Ah, fortunate,
Ah, fortunate ...
I can defy tomorrow’s law;
Never tomorrow can say to me—
It passed you by. You did not see.
For I saw....
There was a star fell out of the night,
Fell down that tall blue precipice,
And I had time to lift my sight,
To lift my fortunate sight to this
And say—I am not too late,
I am not too late.
Days and nights went by under the trees. The travellers went down into the Yosemite Valley itself. At one hour the subtle shape of Half Dome was suggested through a robe of morning mists, at another it was hewn starkly out of a hard sky. They confronted the incredible grained and golden face of El Capitan, that perfect half of an unknown whole, that perpendicular desert of stone which bares its naked heart to the sun and whose boundaries march with those of the clouds. There was for days a sound of falling waters always. Edward did not hear it, but he could see the thin silken bands of water binding the mountains, and he could lie at the feet of falls in an explosion of light spray and watch the stars shoot out of the smooth high brim of the fall three thousand feet above him.
The red pine ground was their bed between the crimson and golden trunks of trees. There was always light on the river and often, it seemed, a light within the river, a twisting snake of light.
Yosemite was printed like a dream upon that part of the memory that registers impossible things....
They were motoring westward again through the gold country—Eldorado. The two Fords were together now, Tam driving the first. Lucy was in the front seat beside Tam. Emily and Edward sat in the back.
“I have never really driven a car before this trip,” said Tam as they started. “In England I am no motorist, though a friend’s Rolls Royce occasionally wears Lucy and me as buttons. But I am no driver and it alarms me to have anyone but Lucy in the seat beside me.”
Lucy looked at the country with a patient expression. The angle of her head followed the line of the hills. The line was like a feverish temperature chart against the sky and Lucy watched it with uncritical attention.
Emily put her hand upon Edward’s thin arm. “You know, Edward,” she said, “you’re a masochist.”
“I suppose I am,” said Edward despondently. “What is it?”
“A person who enjoys hurting himself.”
Edward considered this.
“That’s what makes me want to love you without being loved,” he thought. “Yes, I want that. I want to be hurt and to make myself sick with pitying myself. I want to ensure that you shouldn’t love me by telling you the worst about myself.”
He found it suddenly a real effort to be silent. He wanted to tell her how unhappy he was; he wanted to try and make her cry for him, or rather to satisfy himself that she would never cry for him. He wanted to tell her how often his head hurt and how poorly his ears served him and of the unbearable thundering and crashing that was always in the foreground of his hearing. He wanted to tell her how impossible he found it not to drink too much, how impossible he found it to be like other men. He wanted her to say, “Poor Edward, poor man...” and stroke his hand.
He said, “Emily, are you really as hardhearted as Tam says?”
They both looked suddenly at Tam. He was telling Lucy in his usual absolutely confident way of some small experience of his own—an experience that would not have been worth describing had it not been for his own intense interest in it. They heard him say, “And the silly part of it was that if I hadn’t been wearing those old grey flannels the feller wouldn’t have dared to speak to me like that.”
He had a habit of speaking to Lucy as if she were not his wife but a friend.
Emily leaned her head suddenly on Edward’s shoulder. “How can you be so brutal?” she said. “How can you ask me if I am hardhearted when I am in such pain—and all for love....”
She never could keep her hands still. She threw out her right hand as if in surrender and hammered the side of the car. Edward could feel that she was absolutely tense. The muscles of her neck were unyielding.
He thought, “I must be very cautious.” He understood that he was not in Emily’s world at all. “I must be very cautious even in thinking of her now....” It was like falling into very cold water and becoming at once numb. “I mustn’t be feeble in this too. I must be a hero in another way. If I love her without hope, in the end I must die because the pain will grow and grow.” He looked forward almost eagerly to atrocious pain forever. The forever of the morbid introspective is not a real eternity. I believe he looks forward in the very end of the end to telling God and being publicly pitied and caressed at last. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, thou hast been alone and unfortunate in all things. Enter thou into the unending pity of thy Lord.”
The wind blew back to them something that Lucy was saying. “Well, it’s just as I always told you, Tam. You never know what you can do till you try.” They were being briskly polite to each other. They were what is called in sprightly domestic literature, “Good Comrades.”
“When you asked me if I were hardhearted, Edward,” said Emily, “I suppose you were going to tell me something about yourself.”
“I was,” replied Edward. “But I won’t now. Anything I could say to you now would seem too big to me and too little to you. My love, for instance. And the fact that I must miss everything in the world....”
“Your deafness....” said Emily. “I gathered you were a bit deaf even before Melsie Ponting told me you were as deaf as a post. Tam said—‘Yes, and as slow as a Sunday post’—but I told him to shut up. It must be beastly being deaf because I suppose you feel that you seem stupid and that people get tired of talking to you. Why don’t you go to a doctor and all that? I always go to doctors the very minute I have a symptom—doctors are so awfully interested and lean forward when I talk about myself, which of course nobody else will ever do. Other people tiresomely begin talking about themselves as soon as I get going, but luckily doctors never do that. Tam is the only person I know who can talk successfully about himself, but then he is always perfectly happy about himself and talks of what happened when a vital button came off at his wedding, or how pleased somebody was to see him when he called, or why an Armenian mistook him for a Turk. And everybody listens with a poised smile on their lips, and when he has finished there is always a loud noise of success. Sure and happy people never fall flat. Edward, if you weren’t so sad-hearted, people would love you much more.”
“That’s what happy-hearted people always say,” said Edward. “Happiness and sadness are not attributes and not moods. They are the foundations on which people are built. You can’t change your foundations.”
“Well, if you are sad, your castle is built on sand. It is so safe to be well and truly laid on a happy and a rocky heart. Then even pain is nothing more than storms beating on the rock. When the storm goes down you are wet and perhaps a shade chipped but still safe.”
“I am never safe,” said Edward. “Never safe for a second.”
“Oh, I am so tired of talking about you and me, Edward dear,” said Emily sitting up.
They were silent and Edward felt as if he were learning Emily’s face by heart and as if it were a lesson knowledge of which would be most urgently required of him some day. Her upper lip was thinner than the lower and, though the upper lip did not protrude beyond the lower at all, the effect of a little uptilted pout was produced by the line below her mouth which receded very definitely before jutting out to form a rather large round chin. Her nose was strong and rather broad, absolutely straight in profile and a little tilted. Tilted lines were necessary in her face to support her slanting thick black brows and the upward angle of her dark hair. She was smaller than most people and looked as if she were accustomed to putting her shoulders back and looking half defiantly up into the eyes of large, strong, delighted men.
There were no level places in the land they were passing through and no color except a hot brown. The air shook in the heat; the summits of the brown dead hills seemed to be seen through shaken water. There were scars in the hills made by old gold-seekers here and there, and surviving one-man mines stabbed the slopes. Small villages of bleak grey shacks clung to the road. The sunset turned the brown to red; the air in the shadow of the hills was russet red. It was time to find a camp site. Whenever they turned a corner and looked down, as it seemed, upon a perfect site, some little town had chosen that site too. There was no remoteness in that strange broad land.
“This damned country has broken out into a rash of towns,” complained Tam.
One of the intrusive little towns seemed to attract the sunset. Its windows flamed in orange; its roofs smouldered in dull crimson.
“It’s like as if it was on fire,” said Lucy. “Stop, Tam, and let me look.” Lucy always had to look where the others only glanced.
“Lot’s wife,” said Tam.
“One thing, by the way, that we know because the Bible tells us so,” said Emily, “is that Lot didn’t care a damn for his wife. If he had cared he would at least have looked round at her predicament; probably he would have tried to help her or melt her or something. We should have known if he had because he would have been preserved forever as a pillar, a monument to conjugal gentlemanliness. The cad.”
“We ought to get under cover. It’s going to rain; the cows are lying down,” said Lucy restlessly.
“Oh well, even a cow is human and may err,” said Emily.
But the stars became gradually absorbed in darkness.
As the final darkness fell they came to a deserted village consisting of a roadhouse, a shack or two and a barn, all empty. The travellers had with them dill pickles, a cucumber, canned tomatoes, raw eggs, raw potatoes and soda-crackers. They had also accumulated various bottles, one of very fulsome country-saloon port wine, two of gin, one of vermouth and two of whiskey.
The meal, eaten seated on the bare floor of the old roadhouse, seemed blessed. There was so much to drink. They all felt as if they had left themselves gloriously behind. There was no hint of life in the village except—far off—the asthmatic and difficult cry of a donkey. And a dog strayed in and joined the travellers. It did not seem to mind the fact that they all tried to be funny at its expense. Tam pulled its tail, lifted it up by its tail.
“The way to flatter a dog,” said Emily, “is to say, ‘What a nice new tail you are wearing today, darling.’ Dogs are frightfully sensitive about criticism of their tails. Of course most dogs have only one tail which they wear weekdays and Sundays, but they would never admit that. They only think to themselves, ‘How lucky I chose this one—I hesitated between the one with the black pin-spot and the plain white one—and how lucky it still looks new.”
“That reminds me of my new puce stockings,” said Melsie Ponting. “Do you know that no less than three gentlemen acquaintances—old beaux of mine, you know—stopped me on Geary to say how cute they looked. Don’t you want to say something about my puce stockings, Banner?”
Emily whispered incautiously to Edward, “I think she even sleeps with mistletoe over her bed.”
Edward was strongly stroking the dog’s head. “The point of a dog,” he said, “is that you can always pretend to yourself that the dog is saying to itself, ‘Well say, this is a feller worth knowing.’ They always look like that. No dog ever will show that he despises you.”
“Edward,” said Emily, “are your spirits always at half mast?”
Edward had an acute pain in his head, under his eyebrow. But his mind seemed to him detached from the pain and extraordinarily facile. He could hear well, he felt, but this was because Banner Hope was singing in such a sharp voice. Edward said, “It is more dramatic to be sad than to be happy, anyway, Emily. Everything that is meant to be dramatic is sad. The song that Hope is singing is—like all jazz songs—about being far away from where you want to be.”
“Sadness is too easy,” said Emily. “It is like mother-love and the weakness of little children and the old home and the maiden’s prayer—a too easy short cut to drama. All my life I have been dramatic but I have never arrived at drama by sadness.”
There seemed to be things rolling about under Edward’s forehead. He thought they were loaded dice; they did not feel like balls, they hurt too much and had too many corners. He was almost pleased when he tried to stand and found himself too giddy.
Edward realised for the first time that it was raining outside. There were miles of air full of rain, like steel bars between him and safe towns and a warm bed.
“Gee!” exclaimed Melsie, unremittingly facetious. “Edward’s British standards have fallen down on him. One twist too many in the lemon peel, Mr. Williams.”
But Rhoda saw his eyes and rose with that tolerant yet exasperated look to which Edward was accustomed when he needed sympathy. There was wild agony in his forehead. He fell down. He rolled upon one side and then on the other. For a second he saw Emily looking detached, looking at him with an expression of excited contempt. Was she saying, “Oh, what a party!” to herself? Rhoda pressed her hands firmly over his eyes, her cold hands moved firmly about his forehead....
Edward was not good at bearing pain although he was fairly well accustomed to the exercise. It was only after disgracing himself in his own eyes and in Emily’s several times by crying in the car that he found himself in a ward in a San Francisco hospital.
It was immediately apparent that he could not escape an operation. The surgeon tapped his forehead impressively and his gold teeth gleamed briskly down upon the horizontal Edward.
“I wouldn’t carry those sinuses about with me, my friend, not in that condition, not for half of John D. Rockefeller’s pile.”
Edward would not have minded continuing to carry his sinuses about exactly as they were. He vaguely treasured his afflictions. Without them he would not have felt interesting. Once, when a palmist told him that the latter part of his life would be spent in perfect health, Edward was definitely disappointed. However, an operation had its dramatic side, at least in anticipation and in retrospect. At the time it was a humiliation and a terror.
“General anæsthetic absolutely unnecessary,” the gold-mouthed surgeon had said. “It’s as simple as letting off a gun. I’ll take out your tonsils at the same time. You won’t know a thing about it. You’ll be out batting with your friends in three days.”
Early one morning a man in white helped the pale Edward on to a white-sheeted vehicle which ran quickly on white and furtive castors. There was no pillow on the vehicle, and Edward, perfectly horizontal, darting head first along strange smelling corridors, felt like a torpedo whizzing towards destruction. “As simple as letting off a gun.”
The surgeon, waiting in a sort of loose-box furnished in white, was dressed in white. His manner had lost the affability which had hitherto characterised it. Even his gold teeth were hidden by a white mask which, like the mask of a Turkish woman, hid the lower part of his face. He further obscured his face by covering one eye with a saucer made of mirror. The pupil of his eye could be seen through a hole in the middle of the saucer, restless and malevolent like a spider in its web. Edward was draped in gauze by a nurse. The smell of drugs and disinfectants was so strong that it seemed as if the walls must burst.
There was now no escaping from what the surgeon was going to do. The only thing one could do was to hinder him in his work.
“Keep still, keep still ...” said the surgeon in a harsh voice. “Stop that noise, you fool.”
Edward was afraid and he intended to stop the noise but he heard his own voice still bursting from his lungs. “Ah-ow ... ah-ow....”
He wished to implore the surgeon to stop and let him rest from pain and the feeling of ubiquitous blood, but the cocaine in his throat prevented him from articulating. Every time the surgeon struck his terrible little chisel, Edward winced violently. He was very anxious that the surgeon should realise how unusually sensitive he was. He wanted the surgeon to be sorry for him. But the surgeon was angry. He tapped Edward’s forehead with barely suppressed anger. “I’m within a third of an inch of your brain here,” he said. “It’s up to you whether I can put this bit of work through or not.”
Edward writhed. The nurse took his hand. “She’s sorry,” thought Edward.
There was blood everywhere. Some blood on the white apron that was stretched across the surgeon’s stomach. Sweat was falling from the surgeon’s chin.
“Take him away,” said the surgeon suddenly and loudly. It was over. Full of shame because of his forlorn and hideous condition, Edward was wheeled quickly along the corridors. A man on crutches in a check woollen dressing-gown stared at his outraged and disordered face. Edward made feeble movements with his hands and the nurse covered his face with part of the sheet. “Now people will think I am dead. They will get quite a thrill,” thought Edward and lay very still. When they took the sheet away he was beside his bed in the long bleak ward. All the other patients were looking greedily at him. Edward wanted to tell the nurse of his horror and discomfort but the cocaine still blocked his utterance. He could not mould his voice into syllables.
He hoped intensely that Emily would not come to see him while he was padded with bloodstained cotton-wool. He made up little tests to find out whether she would come. “If the sunlight reaches the chin of the man opposite before a tram goes by outside I shall know that she will not come until I am really fit to let her see me.”
In answer to a croak from the man opposite, the nurse came and pulled the blind down with a peevish flounce. Most of the nurses in that ward visited on everyone who made a request the irritation they had accumulated by reason of scores of other requests. If Edward asked for anything he was made to feel as if he had asked for the same thing an unreasonable number of times. Only when the doctors were there the nurses spoke in soft optimistic voices and patted the patients’ shoulders genially and called them “This poor boy....”
Edward’s test was spoilt by the pulling down of the blind. He betted with himself on whether the facetious man with bristly hair would ring the bell for the nurse before the blind man next to him did so. The facetious man called the nurses, “Say, Saddie,” and asked them about their beaux. No nurse was ever irritable with him. Sometimes he rang the bell specially to tell the nurse that he was so hollow he could put himself outside a whole steer, and the nurses, though they gave him nothing, never seemed to be annoyed by his cheerful importunity.
Edward thought that no-one in the world cared that he was ill. He did not want Emily to come and see him in his undignified condition. But he would have liked her to come to the door of the ward with a great splendid tangle of salmon-colored roses and be stopped there by a grave sweetfaced nurse, who would tell her that Mr. Williams was too seriously ill to see anyone. Then Emily would ask, “Is there any danger?” in an anxious voice that he had never heard, and the nurse would shake her grave sweet head and say, “One never knows. He is suffering terribly. The surgeon had to operate within a third of an inch of his brain.” Edward fell into a half sleep imagining the roses that Emily would bring and lay against his lips.
When he awoke he saw Banner Hope walking away from him towards the door of the ward.
“Hey!” said Edward in a thick desperate voice. A week before he would have refused to believe that the sight of Banner Hope could ever give him pleasure.
“Why, why, why....” said Mr. Hope, turning round guiltily. Edward saw at once that the visitor had been glad to find the patient asleep. It had been to Mr. Hope an opportunity to acquire merit as a benevolent friend without the effort of expressing benevolence. “Why, why, why ... isn’t this just too bad?...”
He looked inquisitively at Edward’s miserable face.
“Now, don’t you say a thing, Edward. The nurse has told me how it is. You gotter lie low and say nothing and I’ll give you noos of all the folks. All your friends surely are peeved with these old sawbones for carving you about this way. I should say so. Yes, indeed.”
This unprecedented burst of sympathy at once restored to Edward a pale gleam of the melancholy heroic light in which it was his constant effort to see himself. Still the name of Emily had not yet been mentioned and he tried to point this out. But his throat still played him false.
“Eb-gy....”
“That’s all right. That’s all right. I get you perfectly. You gotter let uncle do all the tongue work. Let me see now.... Well, there’s Melsie Stone Ponting. She’s a sport now.... What d’you guess she said when she knew you were sick? Why, she said—well, mebbe I’d better not tell you after all.... Anyway it was very smart and showed how crazy she was about you. Avery Bird I haven’t seen recently, he naturally can’t think of a thing except Rhoda’s indictment. I guess you’ve heard how Rhoda was arrested the day we all got home from Yosemite. Indicted for what they call Criminal Syndicalism. Some of the dope she put across at the W. I. L. A. kinda got somebody’s goat. You know, when we’d left you at the hospital some of us went round for a drink at Rhoda’s studio. There’s a kind of an old she-janitor, you know, located in the basement, and she met us and said how the cops had been and opened Rhoda’s bureau and gotten a wad of papers out of it. Rhoda surely was mad, and Avery—who almost never lets up on his detached pose or says anything except epigrams—I’ll say he blasphemed quite a bit. And right there in the middle of that little tableau two plain-clothes cops walked in. The door was still open and they walked in and there was Rhoda up to her elbows in her bureau, trying to find out which papers they’d gotten hold of. Well, it was a fair cinch. There was no getting around it. One of the cops read the warrant; it was all about sabbotidge and advocating unlawful methods of effecting political changes. They seemed to know a whole heap about sister Rhoda. She didn’t answer back any. She smiled and looked white. Avery said a hell of a lot, but they didn’t take much account of him. They took all our names and addresses. Of course, it’s a long ways from indictment to conviction. Avery says he’s not taking much on her chances, she’s got in good and deep. The ‘What Is Liberty’ offered to put up her bail money—but Rhoda’s got plenty of dough herself. For some reason she isn’t accepting bail. It seems like if she’s got to be arrested she wants to have it done thorough. She’s always been crazy about prisoners and jails....”
“Ebb-ly ...” hiccoughed Edward.
The nurse was beckoning to Banner. The sedate wives and mothers of other patients followed by their scrubbed and creaking children were willingly submitting to authority and leaving the ward.
“Say, I must be moving along,” said Banner Hope with alacrity. “What’s that you say? Emily? Oh, Emily’s gone to China. Take care of yourself, Edward, some of your friends’ll be around again some time soon....”
Edward was left in such an unrelieved condition of depression that he was on the verge of peace. “Gone to China.... Gone to China.... Gone to China....” his mind chanted to itself to the rhythm of the pulse drumming in his ears. He reminded himself without ceasing that Emily had gone to China. To do so put the finishing touch to his orgy of despair. But all the time he felt certain that his ears had really played him false. All the time a little secret unadmitted factory in his mind was circulating hope by making phrases with similar vowel sounds. “He must have said, ‘Emily’s doing fine,’ or he must have said, ‘Emily’s reading Heine,’ or he must have said, ‘Emily—how do I know?’” The rhymes became less and less probable as Edward approached sleep. “Penny-a-liner.... Asia Minor.... Clementina.... Norah Criner....” But gone to China seemed the most absurd of all.
Edward was long enough in this hospital to fit a kind of bare innocent interlude into his experience. No other visitor came to see him during the three weeks of his illness, and he had leisure to build upon the dark and sordid foundation of his life a sort of airy trivial superstructure of interests. He watched the manners of the nurses. He became interested in human temperatures, weights, symptoms and facetious gossip connected with physical details. The watch under his pillow became his most intimate friend and guide. Waking up at six o’clock, bathing, and bed-making were an intolerable nuisance, but he was much concerned if the nurses were a moment late. The whole day was enlivened by the jokes or scoldings of the nurses. A new joke was hardly ever made in the ward, but the old ones were always successful. All the men laughed at them because they were glad that the temper of the nurses made joking possible. Sometimes the doctors were late and, though no-one loved the doctors, everyone was exasperated with them for being late. Sometimes the doctors were so late that the breakfasts became tired of waiting, and then all the patients ate their breakfasts with a sense of incompleteness and danger. Meals were very important. Sometimes there were little red jellies at the midday meal, and when the cheerful glitter of these jellies blossomed on all the approaching trays Edward was full of an almost gay anticipation. There were no books to read, only magazines. To the nurses a magazine was a book. Any magazine would do. One did not mention the titles of books or magazines in the ward; one asked for “a book to read” as one would ask for a glass of milk. Edward was called by doctors and nurses “a great student” because he was always reading a magazine. He was not critical enough to refuse to read the bad literature that was placed before him. Sometimes he quite enjoyed the sentimental love stories. He read the comic pages with a somber interest. And he often made little tunes in his head to fit the poems, most of which seemed to have been written in imitation of each other. Some of the poems were patriotic and these annoyed Edward; it seemed so silly that anyone should love any country but England to the point of writing bad rhymes in its honor. Edward’s mind was tired, too tired to feel very acutely the need of better fare. Others in the ward were more conscious than he. The man next to Edward liked the works of Gene Stratton Porter; he thought the tales of this writer very moral and very deep. He often told their plots in great detail to Edward, announcing himself as “considerable of a student like yourself.” This man, who had a thin voice all on one note, was fond of talking to his neighbors at night. He would say, “Hope I’m not disturbing you folks,” and nobody dared to say, “You are.” They were all rather gentlemanly and talked a good deal about Americanism and the advantages of American education. In health they frequented movies rather than saloons. They all had wives or very respectable sweethearts who came conscientiously to sit with them during visiting hours. You could distinguish the sweethearts from the wives by their habit of bringing tight bundles of flowers and flinging them down ungraciously on the stomachs of the afflicted. Wives never did this. The wives brought snorting and bubbling babies instead of flowers. Neither wives nor sweethearts had anything much to say. They all looked as if they took for granted that the invalids were going to die. Visiting the sick seemed to embarrass them hopelessly.
Visiting hours were always exciting to Edward because Emily might come. He still boasted to himself that she had gone to China and that he was sunk in despair, but actually he felt convinced that he had mistaken Banner Hope’s meaning. When he should next see her he would tell her of his mistake as a sort of heroically tragic joke. She would come any day now and sit beside his bed and tears would come into his eyes and his thin hand would grope for hers and for a moment they would both be unable to speak. Then he would say simply, “They told me you had gone.” And she would think, “Could I ever find a more faithful lover than this?” and she would touch his hot thin cheek with her cold fingers.
He hated the nights. Either he would stay awake and watch the dim sickly light upon the ceiling and think of his dreary yet too expensive room at the hotel absorbing money all this time, and think of the senseless and exasperating death of Jimmy at Loos, and think of money again and of the fact that he could not get his complexion clear—directly one set of spots healed another began. Or else he would sleep and dream cruelly and grotesquely of endless, arid journeys and of beautiful anticipations that withered away and of missing trains—never of Emily.
In the daytime he would forget the hateful night. All day till about six, when the night clamored to be remembered, he was almost contented.