SOMETHING THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
A C OR EVEN A
MISSHAPEN
—S,
said the Perfessor,
is for Sex and also for Sin.
The difference between them is not worth a pin.
—Well, I’m back, Mrs. Brown said, coming up the steps of the verandah.
Darkness, a gentle tide, had risen up the prim enclosure of the garden, hiding the nymphs in pools of shadow. Mr. Shawnessy could no longer distinguish the forms of two bronze bodies entangled in lilies at the base of the fountain. The children had gone behind the house.
—Still talking, I see, she said to the Perfessor. Here let me sit between.
—There’s only one thing I like better than good talk, the Perfessor said. Put it right down here. We were talking about clothes.
Mr. Shawnessy cleared his throat.
—Don’t worry, John, the Perfessor said. Evelina’s an emancipated woman. As for clothes, I’m for ’em. What kills these back-to-nature cults isn’t prudery, but the fact that most folks look like hell naked. Man is really one of the more unattractive animals. For sheer looks, the great apes beat him all hollow.
—Strange, Mr. Shawnessy said, that the only animal that knows it’s an animal is desperately eager to conceal the fact.
—There, said the Perfessor, you have the beginning of religion. Modern religion is man’s effort to convince himself that he’s not an animal. Now, animals live according to their instincts. Therefore, says Religion, instinctive life shall be evil, and Sex, the strongest instinct, shall be the greatest evil. God is man’s conscience, the policeman of civilization, punishing man for all recollections of his animal state. It’s only right that religion should begin with the Fall of Man because religion was itself the Fall of Man.
—Personally, Mr. Shawnessy said, I think we’re happier wearing the figleaf of forbidden knowledge.
—O, I don’t know, the Perfessor said. The average animal is happier than you or I—that is, until man comes along and fences him in. Think what a good time our friend Jupiter over there in the bullpasture would have if we let him run loose. He could feed and fight and flute to his heart’s content until cut down in a serene old age. Man’s unhappiness, you see, comes precisely because he knows. Man’s the only animal who knows that he’s going to die. Religion’s a vast ritual of remorse for the unhappy discovery of pain and death.
A sound of singing came from the Revival Tent.
—There is a fountain filled with blood. . . .
—Listen to ’em! the Perfessor said. Inmates of the greatest lunatic asylum man ever built—the Christian Church! The typical Christian is just plain crazy—in a socially acceptable way. He believes that the universe was made by a grand old man squatting on a cloud. He believes that this old man somehow begot a son without intercourse a few hundred years ago. He believes that this son is in some mysterious way also the father. He believes that this son came down to earth for the express purpose of being executed like a common criminal to purge humanity of its sins. He believes that the world is better for all this, despite the fact that people go on being as no-account as ever. He believes that this young man, after being very dead, got up and walked out of the grave. He believes that the old man up there on the cloud is all-good and all-powerful, but that the world of his creation is a world of corruption and death.
The Perfessor stopped and took a drink. A faint glare of fire was on the western wall of the night. The singing from the Revival Tent had lapsed and begun again.
—As for this god, the Perfessor went on, he has all the characteristics of a crazy person. He has a god-obsession. He’s being constantly annoyed and persecuted by other imaginary gods that shall not be had before him. He wants everything to redound to his personal credit. Nothing for others—but all only for him, so that he may be glorified forever and forever. He falsifies the history of the world as an act of self-justification. He wields unlimited power like a despot and brags of his triumphs. Whatever he wills is good, and whatever is against his will is evil. He attributes his own faults to others, attacking Satan for wanting to rule in heaven and charging the Hebrews for being a stiff-necked people. Isn’t this a picture of a thoroughly unpleasant old man and a thoroughly unpleasant universe?
—Yes, it is, Mr. Shawnessy said. But it was better than what went before. At least the Hebrew God was the product of a strong moral sense. Later, in the Christian ethic of the Golden Rule, this moral sense went beyond the tribal stage.
—The pagans were closer to divinity than Christ was, the Perfessor said. At least they frankly recognized the miracle of sex and procreation. They showed a healthy appetite for life itself, which is more than we can say for the immaculate Nazarene.
—The pagans recognized the divinity of process, Mr. Shawnessy said, but not of personality. And as far as I can see, human life is people. It’s even simpler than that. It’s Oneself, a simple, separate person. But Oneself exists by virtue of a world shared with other selves. Our life is the intersection of the Self with an Other. In the intense personal form this intersection is love, and in the ideal, general form it’s the Republic. Jesus gave us the moral shape of this Republic—the Sign of the Cross.
Mr. Shawnessy heard a commotion in the bushes. The Perfessor’s place on the swing was empty, and the Perfessor’s head was just disappearing over the side of the verandah.
—I’ll be back later, he said. Be good children, and don’t eat any apples.
—It’s getting quite dark, Mrs. Brown said, her voice low and musical.
She sat beside him on the swing, her hair bound up leaving her neck bare all around in the fashionable way, her hands folded in her lap, her face and figure in piquant profile.
He was thinking of her universe. It was, he knew, a rather brave, hopeful, lovely universe. He understood this universe, liked it, lingered uneasily at the threshold of it. He was thinking of the long, long way that had led from female to feminine, from Woman to Eve. Billions of lost souls had labored to perfect this slight creature and her universe of feminine values. Two hundred thousand years had been necessary to tailor her modish dress out of a figleaf. Billions of dead hands had put stone upon stone to erect the curious monument of her house. Like a sound of ocean was the murmur of dead tongues that had struggled to speak so that her mouth might make musical words about the rights of women and the finer things of life, so that her bookcase might be full of gilded volumes. This woman, too, was Eve, a sacred Other. There was, he knew, a sense in which he approached her through the precise formulations of her lawn, and as he did so, garden and house dissolved; pagan adornments were overcome by bark and leaves. He had entered a grove of danger and decision. There was a sense in which he found her there, forever waiting, naked, with gracious loins, an anguishingly beautiful young woman whose body wore perhaps some curious blemish as a sign of her mortality. There was a sense in which he was always reaching out his hand toward her in this place and touching her face as it looked up into his. There was a sense in which the face was that of the woman he had married, and also of some other women whose faces had been turned up toward his. There was a sense in which this face of the archetypal woman was forbidden, untouchable, divine. In this excitement, there was a sense in which he became lost: he lost his name, his selfhood, his oakleaf garland, and even his own private republic, and achieved a wonderful unity—which was immediately relinquished.
—Professor Stiles is an odd person, isn’t he? Mrs. Brown said at last. What makes him so unhappy?
—The Professor has a vested interest in being unhappy. If the world were other than he supposed, he’d be a discredited person.
—He says so much that’s true. But he turns it all to a joke or a hollow thing at last.
—But it gives him a great advantage in conversation to speak without responsibility. Nothing is sacred to the Professor. There are no taboos, no forbidden words or places. You and I, on the other hand, Evelina, are continually treading with ca
re as if the universe were all alive and wherever we put down our foot we might hear a cry of human anguish.
—I used to admire Professor Stiles very much, Mrs. Brown said. He wants me to come back to New York. Do you think I ought to go?
Just then, there was a disturbance in the bushes, and Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles clambered over the wall of the verandah and lay full-length on the stone floor.
—And curst be he that moves my bones, he said, his voice hoarse.
—Mrs. Brown!
It was a voice from the backyard.
—Excuse me, Mrs. Brown said. I’ll try to come back. It’s about time to hang the Japanese lanterns.
She walked down the steps into the darkening lawn and disappeared around the corner of the house. The Perfessor stayed flat, a monumental effigy with eyeglasses on, face sharp and pallid, hands crossed on chest.
—There she goes! he said. What a waste of beauty! Why will women try to be intellectual? The only feminist movement I want to see is one to make women more feminine. For Christ’s sake, let’s not make them more like men. You know, I really despise bright women. It’s unbecoming of a woman to be interested in ideas.
—Professor, Mr. Shawnessy said, don’t you ever get tired of being a professional rebel? Why don’t you resign yourself to being happy now and then? Why not give up and admit that you enjoy life? Still, I suppose such a radical change of mind might make you disintegrate in a second like the corpse of M. D. Valdemar, when they took it out of the mesmeric trance.
—Really! the Perfessor said. You disturb me, John. I’m not feeling very well as it is.
He crawled over to the swing and sat down.
—I would love to be moral, he said. I would love to believe in the Republic of Brotherly Love, Sisterly Affection, Filial Piety, and Jesusly Humility. If only I weren’t so goddam well-informed and bright! After all, John, human morality is a mere refinement of the social instinct, which we see also in some of the other animals. We’re moral because it pays to be moral. But the really great problems of the Republic don’t achieve moral solutions. Take the Negro question. The Negro is morally about where he was before the War. The Declaration of Independence is still a White Paper.
Westward, from the Revival Tent, came a smell of smoke. Low flames licked the fringed horizon.
—What are they doing over there anyway? the Perfessor asked.
—Just a Fourth of July bonfire, Mr. Shawnessy said.
He was vaguely troubled. He was stirred by a memory of some thing that had happened, a legend of beauty and the earth, of the tangled world of personal republics, and of their infinite intersections.
—Yes, sir, the Perfessor said. If everyone were like me, the Negro problem could be settled in a jiffy. Sex doesn’t draw any color lines, and neither do I. At night, all cats are black. Never in the history of mankind have two races lived so close as the black and white do in America without a complete blend after a while. This dark old rule of the jungle is just what the Southern white fears. Let’s not fool ourselves: all his efforts to keep the Negro down are, at root, efforts to keep black seed running in black channels. This paladin, the old Southern Colonel, defends the purity of us all.
Just a Fourth of July bonfire. Some fragments of old lumber that used to be somebody’s house, loose odds and ends of lives.
—You may prate as you please, the Perfessor said, of beauty and the good—human life’s a dark affair. In the Swamp all was fated, but no one knew it. Now, our advance in understanding consists of knowing that all is fated.
—But what you call fate includes moral decisions made by human beings. The tragedies of human life merely teach us that we can’t escape responsibility. In short, we can’t resign from the Republic.
The two men smoked in silence. The red glare in the west now flickered through the palings in the fence.
—John, the Perfessor said, shaking his head, what a bloody tapestry our life has been! In this modern republic, nineteen hundred years after the birth of Christ, a million young men killed each other in hot blood because human skins differ in pigment. And the end is not in view.
The Perfessor shot a keen glance at Mr. Shawnessy.
—Your own life, he said, has been strangely touched by this mixture of the bloods. You know, John, there was something you never told me about your first marriage, though you hinted at it.
—Yes?
—Maybe I shouldn’t ask, the Perfessor said, but I’ve always been damn curious—
He hesitated.
—Yes? Mr. Shawnessy said, his voice gentle and remote.
He was flicking pages in the book of his own life, a myth of himself and his memories of the Republic in War and Peace.
The trains are changing in the station of Myself. I must catch a darktime express. Good night, ladies. Good night, ladies. Good night, sweet ladies, we’re going to leave you now. . . .
O, let’s go back and live in old daguerreotypes of houses by the river. O, subtle, musky, slumbrous . . .
Yes, I was guilty too. I never could resist the shape of beauty by the river. But I didn’t know that I set my mouth to the mouth of a dark Helen.
Did you think that a single black man could feel the lash and you not bear the scar? Did you think that a single comrade might lie dead in the July corn, and you not lose a portion of yourself? Did you think that mankind could go to war and you not fight?
Go back. Unwind the tapestry and trace the scarlet thread. Go back, lonely young voyager on rivers. Relive the sibilant names. Review old lusts beside the river. Lay on the lash and fill the slaver’s hold. Plant seed and raise a crop of cotton in the bottom lands. Stand up and give us pompous words about the rights of man, while the darkies labor on the levee.
(All this is the marvellous myth of Raintree County, where all threads come together and where all rivers run and all must find the lake, where all the trains are changing in the stations, and every single word that ever was is written into riddles between the four lines of a square.)
But tread with care. There are lost souls here. There is a piteous and lost republic. Tread with care. There are lost lives here that will cry out like sinners touched by flame. Catch the train. Hurry back along the branchlines of departed Raintree Counties. There are lost souls here. There are lost voices here. There are lost songs. Tread with care.
O, don’t you remember a long time ago? O, don’t you remember
July 4—1863
AN OLD SOUTHERN MELODRAMA WAS PLAYING ITSELF UP TO THE LAST CURTAIN,
he felt, as the train chugged on toward Three Mile Junction. He shook the last of a brief, uneasy sleep from his head. Smoke sifted in through the open windows on his already grimy face. He stared at the daguerreotype in his hand, in which four faces looked palely out from under the shadow of a Southern mansion. He studied the mad scrawls on two letters that had started him two days ago on a hunt for two lost children. He had touched their ghostly trail in a store where a doll had been bought. He had seen the two lost faces imprisoned on a glass plate in a photographer’s shop. One of these faces had taken the name Henrietta Courtney, a certain Negro girl, dark Helen, dead long ago in fire. He had said good-by to Nell Gaither in the station in Indianapolis. And now the chase had nearly come fullcircle to the place where it had started.
In a few minutes, he would be home in Freehaven, and the thing would be settled. No doubt this dark old melodrama in which he had been entangled for four years would turn out all right—more or less—and the nightmare of the last three days would have an awakening.
Nevertheless, he felt more terror now than at any time since the hunt had started, as he sat helpless, holding some fragments of a life. He had been slowly assembling the pieces of a curious puzzle for three years now. He reshuffled the pieces, slowly fitting them into place, still hunting for the missing piece.
The faces in the daguerreotype were pale smudges in the yellow gaslight. Behind them rose the pillars of a doomed house. Here (but twenty years ago) wa
s a little girl beside a river.
Then it seemed to him that only through a weakness of the will is the past relinquished. A human life had a dimension that wasn’t perfectly understood. In this dimension, the whole river of one’s life existed all at once, a legendary symbol written across the face of time. And the source of the river was in the gulf to which it flowed as well as the spring from which it rose. And if one were to understand the enigma of a twisted life on the land, where would one begin, except in a daguerreotypal river flowing past a daguerreotypal house?
The river was flowing, flowing to the sea. It poured its cold strong waters past dissolving swamps. The yellow pollen sifted on the river, the yellow pollen sank and bubbled in the river. The river passed a city on the Delta.
It was summer, and a little girl with violet eyes grew up beside the river, her life rising out of ancient summers where the hot nights throbbed with voices of darkies singing on the levees. They picked the cotton in the fields and piled the bales beside the river, and the steamboats passed in neverending line, their whistles shrilling and their big wheels turning. And the river passed and washed the earth away.
Whence had she come—Susanna, lost child of a stained republic? Who was the mother of this child? Who was the father of this child? Was it possible to follow this child, holding her unburnt doll, back through the windings of the Great Swamp?
The river passed in darkness to the sea, the yellow river passed in darkness, flowing, flowing to the sea.
This little being, being human, knew love and hatred by the river. One night she hunted for a doll in an old log cabin. On the levees, the darkies were gay, a glare of bonfires lit the night to celebrate the birth of the fairest of all republics. And her small form in a nightdress (dark hair hanging to her shoulders) wavered on a mirror at the landing. She saw the dark flesh and the white; the rose of love bloomed scarlet in the night, the symbol of a stained republic. This was the thing she found while hunting for a doll.