“I haven’t got the leisure you New Orleans fellows have,” the other explained. “Got to keep on the jump, myself.” He arose and shook hands all around. “Glad to’ve met you boys,” he said to each in turn. He clasped Mr. Talliaferro’s elbow with his left hand while their rights were engaged. The waiter fetched his hat and he gave the man a half dollar with a flourish. “If you’re ever in the little city”—he paused to reassure Fairchild.
“Sure, sure,” Fairchild agreed heartily, and they sat down again. The late guest paused at the street door a moment, then he darted forth shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!” The cab took him to the Monteleone hotel, three blocks away, where he purchased two tomorrow’s papers and sat in the lobby for an hour, dozing over them. Then he went to his room and lay in bed staring at them until he had harried his mind into unconsciousness by the sheer idiocy of print.
6
“Now,” said Fairchild, “let that be a lesson to you young men. That’s what you’ll come to by joining things, by getting the habit of it. As soon as a man begins to join clubs and lodges, his spiritual fiber begins to disintegrate. When you are young, you join things because they profess high ideals. You believe in ideals at that age, you know. Which is all right, as long as you just believe in them as ideals and not as criterions of conduct. But after a while you join more things, you are getting older and more sedate and sensible; and believing in ideals is too much trouble so you begin to live up to them with your outward life, in your contacts with other people. And when you’ve made a form of behavior out of an ideal, it’s not an ideal any longer, and you become a public nuisance.”
“It’s a man’s own fault if the fetish men annoy him,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays there are enough things for everyone to belong to something.”
“That’s a rather stiff price to pay for immunity, though,” Fairchild objected.
“That need not bother you,” the other told him. “You have already paid it.”
Mr. Talliaferro laid aside his fork. “I do hope he’s not offended,” he murmured. Fairchild chuckled.
“At what?” the Semitic man asked. He and Fairchild regarded Mr. Talliaferro kindly.
“At Fairchild’s little joke,” Mr. Talliaferro explained.
Fairchild laughed. “I’m afraid we disappointed him. He probably not only does not believe that we are bohemians, but doubts that we are even artistic. Probably the least he expected was to be taken to dinner at the studio of two people who are not married to each other, and to be offered hashish instead of food.”
“And to be seduced by a girl in an orange smock and no stockings,” the ghostly young man added in a sepulchral tone.
“Yes,” Fairchild said. “But he wouldn’t have succumbed, though.”
“No,” the Semitic man agreed. “But, like any Christian, he would have liked the opportunity to refuse.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Fairchild admitted. He said, “I guess he thinks that if you don’t stay up all night and get drunk and ravish somebody, there’s no use in being an artist.”
“Which is worse?” murmured the Semitic man.
“God knows,” Fairchild answered. “I’ve never been ravished.” He sucked at his coffee. “But he’s not the first man that ever hoped to be ravished and was disappointed. I’ve spent it lot of time in different places laying myself open, and always come off undefiled. Hey, Talliaferro?”
Mr. Talliaferro squirmed again, diffidently. Fairchild lit a cigarette. “Well, both of them are vices, and we’ve all seen tonight what an uncontrolled vice will lead a man into—defining a vice as any natural impulse which rides you, like the gregarious instinct in Hooper.” He ceased a while. Then he chuckled again. “God must look about our American scene with a good deal of consternation, watching the antics of these volunteers who are trying to help Him.”
“Or entertainment,” the Semitic man amended. “But why American scene?”
“Because our doings are so much more comical. Other nations seem to be able to entertain the possibility that God may not be a Rotarian or an Elk or a Boy Scout after all. We don’t. And, convictions are always alarming, unless you are looking at them from behind.”
The waiter approached with a box of cigars. The Semitic man took one. Mr. Talliaferro finished his dinner with decorous expedition. The Semitic man said:
“My people produced Jesus, your people Christianized him. And ever since you have been trying to get him out of your church. And now that you have practically succeeded; look at what is filling the vacuum of his departure. Do you think that your new ideal of willynilly Service without request or recourse is better than your old ideal of humility? No, no”—as the other would have spoken—“I don’t mean as far as results go. The only ones who ever gain by the spiritual machinations of mankind are the small minority who gain emotional or mental or physical exercise from the activity itself, never the passive majority for whom the crusade is set afoot.”
“Katharsis by peristalsis,” murmured the blond young man, who was nurturing a reputation for cleverness. Fairchild said:
“Are you opposed to religion, then—in its general sense, I mean?”
“Certainly not,” the Semitic man answered. “The only sense in which religion is general is when it benefits the greatest number in the same way. And the universal benefit of religion is that it gets the children out of the house on Sunday morning.”
“But education gets them out of the house five days a week,” Fairchild pointed out.
“That’s true, too. But I am not at home myself on those days: education has already got me out of the house six days a week.” The waiter brought Mr. Talliaferro’s coffee. Fairchild lit another cigarette.
“So you believe the sole accomplishment of education is that it keeps us away from home?”
“What other general result can you name? It doesn’t make us all brave or healthy or happy or wise, it doesn’t even keep us married. In fact, to take an education by the modern process is like marrying in haste and spending the rest of your life making the best of it. But, understand me: I have no quarrel with education. I don’t think it hurts you much, except to make you unhappy and unfit for work, for which man was cursed by the gods before they had learned about education. And if it were not education, it would be something else just as bad, and perhaps worse. Man must fill his time some way, you know.”
“But to go back to religion”—“the spirit protestant eternal,” murmured the blond young man hoarsely—“do you mean any particular religion, or just the general teaching of Christ?”
“What has Christ to do with it?”
“Well, it’s generally accepted that he instigated a certain branch of it, whatever his motives really were.”
“It’s generally accepted that first you must have an effect to discern a cause. And it is a human trait to foist the blunders of the age and the race upon someone or something too remote or heedless or weak to resist. But when you say religion, you have a particular sect in mind, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Fairchild admitted. “I always think of the Protestant religion.”
“The worst of all,” the Semitic man said. “To raise children into, I mean. For some reason one can be a Catholic or a Jew and be religious at home. But a Protestant at home is only a Protestant. It seems to me that the Protestant faith was invented for the sole purpose of filling our jails and morgues and houses of detention; I speak now of its more rabid manifestations, particularly of its activities in smaller settlements. How do young Protestant boys in small towns spend Sunday afternoons, with baseball and all such natural muscular vents denied them? They kill, they slay and steal and burn. Have you ever noticed how many juvenile firearm accidents occur on Sunday, how many fires in barns and outhouses happen on Sunday afternoon?” He ceased and shook the ash from his cigar carefully into his coffee cup. Mr. Talliaferro seeing an opening,
coughed and spoke:
“By the way, I saw Gordon today. Tried to persuade him for our yachting party tomorrow. He doesn’t enthuse, so to speak. Though I assured him how much we’d all like to have him.”
“Oh, he’ll come, I guess,” Fairchild said. “He’d be a fool not to let her feed him for a few days.”
“He’d pay a fairly high price for his food,” the Semitic man remarked dryly. Fairchild looked at him and he added, “Gordon hasn’t served his apprenticeship yet, you know. You’ve got through yours.”
“Oh,” Fairchild grinned. “Well, yes, I did kind of play out on her, I reckon.” He turned to Mr. Talliaferro. “Has she been to him in person to sell him the trip, yet?”
Mr. Talliaferro hid his mild retrospective discomfort behind a lighted match. “Yes. She stopped in this afternoon. I was with him at the time.”
“Good for her,” the Semitic man applauded, and Fairchild said with interest:
“She did? What did Gordon say?”
“He left,” Mr. ‘Talliaferro admitted mildly.
“Walked out on her, did he?” Fairchild glanced briefly at the Semitic man. He laughed. “You are right,” he agreed. He laughed again, and Mr. Talliaferro said:
“He really should come, you know. I thought perhaps” —diffidently—“that you’d help me persuade him. The fact that you will be with us, and your—er—assured position in the creative world—”
“No, I guess not,” Fairchild decided. “I’m not much of a hand for changing folks’ opinions. I guess I won’t meddle with it.”
“But, really,” Mr. Talliaferro persisted, “the trip would benefit the man’s work. Besides,” he added with inspiration, “he will round out our party. A novelist, a painter—”
“I am invited, too,” the blond young man put in sepulchrally. Mr. Talliaferro accepted him with apologetic effusion.
“By all means, a poet. I was about to mention you, my dear fellow. Two poets, in fact, with Eva W—.”
“I am the best poet in New Orleans,” the other interrupted with sepulchral belligerence.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed quickly, “—and a sculptor. You see?” he appealed to the Semitic man. The Semitic man met Mr. Talliaferro’s importunate gaze kindly, without reply. Fairchild turned to him.
“We—ll,” he began. Then: “What do you think?”
The Semitic man glanced briefly at him. “I think we’ll need Gordon by all means.” Fairchild grinned again and agreed.
“Yes, I guess you’re right.”
7
The waiter brought Fairchild’s change and stood courteously beside them as they rose. Mr. Talliaferro caught Fairchild’s eye and leaned nearer, diffidently, lowering his tone.
“Eh?” Fairchild said in his burly jovial voice, not lowering it.
“Would like a moment, if you’ve time. Your advice—”
“Not tonight?” Fairchild asked in alarm.
“Why, yes.” Mr. Talliaferro was faintly apologetic. “Just a few moments, if you are alone—” He gestured meaningly with his head toward the other two.
“No, not tonight. Julius and I are spending the evening together.” Mr. Talliaferro’s face fell, and Fairchild added kindly, “Some other time, perhaps.”
“Yes, of course,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed faultlessly. “Some other time.”
8
The car swept sibilantly up the drive and on around the house. There was a light on the veranda vaguely beyond vines. They descended and Mrs. Maurier crossed the veranda and passed clashing and jangling through a French window. The niece turned the corner and followed the veranda to where beyond a nook spaced with wicker and chintz, and magazines gaily on a table, her brother sat coatless on a divan beneath a wall lamp. There was a faint litter of shavings about his feet and clinging to his trousers, and at the moment he bent with carpenter’s saw over something in his lap. The saw scraped fretfully, monotonously, and she stopped beside him and stood scratching her knee. Presently he raised his head.
“Hello,” he remarked without enthusiasm. “Go to the library and get me a cigarette.”
“I’ve got one on me, somewhere.” She searched the pockets of her linen dress, but without success. “Where”—she said. She mused a moment, spreading her pocket with her hand and staring into it. Then she said, oh, yes, and took off her hat. From the crown of it she produced one limp cigarette. “I ought to have another,” she mused aloud, searching the hat again. “I guess that’s all, though. You can have it: I don’t want one, anyway.” She extended the cigarette and skirled her hat onto the lounge beside.
“Look out,” he said quickly, “don’t put it there. I need all this space. Put it somewhere else, can’t you?” He pushed the hat off the divan, onto the floor, and accepted the cigarette. The tobacco was partially shredded from it and it was limp, like a worm. “Whatcher been doing to it? How long’ve you had it, anyway?” She sat beside him and he raked a match across his thigh.
“How’s it coming, Josh?” she asked, extending her hand toward the object on his lap. It was a cylinder of wood larger than a silver dollar and about three inches long. He fended her off with the hand that held the lighted match, thrusting the elbow beneath her chin.
“Let it alone, I tell you.”
“Oh, all right. Keep your shirt on.” She moved slightly away and he took up the saw again, putting the burning cigarette on the wicker lounge between them. A thin pencil of smoke rose from it into the windless air, and soon a faint smell of burning. She picked up the cigarette, drew once at it, and replaced it so it would not scorch the wicker. The saw grated jerkily and thinly; outside, beyond the vines, insects scraped monotonously one to another in the heavy, swooning darkness. A moth, having evaded the screen wire, gyrated idiotically beneath and about the light. She raised her skirt to stare at a small feverish spot on her brown knee. . . . The saw grated jerkily, ceased, and he laid it aside again. The cylinder was in two sections, fitted one to another, and she drew one foot beneath the other knee, bending nearer to watch him, breathing against his neck. He moved restively and she said at last:
“Say, Gus, how long will it take you to get it finished?”
He raised his face, suspending his knife blade. They were twins: just as there was something masculine about her jaw, so was there something feminine about his.
“For God’s sake,” he exclaimed, “let me alone, can’t you? Go away and pull your clothes down. Don’t you ever get tired of waving your legs around?”
A yellow Negro in a starched jacket stepped silently around the corner. When they looked up he turned without speaking. “All right, Walter,” she said. But he was gone. They followed, leaving the cigarette to lift its unwavering plume and a thin smell of burning wicker into the somnolent air.
9
fool fool you have work to do o cursed of god cursed and forgotten form shapes cunningly sweated cunning to simplicity shapes out of chaos more satisfactory than bread to the belly form by a madmans dream gat on the body of chaos le garçon vierge of the soul horned by utility o cuckold of derision.
The warehouse, the dock, was a formal rectangle without perspective. Flat as cardboard, and projecting at a faint motionless angle above it, against a lighter spaciousness and a sky not quite so imminent and weary, masts of a freighter lying against the dock. Form and utility, Gordon repeated to himself. Or form and chance. Or chance and utility. Beneath it, within the somber gloom of the warehouse where men had sweated and labored, across the empty floor lately thunderous with trucks, amid the rich overripe odors of the ends of the earth—coffee and resin and tow and fruit—he walked, surrounded by ghosts, passing on.
The hull of the freighter bulked, forecastle and poop soaring darkly sharp, solid, cutting off vision, soaring its superstructure on the sky. The unseen river continued a ceaseless sound against the hull, lulling it with a
simulation of the sea, and about the piles of the wharf. The shore and the river curved away like the bodies of two dark sleepers embracing, curved one to another in slumber; and far away opposite the Point, banked lights flickered like a pile of yet living ashes in a wind. Gordon paused, leaning over the edge of the wharf, staring down into the water.
stars in my hair in my hair and beard i am crowned with stars christ by his own hand an autogethsemane carved darkly out of pure space but not rigid no no an unmuscled wallowing fecund and foul the placid tragic body of a woman who conceives without pleasure bears without pain
what would i say to her fool fool you have work to do you have nothing accursed intolerant and unclean too warm your damn bones then whisky will do as well or a chisel and maul any damn squirrel keeps warm in a cage go on go on then israfel revolted surprised behind a haycock by a male relation fortitude become a matchflame snuffed by a small white belly where was it i once saw a dogwood tree not white but tan tan as cream what will you say to her bitter and new as a sunburned flame bitter and new those two little silken snails somewhere under her dress horned pinkly yet reluctant o israfel ay wax your wings with the thin odorless moisture of her thighs strangle your heart with hair fool fool cursed and forgotten of god