Blue Voyage: A Novel (27 page)

VII

To his Lady, his Mother, his Wife, his Sister: her Servant, her Child, her Lover, her Brother, and to express all that is humble, respectful, and loving, to his Cynthia, W. D. writes this
.

ONE

You are not ill-educated, Cynthia—if for the first and last time you will permit me so to address you—and you will therefore recognize this clumsy paraphrase of the salutation with which Heloise began the first of her letters to Peter Abelard. It is not by accident that I choose this method of opening what will no doubt be the last letter I address to you. For what, under the peculiar circumstances—I refer to the fact that, for reasons into which I forbear to inquire, your mother and yourself have decided to drop me from your acquaintance—what could be more likely than this beautiful exordium to persuade your eye to read further? And that, for me, is all-important. The reasons for this you will readily understand. Suppose this letter is delivered to you by your stewardess. I shall be careful to address the envelope in a style which you will not recognize, so that you will at least not destroy it unopened; but having opened it, is there not a great likelihood that you will then tear it to pieces as soon as you see from whom it comes? Yes. And for that reason I have—let me confess at once my iniquity, calculated iniquity!—employed this striking method of greeting you. It will perhaps—that frail pontoon “perhaps,” on which so many desperate armies have crossed—amuse you, perhaps even a little excite your curiosity. You might retort, derisively, that it is odd of me to model my salutation on that of Heloise rather than on that of Abelard? But unfortunately, Abelard is altogether too blunt for my purpose. He plunges in with a directness quite disconcertingly up-to-date; beginning with a mere “could I have known that a letter not addressed to you would fall into your hands.” Would this be more likely to tempt you on, Cynthia? Or could I have the heart to begin, as Abelard began his fourth epistle, “Write no more to me, Heloise, write no more”?… This would be both melancholy and absurd.

And the impulse to write to you, by way of leave-taking, is imperious. It seems to me that I have an infinitude of things that I must say to you. You know how one feels on a dock, when one sees one’s friend sail away, perhaps forever? the regret, almost the agony, with which one remembers a few of the things one has forgotten to say, or hadn’t the courage to say? One never, after all, told him how much one loved him. Not even a hint. One never, after all, showed one’s simple joy in the fact that one, at least partially, possessed him. One never so much as breathed the suggestion that one would feel his absence. And then, there is all the good advice that one has forgotten to give, all the solicitude for his future that one has somehow failed to express! You are going to a tropical climate? Do not forget your cork helmet and your parasol! Remember, when you get up in the morning, to empty the scorpions out of your boots!… You are going to the North Pole? Be sure, then, to take a thermos flask filled with hot rum and coffee, and plenty of almond chocolate, and your goloshes, and your heaviest woolens!… Nor do I mean this facetiously. The advice is usually just as stupid as this, just as useless. But it serves its purpose: no matter how clumsily administered, it serves to express the aching concern with which one sees the departure; and its expression is at once accepted as just that and nothing else. And so it is with me, Cynthia. I have never told you in so many words that I love you—partly because there was no time for it, our acquaintance being so brief and so scattered; and partly for psychological reasons: my profound sense of inferiority, my sense of filthiness, and my fear of all decisive action, all being partially responsible. And now it is too late, for I find you (again in mid-Atlantic! surely one of the most remarkable coincidences that ever befell two human creatures!) engaged to be married; and no sooner am I informed of this fact than I am “dropped” by you—given, in fact, the “cut direct” by your mother. Well! This has one saving grace, this magnificent disaster—for I
can
now say, once and for all, that I love you.

Having said this much, however, I find myself oddly at a loss as to how to continue. The truth is, my imagination has dealt with you so continuously, and so strenuously, and so richly, that I have no longer any definite sense as to where, exactly, between us, the psychological boundary lies. Two nights ago, for example, after our encounter on the deck (where, of course, as I am in the second cabin, I had no right to be) I lay awake all night, re-enacting every scrap of our little history, and improvising a good deal besides. In this you were—as indeed you are in
all
my reflections—“Cynthia”; and you were admitted to an intimacy with me (this may surprise you!) which I have vouchsafed to no one else. As I look back on that long orgy of self-communion, which had you as its chief but not as its only theme, I find in it naïveté a good deal that amuses me. It is a curious and instructive fact, for example, that in that moment of
Sturm und Drang
I should have experienced so powerfully a desire to talk to you about my childhood. I found myself constantly reverting to that—babbling to you my absurd infantine confidences and secrets, as if you were—ah!—my mother. Exactly! And isn’t that the secret of your quite extraordinary influence upon me? For some reason which I cannot possibly analyze, you strike to more numerous and deeper responses in me than any other woman has done. It must be that you correspond, in ways that only my unconscious memory identifies, to my mother, who died when I was very small. Can it be that?… Anyway, there it is; and as I sit here in my beloved smoking room, waited on by Malvolio, (do you remember how, on the nice old
Silurian,
you reproached me for sitting in the smoking room so much? do you remember how, one evening, we listened, standing just outside the door, on the dark deck, to the men singing there?)—well, as I sit here, hearing the slap of rubber quoits on the deck above, it is again a desire to talk to you of my childhood that comes uppermost. Strange! It really seems to me that there is something exquisitely appropriate in this: it seems to me that in this there might be some hope of really
touching
you. I do not mean that I harbor any hope that you will break off your engagement and engage yourself to me. (For one thing, I am not at all sure that I would want to marry.) Nor do I mean anything quite so obvious as that you should be touched
sentimentally
. No. What
do
I mean, then? Well, I mean that this would be the most direct, simple, and really effective mode of establishing the right communion between us. I don’t think this is merely a circumlocution or clumsy evasion. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that to talk to you of my childhood—to tell you of some one particular episode—would be for us what the good advice regarding goloshes was for the departing traveler: a profound symbol of intimacy. Even that is not the whole story. For also—and here, I admit, I
do
plunge recklessly into the treacherous underworld of effects—I feel with a divine confidence that is tantamount to clairvoyance that to tell you of some such episode would be to do you an
exquisite violence
. Why? Because I am perfectly certain that whatever is true—I mean
idiosyncratically
true—of me, is also deeply true of you; and my confession would therefore be your—accusation! An impeachment which you would be the first (but with a delighted shock) to admit.

But no——This
is
an evasion, an attempt to rationalize a mere feeling,
ex post facto
. The truth is, I am confused, and scarcely for the moment know what I
do
think or feel. Unhappy? Oh, yes! as the Negro spiritual says. What else could be expected? Yet I blame no one but myself for my unhappiness, and I hope I am too intelligent to suppose that my unhappiness is of any importance. Confused. My imagination darts in fifty directions, checked in each. I desire you—I hate you—I want to talk intimately with you—I want to say something horribly injurious to you … At one moment, it is of the purely trivial that I should like to talk to you. I should like to tell you of the amusing affair of old Smith (who was with me when I met you) and Mrs. Faubion, who sits opposite us at table; of how, last night, having made himself mildly tipsy with Guinness, he attempted to get into Mrs. Faubion’s room, just as she and her roommate (an incredible young woman!) were going to bed; how he put his foot inside her stateroom door (and such funny shoes he wears! horned like the rhino!) and tried to engage her in banter, meanwhile displaying, as if guilelessly, a purse full of gold sovereigns! At dinner, last night, he had told me of this project, and I had tried to dissuade him from it. No use. He was convinced that Mrs. Faubion was “
that sort
” … And this morning at breakfast, when Mrs. Faubion and I were alone, it all came out, the whole wretched story. “What was the matter with Mr. Smith last night?” “Matter? Was something the matter?” “Yes! He came to our room, and got his foot inside the door, and
wouldn’t
go away—all the time trying to show some gold money he had in a pocketbook! We had to shut the door in his face!… Actually!… And
then
he tried to come back again! I had to threaten to ring for the steward …” She looked at me, while she said this, with an air of profound wonder and mystification, perhaps just faintly tinged with suspicion. It puzzled her. What could have been the matter with the old man? And was
I
involved?… I suggested, of course, that he was just a little tipsy, and urged her to pay no attention to it. She remained, however, puzzled, and a little unconvinced … And Smith! When I walked round the deck with him later in the morning, did he say anything to me about this tragic—for him, I assure you, tragic—adventure? Not a word. Not a single word. But he was unhappy, and quiet—I could see the misery in him turning and turning round that dreadful and brief little disaster; while he revolved in his mouth one of the “expensive” cigars which his employer had given him as a parting present … Well, a horrible little episode, you will say, and why should I want to describe it to you? Again, because I am sure it will touch in you certain obscure chords which it touched in me, and set us to vibrating in subconscious harmony. Pity? Horror? Wonder? A sense of the disordered splendor and unexpectedness and tragedy of life? All these things, Cynthia; but chiefly the desire that we might again, as last year at the Bach concert,
listen together
.

And of course my childhood recollection is even better than that; for, narrated by me to you, it constitutes the playing upon us both of a chord unimaginably rich in stimuli. Consider some of these. The fact that I tell you this story—(as a “story” it is nothing—merely, say, the description of the sailing of a whaleship from New Bedford)—puts you in the position of the mother, and me in the position of the child; but it also makes our relation that of father and daughter. Again, it makes us both
children—
brother and sister, perhaps. Or, once more, it takes the color of a dual conspiracy, the delicious conspiracy of two adults to
become
children. Sentimental? No doubt. But the device, if anything so entirely spontaneous can be called a device, is universal. Baby talk! My baby doll! Icky fing!… Revolting when we detect others in this singular regression, but just the same the instinct is powerful in all of us, and given the right circumstances will betray itself without the least compunction … Very well, then—the right circumstances have arisen
chez moi,
and I must report to you this tiny episode taken from my childhood. Like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, it seems to have no connection; but, tangential though its pertinence may be, its pertinence is none the less profound.

When my mother and father died, the children were distributed, for temporary shelter, among various relatives; and it was my good fortune to be sent for a winter to the house of my father’s cousin, Stanley Bragg, in New Bedford, who had come forward with an offer to look after “one male child.” Of course, I was at first bewildered by the abrupt change, the removal from tropics to New England, the separation from my brother and sister; but on the other hand I had always been fond of Cousin Stanley; and his house, which I had several times visited, had always seemed to me quite the most beautiful and romantic in the world. It stood well back from County Street, concealed by elms and huge horse chestnuts, on a high grassy terrace. On the lower lawn (and this had, to begin with, particularly fascinated me!) stood a life-sized figure of a stag, cast in dark metal. It looked very lifelike, especially when it had been wetted (as frequently in summer) by the garden sprinkler. The garden, behind the house, was divided formally into squares by high box hedges which were full of spiderwebs and superb spiders—the latter I used to tempt out of their deep funnels of silk by twitching a strand of web with a twig: and I had the feeling that they used positively to
growl
at me. Here there was an old-fashioned chain well, like a little latticed house, overgrown with honeysuckle, which worked with a crank; and which kept up a gentle clinking while from the revolving cups on the chain it gushed forth the most delicious water. There were also fruit trees, flower beds, a wilderness of nasturtiums round the pump, and at the end of all, before you got to the barn, grape arbors all across the back wall—so thickly grown that on a not
too
rainy day you could crawl in under the vines and eat grapes in shelter. In the stable, of which John was the benevolent king, were the two horses which Cousin Stanley kept; a solemn black closed coach; a light buggy, for country driving; and, in the cellar, a pig. On one wall, where the whips and harnesses were hung, was nailed a wood carving of a large heart-shaped leaf.

The house itself was a comfortable mansard-roofed affair, with a wide “piazza” (on which stood tubs of hydrangeas) and lofty rooms in which one got an impression of a good deal of white marble. Among its wonders, for me, were the wooden shutters, which slid magically out of the walls beside the windows, and a great number of small carved objects of jade and soapstone and ivory, brought from China and Japan by Cousin Stanley’s father. Best of all, however, was the attic, and its cupola. Cupola! I remember how strange the word sounded when I first heard it pronounced by Miss Bendall, the housekeeper, who smelt of camphor. It struck me as “foreign”—a
Northern
word, surely!—and I hadn’t the remotest idea in the world how one would go about spelling it. But from the moment when Cousin Stanley, stooping a little (as he was very tall) led us up the dark stairs to the warm wooden-smelling attic, and then, with triumph (this was several years before) showed us the cupola itself, I entertained no doubts as to its fascinations. Miserable child, who has no cupola for his rainy mornings! It was in itself a perfect little house, glassed on all sides, with a window-seat all around, so that one could sit on whatever side one liked and look out to the uttermost ends of the earth. Over the slate roofs of houses, one looked steeply downhill to the harbor, the bright masts, the blue water, the Fairhaven ferry, and Fairhaven itself beyond. Farther to the right one saw the long red brick buildings of the cotton mills (not so numerous as now) and then the Point, and the Bug lighthouse, and the old fort, and the wide blue of Buzzard’s Bay. With a good glass, one might have made out the Islands; or observed the slow progress of a Lackawanna or Lehigh Valley tug and its string of black coal barges all the way from Fort Rodman to Cuttyhunk; or pick up the old
Gay Head
sidewheeling back from Wood’s Hole, with its absurdly laborious walking beam.