The Unpossessed (22 page)

“I used to be a Jew,” said Bruno smiling. “And I thought that was pretty tough, at Emmett's age, I mean. But a Jew has an easier time than Emmett. You might be a sort of outcast, but you always have a sense of fraternity with the other Jew-outcasts. But you can't expect Emmett,” he raised his brows in almost delicate sympathy, “to bat around the world looking for the rest of the boys who stutter. . . . But the trouble lies deeper than that, Mr. Middleton. Emmett suffers from a form of social disease that strikes only the sons of rich men. He was brought up with too much of everything to think that anything mattered. And he was brought up to be the only pebble on the beach. Plenty of others like him, of course; but they can't get together because they were brought up religiously to be separate—individualism, my colleagues would tell you. The kid was practically born in solitary confinement.”

“He's had all the freedom—”

“That's what I mean,” said Bruno; “he told me his chief ambition a few years ago was to be sent to military school.”

The storm was brewing in the room. Al turned his attention from the problem of his boy. “Jesus Christ, Leonard, do they always go on like that?” Excitement had mounted; arguments rose and clashed like boxers chasing each other around the room.

“Why they're tuning up for action,” Doctor Leonard said easily. “Wait till you hear them when they've learned to play together. I admit right now it sounds like a community sing . . .”

“A funny racket,” said Al conclusively.

It was a funny sight for a man to see in his own library, those sprawling kids who treated
petit point
as though it were a bench in the park. In all his years of living with it Al had never felt at home enough to sprawl. Funny thing for a man to bring down on his own head anyway; a man who didn't give a damn for the kind of house he lived in or the kind of wife he kept, to spend his life working like the devil to keep the house going and the wife (and her canary) more elaborately preserved. Of course the point that nobody admitted was that it was the making of money that held the kick; after that the
petit point
, or diamonds for Merle, were nothing but the chalking up of extra credit. But there was nothing the matter with it, nothing was the matter with anything, as long as you didn't take too much time to slop around and think.

“The Vambery,” he turned to Doctor Leonard, “gets a good fee and a living to treat my wife. Do you know what really ails her, man?” He spoke in a low voice. “She's
bored
. That's a terrible thing. Do you know how terrible that is? My God!
bored!
that's the only God damn thing the matter with her. Why she's got endless, infinite endurance—to stand things that would knock me to hell-and-gone: permanent waves, fittings; massages that make holy rolling look like nine-pins. But give her a plain day to go through—and by God dinner preys on her mind all day, she can't decide what dress to wear, she goes mad wondering if she ought to have asked the Whit-mans, she counts her jewels to make sure of the new maid . . . and by evening she's ready for the Vambery again. . . .”

The butler heaved his ponderous belly through the door. “Mrs. Middleton will be down in five minutes,” he said; bunched his size together and carried it considerately away.

“Her Majesty,” Al said grimly; “prepare to kneel.” He remembered the comfortable Norah squatting on her hassock. “And what do you think of all this, Miss Norah?” he asked.

“I think I've made this sleeve too tight,” she said, stretching it gently.

But he heard Merle's step upon the stairs. Slow; tantalizing; perfect; she had not had a moment of being at ease, of being herself, of making a natural gesture, since they had taken to separate rooms at her request . . . or the Vambery's expensive advice. . . . His boy looked tortured; sat on the edge of his chair much as Al felt he must have sat, some twenty-odd years back, calling on the aloof Miss Emmett with flowers in his trembling hands.

The buzz died. Here's where a pair of hips, Al whispered to Bruno, knocks your revolution for a goal. . . .

Merle stood in the doorway, the Vambery behind her like a shadow. Wait till she issues The Voice, Al thought maliciously.

If he could keep his eyes down, Emmett thought, if he could fasten them on the mobile safety of his dear friend Bruno's face (who was meeting a boat tomorrow!); if he could think hard then of the Magazine, of Russia; of the proletariat . . . But Merle drew him irresistibly. The damnable little Vambery behind her stuck in his eye like a grain of sand. Over and over he could kill the pain; and over and over it swept him like icy bands around his heart. “Too beautiful for a man's mother,” Bruno had said. It was a terrible thing, her beauty. She lived inside it, Emmett thought, like a woman caked in ice. Terrible to look at one's mother and perceive her as ice; as beautiful, slippery, treacherous ice; as a creature of no blood with himself, or even of no blood at all. And to think then of the grotesqueness of one's father . . . cigar in hand (did he ever put it down? could he ever stop reeking of it?) approaching that terrible whiteness, spotting it, polluting it . . . and out of such pollution he was born!

How she had planned her entrance! Bruno thought, amused. She stood in the doorway; diaphanous; pained; gracious; a cross between a crystal-gazer and an advertisement for too much perfume. She hovered in a “poignant” way, her fine-drawn brows the only moving lines in her pallid, careful face. The effect upon Jeffrey, he noticed, was that of a baby having the soles of its feet tickled.

Isn't she horrible, vulgar? murmured Firman behind his hand; spot the diamonds, Corny. I want to put in my application, darling, Cornelia whispered back; I want to see personally to her slow dismemberment
.

She issued The Voice and Al sat back to watch. It came, low and sad; each word formed and formulated in pain; with a brave effort; exquisite; poignantly cracked; the accents shaped by Benvenuto Cellini. Each word worth its weight in gold, in subtlety. “I am proud to meet my boy's friends.” Stage silence. “I am sure you will forgive me for being late, the poor little fellow was in agony; stupid little beastie, he always eats too much and then of course his leg breaks when he stands on it.” Al loved the kids for standing in their still hostility—all of course but Jeffrey Blake, who came forward eagerly, his fingers signalling to his inside-man.

“Meet the wife,” said Al brutally. “And how do you fancy the diamond crown, comrades? my gift to the little woman to wear to the revolution.”

She fluttered like a bird and turned with a martyred-humorous look toward the heaviest of her crosses (the Vambery eyed Al with satisfaction: checking off his categories, placing Al where he belonged, neatly filing him under “sadistic”). “I thought you had gone, my dear.” She extended her hand and Al was God damned if he was going to kiss it. But the blond finger-waver pinch-hitted for him and seemed to like it thoroughly. They stood there doing a tableau out of Candida.

This is more than tactics, Firman whispered; or tactics makes strange bed-fellows. Upper-class sex, Cornelia snickered back; I bet she conceived Emmett by letting fairies kiss her hand
.

This, thought Jeffrey, inhaling the perfume for which he had already conceived, in its absence, nostalgia, is playing the game; but he felt guilty, not toward Norah sitting there, but to the memory of the loyal, scrawny little Comrade Fisher, sitting tonight on her little cot and planning campaigns under Lenin's picture.

My God, thought Miles, the whore of Babylon! And is
this
the mother of our Magazine? My God! If only Margaret were here, to show him the joke, to make him laugh!

His father and Jeffrey and the Vambery swam in black nausea before Emmett's eyes. The light tremor in his mother's voice, the easiness of her extended hand lingering in Jeffrey Blake's, froze him as nothing else could ever freeze him. Why didn't Al . . . But it was Merle's fault; for Merle permitted men, Merle encouraged them, Merle wore pale silver-white clothes that fell from her pale silver-white shoulders . . . He hated her, he hated her.

“I am so flattered, so honored,” said Merle (speaking, Bruno thought, with an expensive, bewildered air, as though English, as though language itself, were foreign to her), “that my home, this library, will see the beginnings of what I know, I know . . . Dear Doctor Leonard, how lovely to see you again.”

He hated her, he hated her. And then he closed his eyes. Her perfume was in his nostrils; her hand upon his head. “My son. At last you have brought home your friends, Emmett, to meet your poor old mother.”

But she was like an actress, Norah thought, enchanted; and put her knitting down to watch. The sort of incredible lady whose hose were never wrinkled, whose powder never caked, whose girdle never rode above her hips—who had, in fact, no hips at all. Marvellous to watch her moving, like an actress on the stage, greeting, pausing, moving on, stopping to touch her son. And Jeffrey standing up to her, kissing her hand as though he did it every day. “Thank you for coming, my dear,” she was talking to Norah herself; bending and fingering the wreath of diamonds in her princess hair, her head faintly weighted as though the wreath were too much for it; “thank you for coming to a dull old woman like myself.” “Why not at all,” said Norah quickly; and looking toward Jeffrey to share her delight saw that she had said again, apparently, the wrongest possible thing. “You lovely child,” said Emmett's mother soothingly, “you lovely peasant—isn't she a lovely peasant, Vammie?” The little dark man bent and nuzzled Norah's hand. Norah loved it all! She sat back on her hassock again and took up the knitting; settled as though she were in the theater.

“Well—” Al rose. “This is no place for me, this hotbed of revolutionaries. Don't forget to protect the Middleton interests, my pet. For every cannon you donate, sell 'em a ton of Middleton's Essentials. Good night folks, good night, I look forward to seeing the red flag flying from my roof when I come home. Good night, good luck. . . .”

Well, Cornelia murmured, if we don't get down to brass tacks now I'll start the revolution myself, without the God damned Magazine. Corny, poor kid, you must be tired—checking out at the library, all afternoon, and hungry too, I see it in your eyes, Cornelia
.

He had sat back long enough, Bruno decided. The elements were restless, impatient to be drawn together. Merle's presence was embarrassing (ludicrously clear how Jeffrey had won her support, and a little disconcerting too)—and yet it made their group more real, less isolated. He glanced over the scattered parts, from the bombastic Black Sheep to the decadent Merle sitting with Jeffrey and the Vambery at her feet—and took heart; he had assembled this conglomeration, he had given them something to come together for—and now he must piece them together into a whole, as he had pieced the Manifesto, and make them a working unit, a practiced symphony: that he could present to Elizabeth in the happy morning. He felt solemn with responsibility, and a little bit ridiculous, as he must always feel when himself in connection with sentiment or achievement stared him mockingly in the face.

“If you don't mind, Mrs. Middleton,” he addressed her curtly, “we'll be getting on with the Inquest.”

“Oh please,” she said, with her vague foreign air of absent humility, “oh please go on. Don't pay any attention at all to me. I shall feel so privileged . . . Vammie, you must explain it all to me. I am very stupid,” she said appealingly to Jeffrey. “My son is always telling me . . .”

“I suggest,” said Miles, seating himself with determination at last, “that we speed things up a bit, after all the Manifesto isn't everything and if we're going to have a Magazine . . .”

“Oh, isn't it,” said Firman sharply. “The Manifesto is the keystone, we have to sail under its colors; and this one,” he flung his eyes contemptuously toward Bruno's well-marked sheet, “is cowardly” “pink” said Cornelia quickly “emasculated”

“Mugwumpery,” said Bruno, bowing. “That, I think, completes the circuit.” The younger generation, he uneasily reflected, was going to be no cinch; perhaps he had been rash in admitting them—and yet, as he looked around him, checked up on all the faces, they were necessary, valid: provided some sort of backbone, ballast (dogmatic though it was) to the old, revived triumvirate. He could scarcely imagine this meeting, the Magazine itself, existing without Firman, without the dry Cornelia sitting by his side. “If an open forum, inviting truth, is counter-revolutionary, my honorable students . . .”

“Revolution,” murmured Merle, lifting her ringed hands in ecstasy, in deprecating ardor. “The very sound is beautiful.”

Sit tight, Firman, muttered Cornelia; you've got to swallow this, I s'pose we need the bitch's money. Of all the slop, groaned Firman
.

“This life we lead,” said Merle, her hands descending in little graduated jumps as though the rings were heavy on her hands, “no life at all,” she said to Jeffrey. She bravely smiled. “Doctor Vambery has the most brilliant explanations. Relating everything to frustrations, to disappointments, to tiny little psychological factors . . .”

“Look, let's get on with the business,” said Bruno firmly, “before Miles wears out the carpet.” For Miles had taken to pacing off the floor again. “We seem to be editing at least six different Magazines. We might at least give Mrs. Middleton her choice of which to support. Myself I'm frankly after two things: truth, regardless of propaganda; and art. . . .”

“Art,” cried Jeffrey, “art
as
propaganda! of course! Art as a weapon . . .”

“No, art as art,” said Bruno grimly. “I've always been in favor of it.”

“But we've got to change our ideology,” cried Firman, “to fit the times.” “Aesthetics were all right in
your
day,” cried Cornelia impolitely; “but this is war-time! we need ammunition, not poetry.”