … Right. Getting a little sea up. Thickening a bit, too … Smith is in bed at sea. Faubion, the Fleshpot, is in bed. The Welsh Rarebit is in bed—whose? Vivien Hay-Lawrence is in bed. The Major is in bed. Solomon Moses Caligula Silberstein is in bed. Cynthia is in bed. Mrs. Battiloro is in bed. The pianist lies awake, thinking of his wife and daughter in Blackpool. The Chief Steward is having a game of bridge in his stateroom, whisky is on the table. All the others lie horizontal, above and below the water line, like chrysalids, like corpses in coffins. The clairvoyant? He, too; but his sleep is troubled by vatic dreams. He sees each chrysalid being secretly attacked by ants, the larva destroyed, the psyche released. Ah psyche from the regions which. M