Trust (74 page)

"Mr. T.'s responsible for everything," I said, and straggled through a hill of sand with Circe and her pale herd, leaving those crippled, bound sailors to brood on the final equality, not of the machine, but of man. The resuscitated motor, revived through dismemberment of the others, was somewhere among them, and indistinguishable to the innocent eye.

Mrs. Purse washed her hands—with soap—in the brook. The seven Purselets washed
their
hands in the brook. Under the trees there was a table, very stately, approached as in a gavotte by chairs, very stately. It was not a picnic table—by no means. Instead it was a ponderous indoors table carried, for whimsical or practical reasons, and certainly with difficulty, outdoors. The chairs were fully carved: from the wrist of each arm grew a little wooden long-nosed face, and out of the back of each popped another such face, clown-featured, king-costumed. All the little wooden heads wore little wooden crowns, but had to look mournfully down on bursting puffy slit seats. Chateaux were washed away. There had been figured velvet to sit on once, with moats and rosy pages open-mouthed below the turrets. And now it was a fairy table under trees, left to rain and droppings both vegetable and avian. In reality the table was not very clean. In reality the chairs, the whole dozen of them, were not very comfortable. But it was a charming scene, like any tea-party. I drew—no, felt—two comparisons: Alice of course, and that glowing and classical moment in the world that begins imperishably with: "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." The sentence is celebrated for its civilizing atmosphere; and surely the very fact of a table under trees—especially when there are set on it a platter of red plums and one of white cheese and one of a golden roast chicken yet to be dealt with, with the steaming spit still lancing it through—brings to mind whole civilizations. It did not matter that a smoky smell of fowl hinted at something in the air more primitive, intimation of the hunt, or that the kitchen was a fireplace made of round stones in a ring and supplied with forked branches in wonderful wild-west fashion, and the fire nearly out. It merely seemed as though Fashion itself, in the person of courtiers, was at masquerade for its own amusement—as though civilization, as represented by the table and its kings, had come out to tease and be teased. Behind that flat victual universe, and held in the brambly basket of the treetops, was an enormous scarlet globe, perfect as the rich yolk of an egg: it was the late sun, caught in a hedge and delayed. And between the table and the sun, only much nearer to the sun than to the table, two men played a game.

There was no net, though there were poles from which a net had once been strung. There was no visible court, though there was a kind of floor out of which hairy weeds wandered. The two men swam in the brush. A tan ball darted from bent racket to warped racket Sometimes the ball lost its way, and dipped into the pool of fine tall grass. And then there was a wait; and then suddenly the ball could be seen again in arc, like a moth lured to the circle of the sun.

I left the brook, and came to the table and breathed gnats, and left the table and the gnats and headed for the players. They were farther than they seemed; I had to walk through a heap of straw—it might have been a formal garden once: decayed trellises and dead thorns all over, and a thicket of cancerous runaway ivy smothering flagstones; and in the center of a sort of grove an astonishing stone ruin, broken like a Greek shrine. It was the remains of a fountain. A hollow finger of pipe protruded from the ground; and a long thick ugly serpent-like chain meandered near it. The chain led to rubble—a stump with kicked-away points at either end: it was an anchor of stone.

They played without conversation. They were governed by the ball, which raised their right arms high, and they were joined by the ball, which brought the blow of one to the blow of the other. They beat the tan ball back and forth. Their faces seemed boiled by the light and concentrated in pursuit. One was still a young man, though he had the clefts of use descending from nostril-margin to mouth-margin; the other was not young. The one who was not young was the taller and the more agile. The one who was still young was the more decorous, and stamped through fiercenesses of weed-growth like a clever circus horse. They kept no score—at least not aloud—and seemingly had no rules beyond the limitations of thigh-high clumps of straw spears and crazy blistered rackets, so I was struck with wonder at whether this earnest breathless gaming pair, like the motors below on the beach, had suffered sad and profound bewitchment. Or perhaps had the dancing sickness and could not end their match until some unendurable unheard inner music ended. Or had a bitterness between them that needed victory in this odd way.

In a little while one said: "Fee fie foe fan. I smell an Ameri-can."

"
Damn
it, you're deficient in imagination," said the other. "You go all over the lot. Can't you imagine a net?"—But neither man turned.

Phung, went the ball. Phung, back again. Phang!

"If you please," said the man who was no longer young, "don't stare. If you please, young lady."

"Watched pot, hah? Nervous!—Well, never mind, it's only a tourist," and the speaker, short of breath, vanished for a moment under a mat of greenery. At length he gracefully emerged. "She's got to be shown around. I authorize you."

"The view's worth showing of course."

"Terrible idea. Show her the wine cellar. Pick—out—something—nice."

But neither man made any move to leave off playing. Phung. Phung. Phang!

"Tell her," continued the man who was still young, "to take a handful of kids if she won't try it alone. I need my wine with my dinner."

"They've
been
downcellar, most of them."

"Well, tell her to pick a glorious hero out of history who
hasn't
been yet and go downstairs with it. Then dump it in the spring."

"You're offhand with glorious heroes," the other grunted.

"The bottle I meant. To cool. Last month I lost a beaut that way—cork was loose. Washed out. Fresh from the cellar too. Some lackey must've nipped it once. Water turned"—phing!—"claret. Matched the house-mold exactly. Pity to see—perfectly good—spring water—diluted."

At once I knew him. Tilbeck was the one who needed wine.

I was afraid to look at him. I looked at the other man. The other man, whom I had taken for old, was not old. It was only contrast that made him seem so. He had a mouth stern with rigid piety—a hollow mouth, full of teeth but hollow-sucked all the same behind lips puffed and womanishly budded. And a step too quick for a young man, since young men are unashamed about not always showing their nimbleness. They will show it if it pleases them. Yet Purse sped, as though someone had doubted how nimble he could be; he dashed and darted, vigorously in training. It made him seem old. The other laughed and sauntered. The other was lazy, and went after the ball casually, like one of those self-mocking tropical divers who greet incoming holiday-ships with a nonchalant crash to the bottom of the harbor, and all for the sake of a penny. He laughed, and he strolled, and he stuck a toe out to kick the invisible net, and he missed his serve, and he ducked, and he held his racket like a feather-duster; and he panted recklessly all the while, until he vaguely reeled. But he was at play, and Purse was at work. Frenetic repetitions rather than exhaustion aged Purse; he looked what he was, a father. Not so my father. I stared with the rot of disappointment at a man not yet forty who had the enamels and graces of a man not yet thirty. Heedlessness—his shoulders demonstrated how little he cared for anything but the soft inch of pleasure; he did not even care for triumph—heedlessness perhaps it was that had left him immune; but he was not
that
immune. Time must overtake before it takes away the whole of a man's earliness, and no one had told me how Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck stood with respect to the touch of the withering finger. It had not tapped him. There was still something unrecounted about the stink of my first cell. Dejection seized me. Shame heated my legs. Not even William, sordid puritan, had had the courage of this sordidness. I viewed my father. He might have been a decade younger than my mother; half that surely. Then and there I had to swallow what I was: the merest merest whim. Oh, less and worse: it was not that I was the flaw of chance. Others belong to chance, others have sprung from caprice. It was not that I had never remotely been intended. It was simply that I could never have been seriously believed in. It is bad to fail, but to succeed beyond one's genuine imagination is terrible. It is the spurt of a too great precocity. It surpasses what is decently normaL A boy of seventeen had made me.

"You! Tourist!" he called to me two-and-twenty years after that moment of his singularity. "I need my dinner. I need my wine. Bring all those counting-houses up from the beach. Tell them their papa laid everything out like a French chef. His missis done? Fixed my outboard?"

"They said it's fixed. They're washing," I answered, and watched the ball go wild.

"Good. This is Purse the digger," he announced. "When he digs into a purse it's not his own. Joke." And then: "This one is my girlie. The kid get you over all right? Didn't soak you, dry enough I see. Though not a looker. What the hell, I like my girlies lookers. Expected a looker, the odds were for it Show you around all the same. You show her," he nudged Purse, and snatched the racket from the other's grip and threw it with his own into a bed of rushes. They fell with a sound like a distant sneeze.

"I'd better see to the hand-washing," Purse said nervously.

"Right you are. Germ gets into a Purse, never gets out again. Give that one to the missis with my compliments. Doesn't come up to her standards, I'm only an amateur. The professional product—how can you make a small purse count? Answer: Teach it. Topical joke, unquote Mrs. Purse, so help me sweet baby Jesus."

Purse bolted like a racer, with a noise in his nose.

"Sacre bleu, blasphemed again. Keep forgetting not to. It's all right in front of the kids, they're hypocrites, but it hurts the pa's feelings something awful. Though he won't say anything—I made him promises. He'd recite all the devil's names for the price of an encyclopaedia and a new tin trunk. Fast on his feet, look at that. It's not hands he's going to supervise, believe me. Prayers. That gang never consumes a Goddamn crumb without first spitting up a blessing. Wear out God that way. You religious?"

"No."

"Believe in God?"

"I don't know. I don't think so."

"Which means Yes. Don't have your mother's shape, now do you?" he said critically. "They teach you something in that college to make up for it?"

"Latin mostly."

He whistled. "Let's go get the bottle. Show you your bed on the way."

We avoided the wilderness I had come by and followed a little path past three large and dirty tents. "Here?" I said.

"Put you in the house. With me. You're no tramp. This way—back door. Through the kitchens. Show you
my
bed."

It was a sofa pushed nearly into a fireplace. Minuet dancers paraded on the cushions in bubbles of frocks the color of grass. Grass underfoot nipped strangely, in knots, out of gaps in the tile. A lobster glow prowled through the windows; some were boarded; here and there a few glass teeth still hung. On the lip of the hearth lay a silken pillow ragged with raveled rosettes. Black enormous surfaces of stoves stretched into mediaeval distances. There was a bad smell—dampness, feces of mice. Wax candles leaned like stalagmites. Under the sofa a heap of charred table-legs. Against a rotting wall something—a cube the size of a cottage, with its door swinging free; perfectly square; gigantic; breathing caged heat: a terrifying refrigerator. "Pantry. Laundry. Back there the bakery. Rows of sinks like-elephant troughs, see 'em? Burned all the bread paddles last winter. Break your heart, hah? All dead and finished. See that clump? Behind you. Right up through. No basement under this part of the house, that's why. The power of grass. Takes over in the end. Gloria was sick on the bus last Monday, you follow?"

I did not know how to answer.

"Tourist! No? Don't get it? Thought you had Latin. Sic transit gloria mundi as they say. Come on, I'll show you the kings."

The kings matched the kings on the chairs under the trees. Grotesque noses, awkward rough little snarls, wicked wicked foreheads leering with the minute grain of the crafty wood; he went from dark guileful panel to dark ingenious panel of an empty room, empty and immense, empty and inhabited by the heads of kings. He polished wooden foreheads with his wrist-bone. I pursued him through a litter of newspapers and peered upward: "There must be three hundred of 'em—I never counted," but he did not mean the prisms that showered from the chandelier like a brilliant bundle of kaleidoscopes; "see?" he said, "up near the ceiling? That whole row up there? Half a dozen of 'em? Those are the Six Philips of France. Heard of Philip the Fair?—that's the crackpot-looking one: crosseyed. On the other side—there's plenty of light left, come on—those are the Five Philips of Spain. Murderous, hah? The way I understand it the old man imported these walls direct from somebody's Hungarian castle. Filthy-minded old man. These are only the heads—figure for yourself what they would've done with the torsos. Well, come on, 111 show you a piece of filth!"

Now a room larger than the last; a bereft drawing-room plainly; a hall. Sky, zodiac, cherubim and seraphim; trumpets, scrolls, lofty harps encrusting the vault But unlike the room of the kings, this one is furnished. A piano and a sofa. The sofa is identical with the kitchen sofa, only the dancers here wear red boots, red bodices, red waving ribbons. A woolen blanket is folded on the arm. "You sleep here. Quite a little instrument, hah? Ever see anything like it for filth? Works all the same. B flat below middle C nice and dead, but you'd expect that, leather gave out Miracle all the rest are O.K. Sounds like a trapdoor slamming half a mile off." He struck a key: out flew a quick tiny metallic cry. The eighteenth century flocked across the piano's grand flanks—courtiers and courtesans, princes and dogs, orchards and mazy streams, all in gilt and pastel, the buckles gold foil, the wigs all silver, the rouge on every cheek a delicacy of brushwork; and lions on the legs, and bronze claw feet, and green fields and mounted hunters dreaming straight across the music-rack. "Filth!" he said. "More of the same upstairs; sailor's filth."