Nightwood (20 page)

The doctor waved his arm. “Revenge is for those who have loved a little, for anything more than that justice is hardly enough. Some day I’m going to Lourdes and scramble into the front row and talk about all of you.” His eyes were almost closed. He opened them and looked about him and a fury came over him. “Christ Almighty!” he said. “Why don’t they let me alone, all of them?”

The ex-priest repeated, “Come, I’ll take you home.”

The doctor tried to rise. He was exceedingly drunk and now extremely angry all at once. His umbrella fell to the floor with the crash of a glass as he swung his arm upward against the helping hand. “Get out! Get out!” he said. “What a damnable year, what a bloody time! How did it happen, where did it come from?”

He began to scream with sobbing laughter. “Talking to me—all of them—sitting on me as heavy as a truck horse—talking! Love falling buttered side down, fate falling arse up! Why doesn’t anyone know when everything is over, except me? That fool Nora, holding on by her teeth, going back to find Robin! And Felix—eternity is only just long enough for a Jew! But there’s someone else—who was it, damn it all—who was it? I’ve known everyone,” he said, “everyone!” He came down upon the table with all his weight, his arms spread, his head between them, his eyes wide open and crying, staring along the table where the ash blew and fluttered with his gasping breath. “For Christ’s sweet sake!” he said, and his voice was a whisper. “Now that you have all heard what you wanted to hear, can’t you let me loose now, let me go? I’ve not only lived my life for nothing, but I’ve told it for nothing—abominable among the filthy people—I know, it’s all over, everything’s over, and nobody knows it but me—drunk as a fiddler’s bitch—lasted too long—” He tried to get to his feet, gave it up. “Now,” he said, “the end—mark my words—now
nothing, but wrath and weeping!
”

When Robin, accompanied by Jenny Petherbridge, arrived in New York, she seemed distracted. She would not listen to Jenny’s suggestion that they should make their home in the country. She said a hotel was “good enough.” Jenny could do nothing with her; it was as if the motive power which had directed Robin’s life, her day as well as her night, had been crippled. For the first week or two she would not go out, then, thinking herself alone, she began to haunt the terminals, taking trains into different parts of the country, wandering without design, going into many out-of-the-way churches, sitting in the darkest corner or standing against the wall, one foot turned toward the toe of the other, her hands folded at their length, her head bent. As she had taken the Catholic vow long before, now she came into church as one renouncing something; her hands before her face, she knelt, her teeth against her palm, fixed in an unthinking stop as one who hears of death suddenly; death that cannot form until the shocked tongue has given its permission. Moving like a housewife come to set straight disorder in an unknown house, she came forward with a lighted taper, and setting it up, she turned, drawing on her thick white gloves, and with her slow headlong step, left the church. A moment later Jenny, who had followed her, looking about to be sure that she was unobserved, darted up to the sconce, snatched the candle from its spike, blew it out, re-lit it and set it back.

Robin walked the open country in the same manner, pulling at the flowers, speaking in a low voice to the animals. Those that came near, she grasped, straining their fur back until their eyes were narrowed and their teeth bare, her own teeth showing as if her hand were upon her own neck.

Because Robin’s engagements were with something unseen, because in her speech and in her gestures there was a desperate anonymity, Jenny became hysterical. She accused Robin of a “sensuous communion with unclean spirits.” And in putting her wickedness into words she struck herself down. She did not understand anything Robin felt or did, which was more unendurable than her absence. Jenny walked up and down her darkened hotel room, crying and stumbling.

Robin now headed up into Nora’s part of the country. She circled closer and closer. Sometimes she slept in the woods; the silence that she had caused by her coming was broken again by insect and bird flowing back over her intrusion, which was forgotten in her fixed stillness, obliterating her as a drop of water is made anonymous by the pond into which it has fallen. Sometimes she slept on a bench in the decaying chapel (she brought some of her things here), but she never went further. One night she woke up to the barking, far off, of Nora’s dog. As she had frightened the woods into silence by her breathing, the barking of the dog brought her up, rigid and still.

Half an acre away Nora, sitting by a kerosene lamp, raised her head. The dog was running about the house; she heard him first on one side, then the other; he whined as he ran; barking and whining she heard him farther and farther away. Nora bent forward, listening; she began to shiver. After a moment she got up, unlocking the doors and windows. Then she sat down, her hands on her knees, but she couldn’t wait. She went out. The night was well advanced. She could see nothing. She began walking toward the hill. She no longer heard the dog, but she kept on. A level above her she heard things rustling in the grass, the briars made her stumble, but she did not call.

At the top of the hill she could see, rising faintly against the sky, the weather-beaten white of the chapel; a light ran the length of the door. She began to run, cursing and crying, and blindly, without warning, plunged into the jamb of the chapel door.

On a contrived altar, before a Madonna, two candles were burning. Their light fell across the floor and the dusty benches. Before the image lay flowers and toys. Standing before them in her boy’s trousers was Robin. Her pose, startled and broken, was caught at the point where her hand had reached almost to the shoulder, and at the moment Nora’s body struck the wood, Robin began going down. Sliding down she went; down, her hair swinging, her arms held out, and the dog stood there, rearing back, his forelegs slanting; his paws trembling under the trembling of his rump, his hackle standing; his mouth open, his tongue slung sideways over his sharp bright teeth; whining and waiting. And down she went, until her head swung against his; on all fours now, dragging her knees. The veins stood out in her neck, under her ears, swelled in her arms, and wide and throbbing rose up on her fingers as she moved forward.

The dog, quivering in every muscle, sprang back, his tongue a stiff curving terror in his mouth; moved backward, back, as she came on, whimpering too, coming forward, her head turned completely sideways, grinning and whimpering. Backed into the farthest corner, the dog reared as if to avoid something that troubled him to such agony that he seemed to be rising from the floor; then he stopped, clawing sideways at the wall, his forepaws lifted and sliding. Then head down, dragging her forelocks in the dust, she struck against his side. He let loose one howl of misery and bit at her, dashing about her, barking, and as he sprang on either side of her he always kept his head toward her, dashing his rump now this side, now that, of the wall.

Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees.

Djuna Barnes was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, in 1892, daughter of an American father and a British mother. After being privately educated, she briefly attended the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League.

From 1913 she lived a bohemian life in Greenwich Village and was, in turn, illustrator, reporter, and special theatrical feature writer for several newspapers and magazines. Her short stories were printed in such publications as
Vanity Fair, The Morning Telegraph
, and
The Little Review
, as a poet, she made her debut in 1915 with
The Book of Repulsive Women
. In 1920-21, the Provincetown Players produced three of her one-act plays. A collection of her stories, poems, and portraits were put together under the title
A Book
(1923). Her novel
Ryder
followed (1928). In the same year,
Ladies Almanack
was privately printed in Dijon, France. In 1929
A Book
was reissued—with deletions and additions—under the new title
A Night Among the Horses
.

Barnes spent most of the 1920s in Paris, where she was part of a circle of expatriate writers and artists that included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Kay Boyle. She left Paris in 1931 for London.
Nightwood
, first published in Britain in 1936 on the strong recommendation of T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, appeared in America in 1937, and has been translated into languages including French, German, Spanish, and Swedish.

The Antiphon
, a tragedy in verse, issued simultaneously here and in Britain (1958), was translated into Swedish, both for book publication and for production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, by Dag Hammarskjöld and Karl Ragnar Gierow.

Djuna Barnes’s work is represented in many anthologies in America and around the world. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. After many years abroad, Barnes returned in 1941 to New York City, where she died in 1982.