Blue Voyage: A Novel (17 page)

ISERY
… This is what it is to be in love. Unmitigated suffering. The most all-poisoning of all illnesses. And nevertheless, it’s the chief motive of all art—we return to our vomit. No, no, that’s not fair. It has beauty!… Think of the extraordinary way in which it changes, suddenly, the whole coarse texture of the universe!—I remember, when I first fell in love, how I used to want to touch everything with my hands. Stone walls. Bark of trees. Bits of metal. Glass. Woolen clothes. All of them had suddenly become exquisite, all of them responded. And when I met you, Cynthia … But there’s no concealing the suffering it has brought, that frightful and inescapable and unwearying consciousness of the unattainable. The soul aching every moment, every hour, with sharp brief paroxysms of intenser pain: the eyes closing in vain, sleep vainly invited, dreams that concentrate into their fantastic and feverish turmoil all the griefs of the whole life; and the eyes opening again to the blindingly unforgotten sorrow—this is what it is, this is what now returns to me in even greater virulence. The intolerable suffering entailed in trying to remember a half-recalled face! That night at the Northwestern Hotel, when I had one nightmare after another all night long, trying to find her … And then, when I went down to breakfast in the morning, exhausted, and still in a kind of dream, all unsuspecting that she too had slept at the Northwestern, I found her, with her aunt, alone in the breakfast room! What an extraordinary discovery that was! She was lost, and she was found. The light, laughing “
Good morning
!” The eggs being eaten in English eggcups!… And it still goes on. Her face escapes me. Why should this be? It isn’t really, of course, that it escapes me any more than any other recollected sense impression. No. Probably less. The trouble is precisely in the fact that one wants too much of it—wants it too often, wears it out with staring, and not only that, but one is also, in a way, trying to
revenge
one’s self upon it. One seeks to
possess
it—with a violence not thrust upon one’s ordinary recollections—simply because one has not been able to possess the reality. One evening it is absurdly easy—I can’t “turn it on” at any moment and luxuriate in it. But the next morning it is gone; and no sleight of mind will give it back to me. I try the chin, the mouth, the profile of the cheek, the eyes—all in vain. The face is a complete blank. Perhaps one trace alone will be discoverable—I can see how, at that particular instant, when she found me staring at her, she looked slowly down, lowering her eyelids, and with what an extraordinary and baffling intensity of expression! There was pain in it, there was annoyance, but there was also, from the dark of her unconsciousness—could I be wrong in thus analyzing it?—a frightful unhappiness and desire, a relaxed and heartbroken desire, desire of the flesh, as old as the world. This alone I can remember, often, when all other aspects of her face have dislimned … Creek, creeky-creek, creeky … The Irish girl moves from her left side to her right. Easy enough to remember
her
face—because I don’t feel any tension about it … Smith too. Or Silberstein—that massive stone face! Bastile façade! Or Faubion. Ah! a pang. You see that gleaming pang, Cynthia?—I see it, unfaithful one!—No, not unfaithful! Not unfaithful! I swear to God … Is fidelity an affair only of the flesh? No—that’s not what I meant to say. Not at all. It’s very very complicated. It’s absurd, this fetish of fidelity. Absurd and chimerical. It leads to the worst hypocrisy in the world. It involves a lie about the nature of the world, of God, of the human being; a misconception or falsification of the mind and psyche. Ah, psyche from the regions which. I am not faithful—and I am faithful. My feeling for Eunice will never change. Nor my feeling for Helen. Nor my feeling for you. Nor my feeling for Fleshpot Faubion. Why should it be considered an unfaithfulness, a betrayal, to love more than one woman or more than one man? Nothing sillier could be conceived. It’s preposterous. We love constantly, love everywhere. We love in all sorts of degrees and ways. Can any one person or thing or place or belief possess one’s soul utterly? Impossible. It is true that when we “fall in love,” experiencing that intense burning up of the entire being which now and then some unforeseen explosion of the unconscious brings to us, our one desire is to possess and be possessed by the one object. But this is largely, or to some extent, an illusion—it’s an illusion, I mean, to suppose that this will completely satisfy. An illusion, Cynthia! Even had I been destined—had we been destined—had I succeeded—had I not too horribly blundered—had I not lost every brief and paralyzing opportunity and at every such turn shown myself to be a fool and a coward—even so, even had I possessed you as madly as in imagination I have possessed you—you would not wholly have absorbed me. No. There would have been tracts of my soul which would never have owned your sovereignty—Saharas and Gobis of rebellious waste; swarming Yucatans from whose poisonous rank depths derision would be screamed at you and fragrances poured at you in a profusion of insult, flagrant and drunken; Arctics of inenarrable ice; and the sea everywhere, the unvintagable sea, many-laughing. Do you listen, Moonwhite?—I hate you and despise you, lizard!—I am walking in Kensington Gardens, Moonwhite, telling you of these things. The man wades into the Round Pond with a net to catch his toy steam yacht. Nursemaids pullulate. Would it shock you to know that I could love even a nursemaid? Is there anything strange or reprehensible in that? For that matter, I did, once, fall in love (mildly) with a lady’s maid. Her name? Mary Kimberlin. Age? Twenty-four. Where did we meet? In Hyde Park, where she was taking the Pom for a walk … Afterwards she married. I liked her, and I still like her … Did Helen Shafter interfere with my fondness for Eunice? Not in the slightest!—You felt guilty about it, William! You felt guilty, you were furtive, you concealed it, and you were in constant terror that you would be discovered. You never met her without experiencing a sense of wrongdoing, you never returned from a meeting with her to your Eunice without a sense of sin, a sadness, a burden of duplicity, that you found intolerable and crippling. Isn’t that true?… That is true, Cynthia. True. True. Oh, so frightfully true. And yet it ought not to be true … M
ISERY
… I admit the sense of evil which permeates that sort of adventure, the sense of treason and infidelity; but I affirm again that it is a sin against the holy ghost to bring up humans in such a way that they will inevitably feel it. It’s hideously wrong! It’s criminal! It is
not
an infidelity for me to love Eunice and Helen at the same time! It is not!… No man can serve both God and Mammon, William.—The distinction is utterly false! If I find something precious in Helen to adore, and at the same moment find something equally precious in Eunice to love, and if both of them love me—then what academic puritanism or pedantic pietistic folly can that be which would pronounce it wrong? NO! It is
not
wrong. It is only that we are taught to believe it so that makes it appear so. It is true that I was furtive, that I concealed from Eunice my knowledge of Helen—but why? Only because I wanted to spare Eunice,—who perhaps believed (though I never tried to make her do so) that she possessed me wholly,—the pain of disillusionment, the pain of jealousy. Good God, how much I would have preferred to be frank! I hated the necessity for concealment … It is only the necessity for concealment which introduces ugliness; the thing itself is no less, and often more, beautiful than the rest of daily life.
Honi soit qui mal y pense
… No, William! You are not being honest with me. You admit that as things
are
constituted, as society
does
view it, these furtive and clandestine love affairs are ugly. What defense have you, then, for deliberately seeking the ugly? I can see to the bottom of your soul, William, I know everything in your past, and knowing that, I see everything that will be in your future. All. I can see the way, whenever you go out into the streets, or ride in buses or trains, or go to a concert,—in fact everywhere and at all times—you look greedily about you for a pretty woman, you devour them with your eyes, you move closer to them in order to touch them as if accidentally, you lean backward to touch them, you luxuriate in every curve of mouth and throat and shoulder, you step back (as if politely) to permit them to get into the bus first in order that you may see their legs as far as the knee or even a little farther. You note, as you walk behind them in a crowd, the way their shoulders move as they walk, the curved forward thrust of the thigh, the slight subtle oscillation of the hips, the strength of the gait, and the sweet straightness and resilence of the leg-stroke as observed from behind. You gauge, through their clothes, the proportion of torso to legs, the breadth of waist. You never tire of speculation as to the precise position and dimensions of the breasts; watching a woman’s every slightest motion in the hope that by leaning this way or that, drawing closer her jacket against her body or relaxing it, she will betray to you the secrets of her body. Confess! Kiss the book and sign your name! You are indicted for erotomania!… Pity me, Cynthia! I will confess everything if only you will believe that never,
never,
NEVER
, was this my attitude toward you. I would have given everything to have been able to wipe out my entire past. My recollections of Eunice, and Helen, and Mary gave me nothing but pain:—and all the countless minor episodes, of the sort you have been describing, constituted for me an inferno from which I seemed never destined to escape. Yes. Horrible. To come to the gateway in the rain of fire and looking through it to see the slopes of Purgatory; to guess, beyond, the Paradise; to see you as the gracious wisdom who might guide me thither; and then to know that L
AW
would not permit, and that in the Inferno must be my abode forever!—Do not think this is merely picturesque or eloquent, Cynthia. No. What I am approaching is a profound psychological truth. It is my own nature, my character as patiently wrought by my character, as the snail builds its house, from which I cannot move.
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it
. Do you remember what I wrote to you when you had gone to France? A silly letter, to be sure. Overeloquent, overliterary, sobbingly self-conscious. I told you that I had decided, finally, to go back to America. I had failed with you—to tell you that I adored you was out of the question. But my agile subconscious did the trick. “Do you think,” I said, referring to your description of poppies in Brittany, “that I don’t know a poppy when I see it!” Fatuous! Could anything have been in worse taste? Impossible. My double entendre, of course, is quite clear. The poppy is Europe, and also Cynthia. I was abandoning the poppy not because I failed to appreciate it, but because I recognized my own inferiority. It was my Sabachthani …
Tin-tin-tin
. Half past one. Good God. Try counting again, shutting my eyes more lightly, breathing through my nose. Hot in here.
Ten—ten—double ten—forty-five and fifteen. Um-ber-ella—Cinder-rella
—T
WIST
. What the devil could that have come from? A little girl bouncing a red ball as she said it. Lovely things little girls are—their extraordinary innocence, candor, transparency, charm. Grace. Something light and beautiful in women after all, in spite of their boringness and curious mental and emotional limitations. Toys. Nice to overhear them talking together and laughing in a garden. Nuns in a convent garden. Or singing. How beautiful they are when they sing! That girl, with scarlet-flushed cheeks, singing
Morgen,
waiting for the beautiful melody as given first by the piano to reach the downward curve, and then coming in so deeply and sorrowfully with the slow rich voice. O God, O God that strange mixture of the soaring melody, so perfect in its pure algebra, and the sad, persistent meditative voice—there were tears in her eyes when she finished, and she had to turn away. Then the piano melody, finishing delicately and ethereally by itself … O God, if I could only get that sort of effect in a play—not melodramatically, or with stained-glass windows and paper snow, but naturally and simply by that superb use of the counterpoint of feeling and thought … Extraordinary sorrow in that song. That queer feeling that comes over me when something moves me too much—a kind of ache that seems to begin in the upper part of the mouth and throat, and yet it isn’t an ache so much as an unhappy consciousness which seems to be localized there, and then to spread downward through the whole aching body, a slowly flowering sort of echo in a hollow darkness, opening out with painful tentacles … M
ISERY …
Now the red rim of sight discovers …
No …
Where the red rim of life discovers
… no, sight, is better, suggesting …
Where the rid rim of sight discovers … The void that swarms with shapes of death … And the departing spirit hovers … Batlike above the failing breath
… Is it good or is it bad … Impossible to say. Nonsense. One more of the “
Where the … There the
” type of lyric. Give it up
NOW
… Dante would come into the next verse … How lovely she was, standing there under the dim lamp, elbows behind her, laughing, saying, “
I’m going to be married”!…
Lost. Lost forever. That afternoon at the concert, if I had only … It would have been so simple … Or walking back from those absurd dancers; over Waterloo Bridge … “You know, I simply adore you!” … But it was too soon—it really
was
too soon … It’s never too soon … But I
thought
it was too soon … Is it really gone? that opportunity? Good heavens how often I re-enact all those scenes—impossible to persuade myself that they can be finished! The after-sense is so vivid. I was always expecting to meet her in the street—in the most unlikely places. Always looked at everybody in the street, or bus, or theater, expecting to see her. I even thought she might be on the ship again,—when I sailed back to America! And on Fifth Avenue, or at Aeolian Hall, or in the Museum—constantly feeling that I was on the point of encountering her, and that she was just round the corner, or behind the Rodin. She would be sure to be standing before the Manet parrot!… Why is it?… The frightfully vivid experience, with its appalling after-sense, destroys one’s reason, one’s belief in time and space. Over and over again putting myself into the middle of that concert—the Bach concerto—sitting there in the Wigmore Hall. It was that morning just before lunch, while I was taking off one suit and putting on the other (which