The Unpossessed (14 page)

“You never told me it was snowing, you never told me how beautiful it was,” he said bitterly standing in the cold keen light, his pyjamas eddying sadly about his ankles.

“Hurry, hurry!” she said brokenly and pushed him toward the bathroom; “and bring my toothbrush, I forgot my toothbrush.”

Now there was nothing not to say and nobody not to say it to, so she walked slowly round the room saying aloud “Goodbye, walls, goodbye, window.” She walked to the waste basket filled with orange peels and broken bottles and gave it a swift kick and said to it, “So long old thing, I'm up to the ears myself in the same kind of God damn waste.” She walked to the unmade bed and stood looking down into it and said “Goodbye, bed. I'll miss you, I will. You were a good bed to me.” And then she burst into passionate sobbing with her head buried in the bed's warm depths and whispered to the hollow left by Denny, “Oh darling, grab me round the neck, kick me in the pants, throw Bruno's cable down la Frump's old garbage chute! make me stay, Denny, hold me, hold me! I'll mend my fingers to the bone, I'll let you strangle me at night, I'll . . .”

He found her sitting on the trunk with her hat on the side of her head, jabbing petulantly at the overflow which prevented the lid's closing.

“There's a book in the way, my idiot-child,” he said and lifted her off the lid. “Ulysses!” he cried. “Trying to sneak off with my copy of Ulysses! Have I harbored a thief in my bosom? Give it to me, you thieving wench!”

“It's mine,” she cried, tugging at it.

“It's mine, you little bitch.”

“Mine, you Indian-giver.”

“Mine.”

“Mine, mine, mine. I chose the binding.”

They were silent.

“Do you remember the day, Elizabeth.”

“The bridge, we were on the funny bridge.”

“The man fell in love with you, darling.”

“It was the day you tried snails, darling.”

“Do you remember what the waiter said, darling. . . .”

“Yes, yes, yes, I remember everything, darling,” she sobbed.

“Take it, take the book, Elizabeth. It's yours, my dearest, my darling, my darling Elizabeth, it's yours.”

“No, yours, Denny, yours please, darling Denny, I am a nasty terrible girl, let it be yours, from me, Denny. You have it, Denny, you keep it forever, Denny, keep it forever, darling, I can't bear it. . . .”

The book in its fine red binding slipped to the floor as each one gave it to the other.

“You dropped my book,” she said and cried as if her heart would break.

“You dropped my book,” he scolded and his voice shook. “Elizabeth, we can't! Our book! We've only one of everything. Elizabeth! we're lost! we're saved.”

The book looked up hopefully from its ribald red cover.

“Stay, I dare you,” he whispered.

“Darling, I'm practically on my knees,” he whispered.

“Elizabeth, tell me you love me, don't hide your face,” he dared not cry.

“I, I think we could probably make a go of it, darling,” he said unhappily.

She lifted her face at that and laughed with the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. “Give me my toothbrush, Denny. And hurry, darling, hurry.”

“I'll throw it out the window,” he said like a defiant little boy; but did not. “Do you dare me to throw it out the window, Elizabeth?”

“Yes, I dare you to throw it out the window,” she said grimly.

His hand shook with guilt before them both as his fingers, in spite of him, convulsively clutched what they held. “Ask me to, ask me to, Elizabeth,” he pleaded.

She took it gently from his hand and laid it in her bag.

“At least we've two of those,” she said.

“Maybe you will come back,” he said, frightened.

The red book that belonged to both of them burst into passionate weeping on the floor as over it they gravely said goodbye.

“TELL HIM from me,” Bruno shouted to Emmett through the door of his living-room which had turned overnight into Filing Cabinet headquarters, “that his stuff is sure-fire sale and sure-fire manure and we're not having any in our stable. Tell him to shovel it under someone else's door and get to hell out of our way—we're busy; we're a man of action, a man of Magazine. Besides we've got to meet a boat next Saturday.” (He drew a deep and happy breath of memory.) He turned complacently to the Six Black Sheep squatting on window sills and tables, like a young army too restless to take to chairs, their bright undergraduate sweaters like scattered parts of a flag at rest; and met the ultra-critical eye of their lean and un dernourished Chairman as he sat swinging his feet against Bruno's grand piano. “Nothing,” Bruno added, chiefly to irritate young Firman, “stinks quite like a bad writer. Unless it's the slightly foetid odor of a bad writer gone phony propagan dist. . . . Tell him we're not running a dirty propaganda sheet, Emmett,” he roared, “we keep open house and open forum and if he can't take it slam the receiver in his propaganda face. . . . But what's the matter, Comrade Chairman? what have I said that isn't kosher?”

For Firman, perched like a young Jewish owl on the music stool, had kicked the piano disgustedly, while his eyes behind his glasses gleamed with intelligent dislike. “Oh nothing,” said young Firman coldly (did that lad exist, thought Bruno, return ing the look and the sentiment irresistibly, only to remind him that he must have been just such a conscientious bore himself fifteen years ago?). “Nothing, only that the open forum policy is untenable from the ground up. Every written word,” said Firman, hitching the glasses higher on his nose, “is propaganda.” Six Sheep bowed in a haughty phalanx of assent; their sudden sway putting the flag together for a moment.

“I see you know your catechism,” Bruno said. “We will proceed to the next step. How about poetry? One at a time now, children.”

“An opiate,” said Little Dixon briskly.

“Propaganda for spending your life sitting on your ass reading it,” said Cornelia Carson promptly. Bruno failed to place her counterpart in any of the girls of his own day; she seemed an exclusive twentieth century product, half-boy, half-girl, born yesterday, of movies, radio and matter-of-fact class-consciousness.

“For forgetting what's wrong with the world and getting all tangled up being lyrical about the birds,” said one of the Maxwell brothers.

“I'd have all the lyric poets jailed for counter-revolutionaries,” said Firman, gathering the comments of his committee and fitting them precisely into his dialectic nutshell. He spoke with jagged edges to his speech but when he came to revolution he slipped it out with the U sound round and slippery as a peeled banana.

“And intentions?” Bruno began, thinking how the pleasant sophistries of his own day had changed to dogma in the mouths of this younger generation; when Emmett Middleton came sidling through the door like an uncertain deer; paused and looked about him for a place to sit as though he weren't sure whether to cast his lot with his contemporaries or with Bruno. “Has our maiden contributor bit the dust, Emmett?” The boy smiled gratefully, as though Bruno's notice decided him; he chose for his seat at last the corner of Bruno's desk where he sat enthroned on Bruno's right and above his fellow-classmen. “I thought propaganda was intentional, deliberate?”

Bruno quirked an eye on Firman, aware sheepishly that he had bought Emmett for an ally.

“In Russia,” said Cornelia Carson in her dry two-tone, boy-and-woman voice, “intentions don't count.” “Only results matter,” said Kate Corrigan, commonly known as “Irish,” laying the next step. “This is the age for objectivity, the subjective went out with individualism.” “Everything in the world,” Firman mounted the ladder and intoned from the top rung, “is propaganda. A tree is propaganda. Propaganda for cutting it down and making it into guns. For reforestation. For pulp magazines. . . .”

“And just for lolling under counter-revolutionarily, I suppose, to the fat professors like myself,” said Bruno; perceiving that a superior form of Blake's disease had taken the youngsters by storm. “Oh who will come and lie with me, under the propaganda-tree. . . . Pardon me, Firman, I have a touch of horse-blood.” He met Firman's eye ironically; saw in them a reflection of his own look and drew back startled by the felt resemblance. “But you asked for an interview, Firman. Let's get on with it, I'm a man of action this week, ask my secretary. . . .”

“Yes, Doctor Leonard hasn't got all night,” said Emmett in the tone of class monitor; “make it s-snappy, Firman.”

“Nor yet all week,” said Bruno happily. Five days to Elizabeth's boat; five days to seeing his earliest friend, to tearing down the walls of fog that they had let be built between them; to reaching out, touch hands at last, beg for forgiveness, beg for love. . . . “Now what's on the Black Sheep's mind?”

The Sheep scrambled out of their silence and clattered eagerly for his attention. Only Emmett, diffident, kept still, dissociating himself from his colleagues (Bruno wondered what weakness in himself had made him choose the weakest of their number to befriend) till he saw which way the land lay.

“The point is, Doctor Leonard” “and they won't give us a column in the Campus Pilgrim” “open forum is all very nice” “but like all open forums” “it's only open to one side” “try and slip in one intelligent thought, one protest” “I wish you'd all shut up,” said Arnold Firman vigorously; “how can he hear if we all yell at once like a damned cheering-squad.”

Their enthusiasm for whatever it was that was eating them touched him but it made him feel a hundred years old or more. It had been so long, so many years, since his own contemporaries had gathered like an army behind him. “I gather that the Black Sheep are even hotter under the collar than usual,” he said dryly; “but my senile brains, you know . . . Firman, the ancient mariner looks to you.”

The boy approached his desk with an air of timid impertinence, as though to show he dared be at home in the enemy's territory, as though despite embarrassment to himself he claimed his rights. “Doctor Leonard. Before we go any further . . . excuse me for getting personal—” the lids fell half-way over his eyes—“but we've been hearing about your Magazine for so long now; rumor whispers—and yet . . .
is
there a Magazine, Doctor Leonard?” He raised profoundly sceptical brows.

From behind their glasses the two Jews in the room glared at one another with what (Bruno was certain) must be the identical look. “Your scepticism, Firman,” he spoke coldly; but he could never avoid a faint intimacy when he spoke to Firman, “does you credit. But the Magazine,” and he felt stronger at once, as though he had needed his own words for re-conviction, “the Magazine, to my own surprise, is rapidly becoming a fact. Great trees from little shoe-strings grow; but our Magazine was founded on a Filing Cabinet. Behold, children! The first instalment's paid—and Emmett's mother's going to meet the next. Although, I think, she doesn't know it yet.” Emmett blushed with pride.

“Well then,” young Firman said; and stood as though he planted his thin chest against invisible but omnipresent enemies impersonated momently in Bruno. “The Pilgrim is supposed to be the mouthpiece of the whole student body. ‘Open forum' it says on the title-page; and some drivel about inviting all opinions. But it turns out that it's only open to the opinions of the conservatives, the football heroes, the stinking-fascists.”

Football! Was that the worm that gnawed that hollow intellectual chest? Bruno felt a wave of nostalgia, the strange and nauseating kinship, binding and repugnant, which a cripple feels when meeting a fellow-cripple on the street. Jew on a window-sill! When did not a smart young Jew turn his back with hate upon the football heroes of his world—and pinch his heart at night with longing to be one of them? One batters on closed gates begging for admission; and when the gate stays fast, the battering turns imperceptibly from pleading to attack.

“Why?” said Arnold Firman rhetorically. He spoke with the relentless persistence of one climbing endless ladders toward an unwavering and unforgettable goal. “Because of football politics. Because of fraternity politics. Because the same stinking-fascism that rules the board of directors runs the student-body too. Because, as I said before, the open forum principle is untenable, because propaganda is inherent in every written word. Now—when the Black Sheep resigned from the Campus Club last year in protest against the fraternities. . . .”

“Can the Roberts rules of order, Firman, and get to the point,” said Cornelia Carson briefly. She was a small girl, taut and tightly drawn on strong dry wires; it occurred to Bruno that she might not have enough to eat.

Firman pulled himself up short. “Objection sustained, sister. I thought for a minute I was on the soap-box. The point is, Doctor Leonard, that the Pilgrim's pages are so filled with football drivel that the Black Sheep can't get a word in edgewise. Last month we sent in an article on the Scottsboro case—from the youth angle, you know. They sent it back. ‘We haven't room,' they said, ‘for anything but collegiate topics.' And it's the same with everything we write.”

The Black Sheep nodded like one man. They all reached boiling point, catching heat from their leader, at once.

“We think the student body has a right to know the facts” “whether they want to or not, the dumb yeggs” “if we have to ram it down their throats” “what's education
for
” “we're sick and tired of being told to shut up like a bunch of God damn kids,” cried Cornelia, summing up, “when the Scottsboro boys are younger than we—and they're going to hang them like sure-enough adults.”

The telephone cut like a barbed wire through their unity. They dwindled angrily into silence; drew together whispering and gesturing in their bright wool sweaters, the parts of the flag almost fitting together. Emmett jumped up—“I'll take it here,” said Bruno grimly; he wanted respite from the mounting fire. Jeffrey's voice came like a thin thread sounding the note of his own contemporaries. Behind his back the army of the future milled. He heard Jeffrey through. “I don't give a damn,” he shouted back, “Fisher or no Fisher, Comrade or no Comrade, I won't print lies. And badly written ones at that. Stop acting like a God damn procurer. Alienate, hooey. If literary conscience alienates them we'll start a lefter wing. Tell your Comrade Fisher that a truth in the hand is worth twenty propagandist lies in the bushes, from the early Esquimaux. . . . And don't buy any more pen-holders. All we need now is an umbrella stand and a spittoon. Goodbye, you God damned fool. See you on the barricades. Yes, I'll speak to Emmett. Yes, sometime this week if his mother can make it. Goodbye, goodbye.” He slapped down the receiver with vigor. He would have to wait for Elizabeth; his friends were mad. “See, Firman? Man of action. Brusque. Determined. Editorial sense combined with courage. . . . But I think you were saying something. All of you at once, if I'm not mistaken.”