If you were careless ever; if ever a thing you missed
In the forest—a serpent twist
Of shadow, ensnaring the starlit way of a tree;
If, at your wrist,
The pulse rang never, never, to the slow bells of the sea;
If a star, quick-carven in frost and in amethyst
Shone on the thin, thin finger of dawn, your turning away your face....
You shall be sorry, sorry,
Sorry, for when you die
They shall follow and follow and find you
As you go through the difficult place.
The strong snake shadows shall bind you,
The swords of the stars shall blind you,
And the terrible, terrible bells of the sea shall crash and cry,
The bells of the sea shall ring you out from under the sky
In a lost grave to lie
Under the ashes of space.
Mr. Banner Hope, although he wanted to be a Blonde Beast, was of the type that is inevitably made use of. He knew how to drive a Ford car. He was known to know how. He therefore found it impossible to demur when Avery Bird asked him kindly next day if he didn’t want to drive. It is, as everyone knows, impossible to look personally dangerous and daring when driving a Ford. You have to sit up straight and there is no spare room for your knees. These things give you a mincing, bourgeois look. The lady seated beside the driver of a Ford, whoever she may be, cannot help looking like the driver’s lawful wife, or at worst, his lawful sister. Conversely, in a racing car with a steering wheel that bends paternally over the indolently prostrate driver, even an aunt looks painted.
Avery Bird had first asked Edward Williams if he could drive a Ford. Edward could not even have driven a donkey. He hoped that his inefficiency was a mark of temperament.
Rhoda Romero sat next to Mr. Hope, telling him of her first love adventure and criticising his driving in alternate breaths. Mrs. Melsie Stone Ponting only travelled in automobiles in order to be kissed. As soon as she was settled in the car between Avery and Edward she began obviously discussing with herself which man’s arm to wear round her waist. Edward hardly counted with her as a man, still, he was unattached. She looked from side to side but there seemed to her to be no answer in Edward’s eyes. So she leaned against Mr. Bird and said, “Now let’s enjoy ourselves,” as they started.
The Ford seemed to Edward to be a sun round which the golden planets of the hills revolved. Except for a lapse into greenness after the rains, California hills are always golden; sometimes rose-gold, sometimes lemon-gold. Now the rains were almost forgotten as the travellers drove inland, but there was a faint dream of green on some of the slopes, a glaze or transparency of green laid lightly on the glowing golden hills. And, besides this dream of color, always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew.
There was no need for Edward to talk or even to don the rigid semi-smile which he was in the habit of assuming, with some difficulty, when he realised that he was watched. He could not hear anything except an occasional scream from Melsie Ponting.
At four, six, half-past six and seven they stopped at saloons. The suggestion to stop always came from Banner Hope, but it did not benefit him very much, for Rhoda strictly censored anything that passed his lips. “It would be so discouraging,” she said, “if our driver fell down on us.”
At about a quarter to seven Mrs. Ponting began to notice Edward. She looked round from the shelter of Avery’s shoulder as one looks out of a safe window at a poor man in the cold.
“Edward’s shocked,” she said; and then with a little shriek, “Oh boy, I’ll trouble you to look at Edward’s face.”
“Sir Walter Raleigh discovering the barbarians of the Noo World,” said Mr. Bird, pronouncing the ‘Sir’ with the attentive emphasis democratic America always gives to a title.
Edward had already dissolved the rigid coating of depression from his soul by means of several gin-and-vermouths. He was therefore lost in the thought of Emily and of the happier passages of his life—that dinner at Romano’s when he had made fourth to oblige Jimmy with the Silly Billy Sisters ... the afternoon on the river at Marlow when they first left school.... Edward’s happier passages were very rare and easy to remember. It was only when Melsie’s attack was repeated on a higher key—(“Now folks, go easy, we have a poyfect gentleman in our midst”)—that he was aware of her intention.
“People don’t like me,” thought Edward. “They think I feel superior, but I am not brave enough to feel that. They don’t know how harmless and afraid I am.”
“They wouldn’t countenance such things in Britain, would they, Edward?” said Mrs. Ponting. “The Britisher never hugs anyone except himself.”
She shrieked with amusement and shouted against the wind to Rhoda, “Say, listen, Rhoda, we’re getting good and funny at the back here—barring Edward, and he’s shocked.”
Rhoda looked round kindly at Edward. “Poor Edward,” she said. “Say, folks, at the next saloon there’s a dancing floor and an automatic piano.”
In reply to this Banner Hope of course said that his aunt in Fresno had an automatic piano too. But Edward fortunately thought otherwise. Edward’s ears thought that Banner Hope said, “He could take her in two moves.”
The saloon in the next town they reached had been optimistically built in the belief that the town was destined to be a Center. Perhaps the town had justified this optimism once. It was one of those towns that homesick New Englanders built in a far fantastic land of opportunity and broken hearts. Its houses, separated from prim sidewalks by hedges that were once prim, were built out of dreams of homes left behind and of domestic ideals relinquished. For one moment one thought oneself in Massachusetts, but in the next moment realised that the West had devoured all but a dream of the dream. The shell of the town was empty, cracked and even ruined. The fierce extravagance of California roses covered the damage. Scrub oak, sage brush, chaparral and prickly pear invaded the gardens of sentimental dead miners. A wild scarlet sunset crushed down all gentle thoughts of Salem.
There had been flourishing vineyards on the slopes of the low brown hills, but these were haunted now by the shadow of a date in the coming summer—the date of Prohibition. Cows were tearing the vines to pieces. Californians had given up commenting on this common and horrible sight. There were no new jokes to hide the despair.
In a row on the covered sidewalk of the town were six saloons. The sidewalks were raised from the street level and roofed against the sun, the roofs being held up by once white hitching posts. One of the saloons was open, the others were moribund.
While Banner Hope sought a nickel with which to feed the automatic piano, the others drank a cocktail each, but Edward drank two. He did not dance. He was too self-conscious and too torpid to dance.
While the other four danced he sat at a little lame table and felt warmth and color coming into his mind. The sound of “He could take her in two moves ...” was still in his ears. His eyes were constructing a wide red sandstone chessboard. He remembered it. Near it he was born and near it he had lived during one-third of his life. “They kept me too long in India,” he thought, interpolating self-pity even with his rapture of imagination. “It accounts for me.” The great chessboard was on a low hill, the only hill in a yellow seamed plain that had no limit. About the hill there was a high red wall; the indentations of the battlements were Gothic in shape. The buildings about the chessboard were like dark flowers. He could see confused flat yellow villages outside the wall from where he stood—a pawn on the great chessboard. Near him jewels caught the sunlight, and orange and blue arrows of light from the jewels pierced his sight. The knights on the chessboard wore full skirts like dancers; they looked away from their objective; when they leaped upon their crooked course their skirts swung outward and so did their long hair. The bishops had very thin, twisted faces and a swift, vindictive tread. The rooks clanked as they trod, and their stiff brocade coats were quilted. The queen’s dress was generously made and starry, and her head was outlined against the sunset. She ran like a boy from end to end of the board; she skipped and jumped as she drove the men she vanquished from their squares; her laughter was as gay as frost. The men whom she dismissed knelt and kissed the jewels on her foot before they went. The upper sky was the color of grapes and near the earth it was the color of wine. Against that sky the pawn that was Edward was content only to see the delicate insolent outline of the queen’s form. He could take her in two moves....
“The superior gentleman,” said Mrs. Melsie Ponting, sitting on his knee so violently that not only Edward but the whole floor shuddered. She was becoming every moment more anxious to appear naughty and this was delighting Banner Hope, who could now feel that he was living a deliciously wild life without effort. It was no effort to sweep Melsie from Edward’s knee on to his own. The impulse for this manœuvre was hers.
Rhoda Romero, though averse to the knees of strangers and suffering from the drawback of an innate dignity, was anxious not to seem behindhand. She demanded a challenge to “get together” with a couple of cowboys who had just entered and were shooting craps at the bar. They wore flaring leather chaps with leather buckles, leather waistcoats over red shirts, high boots stitched in a floral design and hats of dark beaver, very broad, very high and pointed. Rhoda approached them with a rather charming suggestion of swagger and asked them where they got their hats. One cowboy answered in a low self-conscious voice, and Rhoda returned to her table with disappointment in her face.
“From a movie company,” she said a little sheepishly.
Mrs. Melsie Ponting shrieked, not with laughter, but with excitement. She hoped that the cowboys would look at her but they did not. “Such is life ... such is life ...” bellowed Banner Hope. Avery Bird said, “Let’s go,” but Edward, as a defensive movement against Melsie, ordered one more gin-old-fashioned each, including a couple for the cowboys.
“Mr. Williams is wegging ub,” said Melsie Ponting more kindly. It seemed to them all extraordinary that so bare a room should be so delightfully full of confusion. Everything seemed hot, and especially hot was the finger of one of the cowboys tapping Edward’s knee.
“And it’s not the first time either,” the cowboy was saying. “I surely did draw a bum card when I got my old girl....”
“What got her goat this time?” asked Rhoda.
An anecdote seemed to tangle itself about Edward’s exhausted understanding: “... a peach of a dame ... foreigner I guess ... gave my mare the once over.... ‘Sure, sister,’ I said ... there she was careening down the grade on my mare....”
“Gadarening would be a good word for that,” thought Edward.
“My God, I said, if the mare isn’t acting like she was going to take the girl home to my old girl ... and sure ’nuff.... This foreign dame I’m telling you of rides back ... kinda queer her way of talking was.... ‘Your wife’s after me and you,’ she says ... and back of her, sure ’nuff, come the old girl.... She was blue’s a lemon when she got here....” He broke off. “Well, presence of ladies ...” he added, smiling fatuously. “Her language ... sour as a lemon she was, yapped like a coyote.... And the foreign dame laughed ... put her head down and kinda sobbed for laughing ... she should worry....”
“I believe it was Emily,” said Avery Bird suddenly.
“You betcher it was Emily,” agreed the cowboy, realising that his story was improved by this fact. “It would be. Emily for mine every day of the week not forgetting Sundays....”
Edward and the cowboy inadvertently walked out hand in hand. The cowboy retained Edward’s hand even while he affectionately shook the hand of every other member of the party. The trees and the houses and the cowboy suddenly slid away to the re-awakened tune of the Ford’s engine. Only the stars and the moon accompanied the party.
They drove the car at last through a gate into a broad moonlit hayfield. It was like a stage set and lighted for a great ballet. There were no dancers but the moon and the haycocks. All the haycocks bowed before the moon.
Rhoda and Melsie chose a haycock against which to spread their blankets. Avery Bird and Banner Hope burrowed into another haycock. Edward, by himself, chose yet another. He arranged his blankets and then stepped back with his head on one side like an artist. There never was seen such an exquisite place to sleep in. In different parts of the field the others were singing, catching an infection of song one from another.
“Oh dig my grave both wide and deep ...” sang Edward hoarsely.
When he lay down the upright blades of hay moved in the breeze against the sky. There was one that was like a pen writing upon the sky.
“In an hour and a half I can say, ‘Today I shall see Emily,’” he said. But in an hour and a half he said nothing. He could hear an owl through his sleep, but he said nothing.
The line of sunlight, as Edward woke, was climbing down the opposite hillside as the sun fought its daily preliminary battle with the eastern mountains. On the near hillside, pine tree after pine tree flamed in the descending green light. When the woods that bordered the fields achieved their morning, shafts of gold dust slanted between the trees. There was a dark brilliant red in the shadows of the woods.
Cinders in hot cakes taste glorious under an early sun. Mrs. Ponting was sleepy and a little more kind than usual. She sat plaiting her hair and giving directions to the men while Rhoda efficiently cooked hot cakes. Edward, who had walked a very long way into the forest in search of wood, returned with half a dozen twigs and with news of a bear’s track which he had discovered in a patch of wet sand by a stream—the great print of the palm and three precise dents for the claws. The fire was so fierce under the frying pan that his characteristically poor contribution was devoured in it like a War-savings Stamp in the cost of the Great War. But he thought, “I can tell Emily I heard the bear crackling in the undergrowth. I might say I couldn’t swear to it and then it wouldn’t be a lie. Anyway she is a liar herself. But liars don’t necessarily approve of liars.”
They all sang during half the day. Along the road which followed the pale green foothills they sang; the squirrels, escaping to the embrace of mean and ragged foothill pines, clasped their hands upon their breasts in pious surprise as the loud song passed by to the kettledrum accompaniment of the Ford. The heads of gophers shot out of their holes and in again, till the slope bubbled with half-seen creatures in the sun, like boiling water. A snake oozed like quicksilver across the road.
Higher and higher. The steep slopes were heaped with dogwood and buck-eye and awakening azaleas. Mariposa lilies stood in the cool shadow. A couple of deer waded in the lilies. Sometimes a web of cloud-blue lilac was spun from tree to tree. The dark wine-colored Judas tree was nearly over.
The forest presently closed about the travellers. They were prisoners. The very passing miles held them closely prisoners. The trees were wrought steel bars between them and their sunlit and delirious cities. The noise of the car was beneath the notice of the silence. The silence of the forest was much louder than their voices or than the stuttering of hearts and engines.
Their eyes leapt absurdly and inevitably up the shafts of the trees. When the striped earth sloped the trees sprang at one angle from the slope like javelins thrown against one enemy, the sun. The sky seemed stabbed by the javelin trees. The high down-pointing cones were barbs, closely embedded in sky.
The sunlight stood in fluted slanting columns hardly more ephemeral than the trees. There was an obsession of trees in Edward’s mind. Out of the corners of his eyes he could see an unceasing bustle of birds and squirrels and insects among the trees, like a hinted joke on lips that were sealed when he looked directly at them. Everything was secret. A few acres of the forest were secretly and quietly on fire. It was the spirit of fire with its eyes shut, intensely malevolent. There was but little flame; a little dagger of flame or two, as though the keeper of the savage secret could barely refrain from committing himself. Blue smoke curled from the roots in the ground; thin snakes of smoke writhed about the innocent strong trunks of the trees. The air was hot and the hanging pale scarves of lichen waved in the heat. It was an intense relief to leave the smoke behind and pass through the living, unthreatened spaces of cool forest again.
There was a pause in the day at the foot of a monstrous horned tree. An experiment on the part of the Creator but not, Edward thought, a very successful one. Trees should be young and shining or they should be immortal and carry their age like a gentle green dream. The greatest sequoia of all is a horned devil with a senile brow. The weight of his thousands of years is like a torpid curse upon him. One thinks miserably of his contemporaries, Moses and the jewelled Pharaohs, and one is glad that the ancients died decently and thoroughly and are only very sparsely survived. Some of the trees on the slope—younger by a thousand years or so—were very much more splendid. The grain of their rough and rusty bark ran up in slow spirals—for ever, it seemed. No great branches drew the eye away from its climb upward to the tapering spear of the tree. Only, far up, near the sun, the little delicate branches and needles sprang out and shone like the drops of a fountain.
“Why, why, why ...” said Mr. Hope, after reading the notice board at the foot of the horned tree. He gave the tree a quick congratulatory glance and said to Edward, “Say listen, you don’t get trees like that where you come from.”
Edward’s mind ran home. “No,” he agreed vaguely. “Not trees like this. No notice-boardy trees like this. Primroses, of course, and what not.”
“Your notice boards in Britain,” said Avery Bird, “say ‘Trespassers will be shot at sight,’ or something very like it. Our notice boards in California say ‘See here, folks, come and look at this tree,’ or some such thing.”
“That’s true,” admitted Edward. “Still, it’s more fun to disobey a notice board warning you off than to obey a notice board calling you on.” I am not sure that he really said this. If he did I do not think anyone heard him. After a second or two he realised at any rate that he might have said it and he thought, “Really, you know, I am quite clever. Only Emily is never there when I am clever. Nobody is on my side. There is nobody to think, ‘Well, by Jove, our hero is not so very unworthy of his Emily after all....’”
The grotesque dance of the Ford car between the quiet trees began again. Back and forth, back and forth, along the climbing roads it toiled. Higher and higher. There were patches of old crusted snow beside the road now. The little meadows among the trees were extravagantly green. The very shadows were green.
The earth opened before them. There was suddenly nothing at all between them and another world. The faces of the opposite mountains—El Capitan, Half Dome—were made gracious with Gothic curves. There were far mountains—red mountains, patterned with snow—to the east of the Half Dome. They were like still flames in the low red sunlight. Yosemite Valley was filling with blue shadow as the sun went down. The line of shadow climbed up the sheer cliffs like rising water and overflowed the tall shallow arches of the cliffs.
Edward thought, “I can’t bear to be alone with this. One can’t be anything but alone in such an indecently enormous world. There is nothing that will ever come near enough to save me.... Unless Emily would come....”
Avery Bird said, “The other party ought to be quite a short ways from here. They’d planned to wait for us before going down into the valley. Let’s all call Emily, let’s sing Emily all through the woods.”
“Emily ... Emily ... Emily....”
They moved along the shadowy road. The sunlight slipped from the brim of the lower cliffs across the valley. The brows of the mountains were still alight.
“Listen,” said Rhoda, and Mr. Hope, listening to excess, stalled the engine by mistake.
“Hurray.... Hurray....”
It was a very small distant voice. There was a very small distant Emily framed in tall trees. It seemed to Edward that all the trees they had seen had been but an avenue leading to Emily. She was waving violently at them with both arms. She ran towards them.
“A deer came and almost kissed me,” she shouted urgently as she ran. “We didn’t light the fire till now for fear of frightening it. The darling thing. We are going to have four fried eggs each. We bought all the eggs in the last town.”
“I guess you got to admit now that London has nothing on this,” said Banner Hope.
Leaning over a doubtful camp fire knelt Emily’s employer and his wife. Emily danced about them without dignity. “Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it fine? Soon it will be all starry above and we shall be just seeing each other’s nice faces and eating four fried eggs each.”
“You spoil things by expecting them too much, Emily,” said her employer, snatching facetiously at her dancing ankle.
Tam McTab, that eminent journalist, had a large dark complacent face. His eyes, unexpectedly, were very pale grey. They were like lapses into vagueness in a vivid face. He had straight black hair, the front lock of which seemed grown at a different angle from the rest and either fell obliquely across his forehead or was blown upward by the wind. He had rather a fat, satisfied chin. He stooped, not so much with slackness as with alertness, as though he were leaning forward to catch the sound of something passing.
His wife, Lucy, had a round, rather indeterminate face and pale drooping hair. Her clothes made her look collapsible and boneless. Even her hat was draped rather than set upon her head. Her lips looked stiff as though she were biting them constantly.
Edward knelt at her side and looked at the fire rather helplessly. He lit several matches but they went out without doing any good. Rhoda Romero took command.
It was dark at last and the stars crept in procession across the space of sky above them. The fire, a slowly spreading ring of fire rooting itself among the pine-needles, was between Edward and Emily. Lucy sat beside Edward.
“Are you fond of reading?” asked Lucy nervously of Edward. She was trying to make a little safe alcove of conversation in the great silence that stood about them. She had not intended anyone else to hear her; she was obviously not really anxious to know whether Edward was fond of reading. But she was accustomed to rooms and to a polite murmur of talk.
Emily heard her and said gushingly to Tam, “Do you play tennis, or is blue your favorite color? Lucy has brought the drawing-room even here. Lucy, won’t you even take off your hat? Is it because of the angels? St. Paul’s angels aren’t in the forest, surely.”
Edward was hardly ever scornful except of himself. He knew too well the difficulties and dangers involved in being alive to despise those who sought for safety in tremulous platitudes.
“I write more than I read,” he admitted in so low a voice that even the mocking Emily could not catch it. “I don’t write well, but I love writing.”
“Oh, how clever of you,” said Lucy. “I’d have loved to write but I never could at all, I’m sure. It’s a gift, isn’t it, really? Tam writes wonderfully. But then he does everything well. He reads a great deal too. He often says he doesn’t know where he would be without his books. He reads wonderfully well aloud. Even here he has brought books. What is the name of the man who wrote that sad bit of poetry—the ‘Song of the Shirt?’ George Moore. I saw some books of his in Tam’s suitcase. I always tell him—half in fun, you know—camping isn’t the place for reading. I admire scenery awfully, don’t you? I am a very observatory person—I often notice things that Tam missed altogether, and then I tell him and sometimes he puts it in his books. That is to say, he did once....”
Her uncertainty robbed her manner of the slightest trace of enthusiasm. She bit her lips and looked at Edward to see if he was listening. She seemed to be chronically unflattered.
Edward felt ease and complacency covering him as she spoke, just as he felt the warmth of the fire enveloping his happy body.
“Yes, I love looking at great things,” he said in a proud throaty voice. “I am myself no reader anywhere, out of doors or indoors.”
Emily was still rudely listening. Nobody else seemed to be talking. Emily was laughing a little. The low fire made a poppy-yellow light on the point of her chin, a theatrical light. A duller light was on the soft silk shirt that followed the gentle lines of her breasts.
“I have got an idea again,” said Emily, thumping the pine needles excitedly with both her hands. “Oh, now I come to think of it, I can’t say it so that it sounds a very good idea. It’s about being honest. Did I talk about it before?”
“Yes,” said Tam, and Emily’s body relaxed with disappointment. Edward thought that Tam was as hard as concrete and that certainly Emily would never bear to be laughed at or to be beaten at games. He was quite sure that she would behave badly at games and contradict the umpire.
“Well then,” said Emily rather lamely, “I’ll talk about it again. Don’t you think it’s tremendously interesting to make people be honest against their will? To startle people suddenly into being honest about their standards—about why they cry and why they laugh and when they lie and how much they pose? Posing especially. Although everybody poses, only about ten percent I should think laugh secretly at their own poses. People’s poses make them slow to admit, for instance, that they laugh only when there is something a little dirty in the joke, or that they cry when their conceit is wounded, or that they powder their noses to attract men and not for the health of their complexions, or that they lie. Let’s all pose as being absolutely honest. Lucy, quick—how much do you lie?”
Lucy bit her lips. She made a little tower of sticks at the edge of the fire and tried to convey a little torch of flames to the tower. “Why, Emily, don’t talk like that. I try not to lie at all, of course.”
“Oh, I try frightfully hard to lie,” said Tam. “I am always deeply disappointed if I do not succeed in deceiving everyone I know about what I am and what I have whenever I want to.” He spoke of himself with great confidence and with an obvious certainty that whatever he chose to say about himself was interesting. One felt that he would just as complacently have explained that he always used Vinolia Soap or that he preferred silk socks to woollen ones.
“Oh, you naughty, naughty man!” said Melsie Ponting. “As for me, I only lie to make a funny yarn funnier. I never mean to deceive a fly.”
“I lie to save myself from myself,” said Edward. He thought this sounded modest and tragic.
“I lie when I am angry or when I am frightened,” said Rhoda. “If I were always calm I should never lie at all, I guess. Except that I never tell anything that happened to me exactly the way it happened.”
“I have no conscience at all,” Banner Hope said. “I remember when my Momma used to catch me stealing the candies....”
“Truth,” announced Avery Bird, “is a bastard begotten by a steam-locomotive and born of the scent of jasmine—if you get me. Truth is the ghost of a decadent vice, clanking steel chains; Mary Magdalene was crucified on truth instead of a wooden cross——”
“Oh, for the land’s sake, Avery,” exclaimed Rhoda. “Do you have to act so damned complex? Nobody gets you, believe me. It’s because he’s a Jew....” she added apologetically to the others as she took Avery’s hand.
“I think you’re all posing,” said Emily. Her clenched hands became slack, as though with disappointment. “If I began to say how much I lied I should pose as a miserable sinner. Yet I do lie, to save myself from the anger—which I deserve—of other people. And I lie often in order to seem uniquely honest. Oh, hang it all, there’s no getting away from pose after all. We’re all posing as liars now because it’s more popular and funny to be liars——”
“Lucy didn’t,” said Tam, as though Lucy were his property.
Emily interrupted, “It was the talk of reading and writing that reminded me. While I was lying in the sun before supper I tried to read George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man. I thought Tam would presently ask me what I thought of it and I began trying and trying to think of something clever I could say—something that would sound so clever that even Tam wouldn’t dare to strip the skin of cleverness from what I should say and see how light and womanly was the core of my thinking. And then I thought it would be fun to say to myself what I really did think, not trying to show off. So I read the book with one hand and wrote everything that occurred to me with the other.”
“Well, I suppose we’d better hear what you wrote,” said Tam, knocking out his pipe in a jovially resigned way.
“Tam, don’t you really want to hear?”
“I see you are determined to let us hear.”
Edward thought, “I certainly have no delusions about her. I can see that she monopolises talk too much. And she talks entirely about herself. Having no delusions about her I can see the more clearly how adorable she is.”
“When I read my notebook now it is like a fog translated into words. Yet I swear this is all I thought about George Moore, and I am not abnormally stupid.”
“No indeed,” said Banner Hope helpfully.
“This is what I find in my notebook:
‘Why not die if you are Victorian? Terrible is the day when each sees his own soul naked. But his soul is all dressed up in tight trousers and what not. And side-whiskers. I wonder if my navy shirt is too tight? My mind is wandering. I must read this book acutely. I fain would show my soul. Mrs. Felicia Hemans toying with adultery. My first schoolroom had a green wallpaper. What’s this about Scott. Too impersonal. Who cares for the effect of Scott now? Might as well care for the effect of Little Arthur’s History. Oh, what roguey rogue he is trying to be. Of course I liked the fashionable sunlight in the Park, and to shock my friends ... I boasted of my dissipations. Now he boasts of his boasting and that is just as bad. A satyr carrying a woman. How laboriously luscious. But why not laboriously luscious? He’s got to give his Young Man something to Confess. But in these days we would laugh at his Young Man. Because he isn’t young. He’s only pretending to be traditionally young. I cannot recall a case of man or woman who ever occupied any considerable part of my thoughts that did not contribute to my moral or physical welfare. He is very proud of that. He thinks that using people makes him great. Men are vainer than women. Or naïver. Talking of vanity, I’d like leather buttons on my coat like a man’s. They would look sort of tawny. Beginning to regard the delineation of a nymph or youth bathing as a very narrow channel to carry off the tide of a man’s thought. How very good all this is. How honest of him to admit his impression of Impressionists. The shocker shocked. Hurray. He is not a spirit shocker but a flesh shocker. It is certainly fair of him to admit his vulgarity—if only he knew how vulgar it was. I don’t know about all this. I don’t know Théophile Gautier. I am a fool. I am a woman. Why do they let women be like me, skipping the strange parts of books? I think the needles on the pine trees are woven like Japanese matting against the sky. I am bored. I am bored. Now I am not bored. I am proud of being not bored; I am proud because the quotations from Gautier please me so. I am applying it all to myself. Oh, he is laughing at me. Being a woman, that’s the trouble. Pity, that most vile of vile virtues, has never been known to me. Is it being a woman that prevents me from understanding how pity can be vile? Women are paid to pretend to understand men’s epigrams. Epigrams about virtues are easy. Pity isn’t really vile, only there are three sexes, men, women and people who pity. It is said that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb. Let us play. He is laughing in a laboriously aesthetic way. He is pulling the nineteenth century’s leg, but the twentieth century can pull his. It is all Victorian smart like a minor novelist’s club. Affectations of an out-of-date “deliciously naughty fellow.” Written for sheltered women. The real genius for love lies not in getting into but getting out of love. All right. But does the word love catch every woman’s eye as it catches mine? Pythons.... Persian cats.... Are men then really so naïve? No woman would bother to retail such Garden Suburb vice. Or do I not understand the joke? Yes, I know he wrote it when he was young. But he re-published it when he was old. Has he not noticed what has happened to the world since he wrote it? It is re-published in fun ... as a survival. If I were cleverer I would have been laughing all along. But it is proud of its Bohemianism. The game of being a Bohemian can only be played with a smiling mind. You can’t have a smiling mind among Pythons and Persian cats. No—Hypocritical reader, in telling you of my vices I am only telling you of your own, in showing you my soul I am only showing you your own. When he talks of readers and souls and vices like that he is using a dead language. The reader he apostrophizes is dead. He has the sustained smirk of a John Leech “Toff.” He is an inverted Pollyanna. Now I am in America. We don’t pretend now. We don’t leer. When we leer we see ourselves in the glass now.’
Tam McTab said, “By Jove, Emily, you ought to be shot. You are terrifying. You are too conscious, you frighten one.”
“Tam, do I frighten you? Tam, say quickly, do I frighten you?”
“Not so much as you might,” he said. “Because we are all somehow metallically unsimple in these days. I am too. We can’t even be naked without noticing it. We can’t even think without thinking about thinking. But you are too unsimple to be allowed to live, really. It is simple and human to pose a bit and not to know you are posing. When you try to know yourself so well you devastate yourself. You are conspicuously inhuman even in an inhuman age. You are too hard-hearted to have delusions and to make mistakes and love yourself peacefully as everyone else does. If you hit nails on the head you do it savagely, with a purpose, and kill something with it—as Jael did.”
It was suddenly apparent that Emily was crying, but she made no sound and said no word. Her eyes looked round and strained and the firelight caught the tears on her lower lashes.
“Is that a bird calling?” asked Lucy mildly. Lucy’s cindery hand was nervously poking the fire with a twig.
Information was generally left for Rhoda to give. “It is not a bird. It is a man whistling.”
The firelight glared suddenly and cast all their shadows outward in a circle. Their shadows were like the petals of a dark flower with a flaming centre.
They listened to the sound of approaching steps across the soft pine needles. Edward listened but he could not hear. A panic seized him because he could not hear. “Probably the forest is full of great sound. They talk of birds and whistling. The world can’t be nearly as still as my world is. My hearing reaches no further than the light of the fire. I have no impersonal hearing at all. Perhaps they can all hear that waterfall across the valley and perhaps owls and the tread of deer. I should be ashamed to tell Emily how little I can hear, although I can always hear her voice. I am defective. Our hero in a tragic mood of self-realisation. Our hero indeed! I am not even my own hero.”
He drew back a little from the dancing light of the fire because he wished to have shadow on his eyes which were filling with tears of self-contempt and self-pity.
“Real men never cry,” he told himself. “What is the matter with me that I have never grown up into a man? Here are two men coming out of the forest. They need a shave. They have big muscles under their skin. Even when they get drunk they probably never cry and surely they never hate themselves. I don’t love Emily—as either of those two men could love her. I love her deafly and drunkenly and neurotically. Is there no happiness at all for poor things?”
The two unshaven strange men he was looking at stood in the outer radius of the firelight. It was amazingly unlikely that they should have found the campers, it seemed. Edward thought that he and Emily and the others were like bees hidden in their flower of flame and shadow. But now they were found.
“Any of you folks got a match?” asked one of the strangers. He added when he had lighted his pipe, “Why, you’re San Francisco folks, aren’t you? I know because I had the pleasure of listening to you, Miss Romero, addressing a meeting of the What is Liberty Association last week. Say, did you know the office of the W. I. L. A. had been raided? Sure it has. I wouldn’t of known it only that I happened to be right there on the stairs when the police hit the place. Took my name and address and showed me the door.”
“Why, what d’you know about that?” murmured Banner Hope. Rhoda looked rather white.
“Have a drink, strangers?” said Avery Bird.