The Unpossessed (26 page)

“I really do not know.” Bruno let his words fall coldly like clots of earth against a coffin. He was filled with unholy satisfaction. “When the intellectual gets intellectual
enough
, my boy . . .
is
there an object?
is
there a Magazine?
is
there such a thing as hunger?” The boy was quivering.
Is
there, Bruno asked himself, myself? Elizabeth? is there anything? he thought and looked about a once-familiar room, doubting suddenly its existence and half-expecting the walls to fall in, the piano to fade . . . “Scepticism,” he said comfortingly to the top of Emmett's head, “is the vile retreat of the weak stomach; the intellectual steals a peep at reality and can't take it . . . so he begins to question its existence.”

Emmett was trembling. “Why did you m-m-make me get drunk, Bruno? Why did you, Bruno? I feel so sick, I want to die. . . .” Again his child's accusing voice reminded Bruno of Elizabeth. His head was so close, so vulnerable; as easy to crush, as to caress it. . . . Murder, he thought, must be a cowardly projection of the will to suicide. He put out his hand and rested it gently on Emmett's head. Beneath his fingers he felt the vulnerable sliding scalp, so like a baby's, so like a girl's.

“Better?” he said, and was surprised to hear his voice as gentle as a mother's. “You want to sleep,” he said tenderly, “you don't want to die.” You don't need to die, he thought; you are dead, we all are. If we were a jot less cynical, if we believed a jot more in life, we'd kill ourselves, he thought. But since we aren't alive, we have no need to die. We're shades. We don't matter anywhere. We don't even produce waste, like Emmett's father. “Sleepy-kid,” he said, “say the word and I'll put you to bed.”

“Why do we bother then,” said Emmett sleepily. “Why do we bother with anything, if nothing makes any difference, Bruno? I mean, why do we start Magazines and r-r-revolutions and things. . . .” His voice was the voice of Elizabeth asking for more about the Three Bears.

“Oh we don't really, we just pretend to,” said Bruno lightly. “There are no Magazines, there are no revolutions,” he said as though he explained away the fear of lightning from a child. “From the early Normans,” he added soothingly; “and now it's time for growing boys to get their sleep.” He struggled to rise, but Emmett, laughing sheepishly, clasped both his arms about his neck.

“Don't
want
to go to bed,” he said petulantly. “Want to stay up all n-n-night and talk with the grown-ups.
Won't
go to bed,” he said with sly impudence; “can't make me,” he said, growing bolder. His mouth was weak with liquor, strong with some half-felt sense of his own power over Bruno.

They struggled lightly. Bruno rose, and the boy rose clinging to him. “Here, here, this is disrespectful, you damn baby,” Bruno feebly said. Emmett tightened his hold; drops of perspiration stood on his broad baby's brow. “Let go, you young idiot,” Bruno muttered; but the arms were comforting. “Won't, won't,” the boy crowed; “car-ry me, carry me, Bruno,” he said in a triumphant nursery sing-song. “We'll get this over with,” said Bruno grimly. He lifted the boy roughly, his hands on his fine vulnerable ribs, and felt his body like a frail triumphant leech against him. He swung him round, Emmett's bare foot caught the whiskey bottle and he laughed with his head close to Bruno's as Elizabeth's home-coming drink formed a rapid pool on the middle of the floor.

In a swell of repugnance he carried him and deposited him in the bed he had meant for Elizabeth. He laid him down, settled his lolling head against the pillow. Emmett lay back smiling like a cat. As though he knew himself instinctively for a usurper. “Good-night, good-night,” said Bruno briefly. But Emmett's hand shot out and clung to his.

“Don't go, don't leave me, Bruno,” he pleaded, his mouth still curved in that triumphant baby-smile.

“I've got to get some sleep, I've got a boat to meet tomorrow,” said Bruno cruelly.

Emmett gripped his hand; the smile ran off his face, his eyes grew large with terror. “You b-b-brought me here,” he almost sobbed, “you made me drunk . . . now you want to desert me, like my mother and f-f-father, like everybody. . . . I'm dead when I'm alone, when I'm not with you,” he sobbed, “I'm as good as dead, and you're going to meet a boat, you're going to desert me too. . . .”

“Nonsense.” The suddenness, the sureness, of his own voice startled him. Whatever it was in men, he thought, that drew them toward each other rather than sent them posturing after women, was in him irresistibly now. The root of the thing lay in fear, in defeat. Before a woman one must wish to be a man, to be strong, to strut, to maintain some permanent impregnable masculine dignity in the very act of melting. With a fellow-man, a fellow-frightened-man, one was reduced without shame to a common denominator. Beaten, he was not fit for Elizabeth. He had run the gamut of indifferent women and couldn't face the highest. It was another thing with Emmett; Emmett was beaten at the start, before the line-up, the only woman he would ever see was Merle, his own forbidden mother. “Nonsense, you're drunk, I'm not deserting you,” he said crisply, and felt the feverish grateful pressure of Emmett's hand. “I won't leave you till you've fallen asleep,” he said, and drew a chair beside the bed.

False dawn entered at the window and Emmett with his hand still clasping Bruno's, fell asleep. The first milk-wagons rattled archaically up the street and still when Bruno tried to free himself, Emmett held on tighter to his hand. He was touched and indifferent in separate layers of his mind and he sat on thinking of the futility of Elizabeth's morning homecoming, of the impossibility of conjuring her up in three dimensions. From the distant river came the wakening cries of boats. Elizabeth, he thought, signalling vainly across the small stretch of ocean that lay between them now, through the blanket of impenetrable personal fog. Emmett lay sleeping in Elizabeth's bed, his head triumphant on Elizabeth's pillow. He tried again unclasping the lax sleeping fingers; but Emmett's hands awoke in fright, gripped his like a convulsive little child's. Bruno gave in; despite himself there was comfort, as if in love of any sort there was something which he had to have. He drew his chair softly close to the bed and bowed his head till it lay on the pillow beside Emmett's and the boy's fluttering whiskey breath blew ironic solace on his cheek.

HE LAY BESIDE Comrade Fisher (Merle Middleton's perfume still lingering, although forbidden, in his nostrils) and drew comfort from her dry, authentic voice. On the steps of the Middleton house he had paused, uncertain, watching his friends go off with scarcely a word to him, as though—incomprehensibly—they blamed him for the thing that had broken up their meeting. Restlessness seized him, a bewildering suspicion that nothing that he touched was real; he felt briefly a victim, alone and scared, a political lone wolf. But he could not go home with his bewilderment to Norah; he was not ready for Norah, he was at the middle of his cycle, outward bound, away from her—the charm of lazy fidelity was a luxury he seldom dared permit himself. And so, his own hands jumping, pulsing, fluttering in his pockets, fantastic strangers to himself, he had thought of Merle and thought of Norah; and come, because it seemed more fitting, direct to Comrade Fisher.

He knew that although she was ugly, although her body was all scraps and joints and angles, he must find her beautiful, he must love her; because she had been in jail; she had been in Russia; because she had loved two revolutionists and their blood must pass through her to him. He could feel the spirit of his predecessors throbbing in her temples, entering his nervous finger-tips and flowing secretly to his head and heart. He lay lightly touching her, listening to her voice; and memorized the details of her bare and pitiful room, the only decorations posters—and the newspaper photograph of Lenin (like a picture of a young girl's father) sitting dynamic and patient behind his desk, waiting, it would seem, for Comrade Fisher to interpret him, or for a second coming.

He had come prepared to talk about Cornelia, to describe the strange feeling of utter incredulity he had had (and still had) when without a word of warning Cornelia slipped to the floor and ended their discussion. He supposed that he ought to feel (as Miles had looked) as though he wakened from a dream and saw reality; but he felt the opposite; he felt that he had been living eagerly all evening (in the center, at the pivot) and then was forced to witness melodrama. Yet it must have
been
real; he had seen Norah rushing up; mechanically he himself had opened windows—and felt that he was taking part in theater. Now his head was spinning, his hands trembling. “I love your hands,” said Comrade Fisher. (Merle Middleton had called them sensuous.) They stilled with pleasure. “I put the party idea across,” he said—and feeling quieted refrained from telling her about Cornelia. “Of course, our difficulties are the Black Sheep—as orthodox, as hide-bound, little religious fanatics, as you describe the average communists.” And yet he was taken again (it was so clear his old triumvirate looked down upon him, didn't altogether trust his strategies) with the longing to announce his machinations to the world, to wear some badge across his chest, to hold innocent and quiet hands to the accusing public (to sit for hours on end, watching Norah sew or knit or cook for him)—to be one thing or the other; he remembered Bruno's disconcerting “neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring, just lousy intellectuals.” Was that the matter with him? Was that why he, who could weep at a book, weep at sight of the Hudson River unexpectedly blue at the end of a street, had felt nothing but incredulity for Cornelia? He raised himself on his elbow, looked Lenin eye-to-eye where Lenin went on writing in his photograph over Comrade Fisher's bed. “I'd like to join the party, Comrade,” he resolutely said. To belong somewhere, he meant.

Comrade Fisher sighed. “I've told you, Jeffrey, over and over again. The time isn't ripe. Boring from within . . . I've told you.” He let himself be soothed. Both Comrade Fisher's words and the picture of Lenin (a dead man, after all, a photograph, all his accomplishments behind him) rested him, comforted him. “I love your hands,” said Comrade Fisher, and lay stretched in her strange kind of agonized silence beneath the head of Comrade Lenin; “the hands of a future revolutionary, a leader . . . whether the
party
knows it or not,” she said contemptuously. But he wished they could rest, those hands of his, he wished their complicated secrets didn't itch so painfully in their bewildered palms. He felt that if he carried more secrets in his hands, more tactical plots in his brain, he would burst. “I know,” said Comrade Fisher definitely; “because I've known the leaders.” He looked into her eyes and saw the memories of many lovers, famous revolutionary leaders; himself the latest. He kissed her passionately.

This then was real, a woman's arms around him, early morning blowing in the window, the day ahead, the sun in the sky, Norah at home with breakfast waiting for him. Real too, when he beheld himself rebuilt in a new woman's eyes. “Tell me again, Comrade,” he murmured, and pillowed her head on his shoulder, “tell me again about Comrade Turner, how you sat up all night with him in jail, waited for the strike to break. . . .”

He lay and listened peacefully to the revolutionary bedtime story, his hands at rest on her head as though her story, her former loves, the spirit of Comrade Turner, the spirit of the strike itself, passed through her and into his fingers and strongly fed him. The experience became his. He was Comrade Turner lying with Comrade Fisher in his arms and planning the tactics of the strike. He was the raw-boned mill worker who led the strike. He was the many mill-hands singing the International. He was the successful lover of Merle Middleton, the messiah to his friends. He was the personal medium for the strike, the interpreter of Lenin, the battlefield for revolution. He was the strike. He was the revolution. His blood rose; his fingers grew tense as claws; gratitude toward Comrade Fisher overwhelmed him like love. He threw off the hot counterpane and made love to Comrade Fisher, Comrade Turner's Comrade Fisher, under Comrade Lenin's sightless eyes.

A ROUND brown cylinder of sound snorted out of the funnel, gave way to billows of smoke which darkened the sky; smaller cries echoed from the smaller fry all over the bay, fretful shrieks of ferries, one deep groan from a lumber barge; Elizabeth's great home-coming ship let out another roar of pain and submitted, gigantic tamed beast, to being led by the nose by a score of anxious little tugs. Elizabeth stood pressed against the deck-rail. The sea-gulls hovered, shouted overhead; the worried little pygmy-passengers scrambled like the sea-gulls' shadows on the deck. She saw how her great ship moved reluctantly toward its harbor; the nervous little tugs manoeuvred briskly, straining and pulling on their incredible leashes. The ship bungled, fumbled; pointed its blunt nose obscenely toward the arm of the enormous slip. There was a moment of drifting with the Hudson tide; when the passengers wondered if they must put out to sea again; and then the ship was beaten, pinned; little men armed with fluttering sheets of paper sprang nimbly, exultantly, over cables as large as their legs.

She saw him at last. There was his face again, Bruno's face, among the faces of the strangers swimming on the pier. Bruno's face, a family face, an inside face, so vibratingly near and dear that it was almost unfamiliar, so that she felt a rush of embarrassed blood beat in her temples, like terrible stage-fright, as if what they were doing there should have been done behind a bolted door. It seemed to her infinitely pathetic that he should have dared to bring so vulnerable a thing as his face down here, before the public gaze, to greet her. She was afraid for his face; it was so real, alongside the indifferent stranger faces, so blurred, so soft, how had he dared to bring it here, how could it exist, how could it hold its own in a world of faces belonging to people not related to him. It was so courageous and yet so frightened, she wanted his arms to wash around her and send them both back to the long childhood days, to purge her of the last taste of Denny and the fast-express; she wanted to melt into him and tell him that she knew forcefully that they were of one family and the same blood, that never again would she hurt his softness, his blurriness, his peculiar caustic tenderness. That he stood there patient on the pier seemed to her the bravest thing she had ever seen.