Blue Voyage

VI

The dew fell softly on the hurricane deck; stars swung over the heavenward-pointing mast, swung slightly to and fro, swarmed in an arc like swarming bees; and the large dew pattered from the wet shrouds, unevenly, now nearer and now farther off, on the moist deck and the hollow-sounding canvas-covered lifeboats. The forestay, black save for the little golden span under the yellow mastlight, slid under the Pole Star, and sliding dipped, as the prow in midnight followed the Great Circle, yielding with long leisurely pitch and scend to the persuasion of the sea. A fleece of cloud passed between Sirius and the shipboy. It flew to westward, fluent of shape, and from the starboard came another, coffin-shaped, and behind that, from the east, a low irregular cavalry of others, merging confusedly one with another, commingling softly and softly disengaging. With the freshening east wind the sea sound, from the darkness under the starboard bow, became louder. The wash of the short-breaking waves was nearer, more menacingly frequent. The stars, suddenly panic-stricken, rushed helter-skelter among the clouds. An eclipse. One bell: the sound veering dizzily down to the black water on the port side. A ship sighted? twelve-thirty?… Something cold touched Demarest’s cheek, and was gone as soon as felt. A snowflake. Another caressed his lifted hand. There were no more — it was to be merely a hint, a suggestion: nature employing, for once, the economy of the artist. St. Elmo protect us! St. Erasmus, patron of the midland sea, guard your mariners! Castor and Pollux, bless this ship, and save this ghostly company!.. The blue fires alighted softly then on the three mastheads; three corposants; and then two others, fainter, perched themselves at either end of the yardarm from which hung the wireless antennas. Was that a footstep? And were those voices?… Sounds almost imperceptible; perhaps only the whisperings of memory or foresight. It was perhaps the sound of Smith, giving himself a body in the darkness; or Faubion, coming up out of the unfathomable with a short sigh; or Silberstein, muttering as he clove the cobweb of oblivion in which he found himself enshrouded; or Cynthia, waking from granite into starlight. It was perhaps only the little sound of the atom falling in his mind, the atom falling like a star from one constellation to another, molecular disaster, infinitesimal tick, which, in its passage, created, illuminated and then destroyed this night, this ship, the corposants; Smith, Cynthia, Faubion, and Silberstein.

He moved a little aft, touching, as he did so, with his left hand, the damp lashings of lifeboat No. 14. This was the motor lifeboat, the trial of which (during boat drill) he had witnessed at noon. Fourteen is half of twenty-eight. The Number of the house had been 228–228 Habersham Street. But this too was only the silent falling of a mind atom. He moved aft, turning his back on this fatal number, which held his life in its poisonous coils, turning his back also on that ghostly company — incorporeal Smith, whose cigar tip dimmed and glowed; Faubion, on whose lifted fingers little blue corposants danced; Silberstein, who muttered; and Cynthia, whose face was turned to the east. They were already beginning to talk, standing far apart, so that their faces were only faintly discernible; but for the moment he was terrified, and delayed at the after-end of the hurricane deck, looking into the black south west; hearing the sound of the voices, but not wholly the purport. Smith, he knew, had begun by speaking Italian; then demotic Greek; then Provençal French; then Macaronic Latin. Passing then to ancient Greek, he had quoted Meleager, to which Faubian had replied, soberly, with Plato’s epitaph for the drowned sailor: Πλωτῆρεϛ σώζοισθε καὶ εἰν ἁλὶ καὶ κατὰ γαῖαν. Ah! Both by land and sea. Remember him. And remember him that lies by the Icarian Rocks, his soul given to the Aegean; and him too that was lost under the setting of dark Orion, borne helpless in ocean, eaten by fishes — Callaeschus, whom the sudden squall overtook at night. And him also do not forget, Erasippus, whose bones whiten in a place known only to the sea gulls. For everywhere the sea is the sea … It was Silberstein who added this last phrase: Silberstein of Sidon, Antipater of Harlem. Yes! It was Silberstein, and Smith repeated the Greek after him, taking his cigar from his mouth to do so: πᾶσα θάλασσα θάλασσα. They were all four silent then for a moment, while Demarest, turning, walked toward them, filling his pipe in the darkness with trembling fingers. And as he took his place a little way off from them, his back against lifeboat No. 14, Cynthia turned again and said:

“They are about us! They go with us where we go. They are our history; and we are their immortality.”

“Yes,” Smith answered sadly. “It is ourselves whose bones lie unclaimed in the deep water that washes the Icarian Rocks; or beside the Needles; or at the ‘whuling Cyclades.’ The sea is the sea — this we know — but also were not our prayers answered? for we had, after all, or we have, our ‘safe passage home.’”

“Yes, we belong to them, and they to us,” said Faubion quietly. Demarest could see that she had lifted her face, and was regarding the blue corposants on the mastheads. “And they and we, together, belong to the all-gathering memory of the future. Or is it possible that we shall be forgotten? But that question, I can see, is already answered by all of you.”

“Answered already by all of us,” Demarest said.

“Answered already,” laughed Silberstein, “in the negative-affirmative … But who will he be, the last one who remembers us? And where will he stand? In a world perhaps englobed in snow.”

“The one who remembers last,” said Cynthia, “will remember always. For He will be God … That, at any rate, is the affirmative. Of the negative, what can be said? We know it, but we cannot speak of it.”

“But we see it there,” said Smith, “we see it there! The cold cloud, into which we return, the dark cloud of nescience, the marvelous death of memory!”

All five faces looked in the darkness at one another, as if for the instant almost surprised. At once, however, they all began laughing together: lightly, with recognition. Of course, of course! They had forgotten that for the moment! All except Demarest had forgotten it — Demarest and Smith.

“Well!” Faubion answered bravely, “that is of course what we must see, and what we do see. Nevertheless, can we not remain individual in our feeling toward this? Choosing, for our pleasure, purely (since there can be no other virtue in the choice) the yes or the no? And I, for one, as you already see, will choose the yes! I will be remembered! We will all be remembered! And never, never forgotten. World without end. Amen.”

“Amen!” echoed Silberstein. “But Smith and Demarest do not feel as you do. Smith is the dark self who wants to die! Smith represents clearly — doesn’t he? — that little something hidden in all of us — in the heart, or the brain, or the liver, or where you will — which all our days is scheming for oblivion. It’s the something that remembers birth, the horror of birth, and remembers not only that but also the antecedent death; it remembers that nothingness which is our real nature, and desires passionately to go back to it. And it will go back to it.”

“Yes, Smith will die and be forgotten,” murmured Cynthia. “He already knows himself dead and forgotten; and it is the death in Smith that gives his brown eyes so benign a beam. Isn’t that so? It is the death in Smith that we love him for. We respond to it, smiling, with maternal solicitude. Moriturum salutamus … There, there!”

Smith tapped his foot on the deck and chuckled.

“No no! Don’t be too hard on me. Is that all I can be liked for? I could be hurt by that thought!.. But of course it’s perfectly true.”

“But of first and last things,” sighed Faubion, “there is no beginning and no end.”

The five people stood motionless and silent, their faces faintly lighted by the corposants. This is the prelude, thought Demarest. This is merely the announcement of that perfect communion of which I have often dreamed. They have lost their individualities, certainly — but was individuality necessary to them? Or is it possible that, having lost their personalities, they have lost that alone by which harmony or discord was perceptible? Or is it only that their individualities have been refined by self-awareness, so that the feelings no longer intrude, nor the passions tyrannize, bringing misery?…

“That is true,” said Silberstein. “Here, at any rate, we are: poised for an instant, conscious and delighted, in the midst of the implacable Zero. We remember — well, what do we remember? We remember that our bones are under the Icarian Rocks. We remember, too, that we are only what we thus remember and foresee. We foresee our past, and remember our future. Or so, at all events to interpose a little ease! And that’s saying a good deal.”

“It means everything,” said Cynthia. “It means not only the past and future we have in common, but the past and future that each of us has separately. And this, of course, is precisely what blesses us. It is this diversity in unity that makes the divine harmony. Think only of the joy of recognition, or discovery, when Smith tells us — what indeed we know already, do we not? but in a sense not so deliciously complete — of his life in Devon, his opera tickets in New Orleans, his forgotten yachting cap and his delightful passion for Faubion! To know what grass is, does not preclude surprise at the individual grass-blade.”

“How nice of you to compare me to a grass-blade! It’s exactly what I am. But you meant more than that. Forgive me for parenthesizing.”

“Yes, I did mean more than that. What do I mean? You say it, please, Mr. Demarest.”

“Consciousness being finite, it can only in theory comprehend, and feel with, all things. Theoretically, nothing is unknown to us, and nothing can surprise us or alienate us. But if imagination can go everywhere, it can only go to one place at a time. It is therefore that we have surprises in store for each other — we reveal to each other those aspects of the infinite which we had momentarily forgotten. Who has not known Smith or Faubion? Cynthia and Silberstein are as old and familiar as God. And this sad facetious Demarest, who when he laughs looks so astonishingly like a magnified goldfish, isn’t he too as archaic as fire? Yet you had forgotten that one could be sad and facetious at the same time, and that in addition to this one might look like a goldfish seen through a sphere of water and glass; and the rediscovery of these qualities, which results when they are seen in a fresh combination, this is what delights you and delighting you leads to my delight. This is what Cynthia means, and in fact what we all mean … Yes, and this is what blesses us. For this — on the plane of human relationship — is infinite love, a love which is indistinguishable from wisdom or knowledge, from memory or foresight. We accept everything. We deny nothing. We are, in fact, imaginaton: not completely, for then we should be God; but almost completely. Perhaps, in time, our imagination will be complete.”

“You could have put it in another way,” said Silberstein. “Each of us is a little essay upon a particular corner of the world, an essay which differs in style and contents from any other; each with its own peculiar tints and stains transmitted from environment. A terrific magic is stored in these little essays! more than the essay itself can possibly feel — though it can know. Of the power of Smith or Faubion to give me a shock of delight or terror, can they themselves form a complete idea? No — not in the least. Not, at any rate, till they have felt the peculiar shock of seeing me! After which, of course, they can begin that most heavenly of all adventures, the exploration of that world of feelings and ideas which we then reciprocate in creating — seeing at once the warm great continents, jungles, seas, and snowy mountains, arctics and Saharas, that we can roam in common; but guessing also the ultraviolet Paradises which we shall never be able to enter, and the infrared Infernos which ourselves will never be able to communicate. How can I ever make plain to Faubion or Cynthia why it is that they cannot as powerfully organize my feelings as they organize those of Demarest? There lies the infrared. There perhaps, also, whirls the ultraviolet. Dive into my history, if you like. Look! This deck is no longer a deck. It is a narrow slum street, paved with muddy cobbles. Do you see it?”

“It is a narrow slum street paved with muddy cobbles. On the East Side, New York. There is a smell of damp straw.”

“The sound of drays, too, and steel-ringing shovels.”

“Cats, ash cans, slush, and falling snow!”

“You all see it perfectly. Or almost. You see it in the abstract — not in the concrete. What you do not entirely see is the basement which my father used as his tailor shop — dark, damp, steamy, and incredibly dirty — where, as he ran his sewing machine, or peered nearsightedly into cardboard boxes for the one button which he couldn’t find, he taught me Yiddish, German, and English. He was always putting down lighted cigarettes — on the edges of the tables, on chairs, on boxes, on the ironing board; and then forgetting them. A smell of burning was always interrupting us, and we would jump up and search frantically for the cigarette. A good many yards of cloth must have been ruined, first and last — and once a customer’s raincoat caught on fire and had to be replaced. There was a terrible scene about it when the man came in for it … We ate and slept, and did our cooking, in the basement room behind this, from which yellow brick steps went up to a yard. My mother was dead — I don’t remember her. When I wasn’t at the public schools, I did the errands — delivered trousers that had been pressed, collected bills, and so forth. Naturally, I learned to cook, sew, and use the gas iron to press clothes, myself. But I also, at the public schools, and in the course of my running of errands, learned a great deal else. I knew the crowds at every saloon in the district, and the cops, and the buskers, and the leaders of the several ‘gangs.’ I knew all the brothels, and all the unattached prostitutes. I knew — as in fact all the boys of my age knew — which of the girls in the district (the girls of our own generation, I mean) had already gone the way of Sara More — the girls who were willing to be enticed into dark basements or unlighted back yards. Beryl Platt, Crystelle Fisher, Millicent Pike, Tunis (so-called, according to romantic legend, because she had been born in Tunis, and had an Arab father) Tunstall — before I was eleven I knew that there was something special about these girls; and when Crystelle one day dared me to come to her back yard after dark, I knew what was expected, and went. After that it was first one and then another. I had no feelings of sin about it — none whatever. It was natural, delightful, exciting, adventurous — it gave color to life. But I never fell in love. I liked these girls — I particularly liked the dashing swaggering Crystelle, whose hair was magnificently curled, and whose blue long eyes had an Oolong tilt, and who knew every smutty word in the language — but if they transferred their affections to other boys I didn’t mind, or if other boys forcibly ousted me I didn’t resent it. What did it matter? Life, I knew, was not exclusively composed of carnal love, and there was sure to be all of it that one needed. Why bother about it? Billiards was interesting, too, and so was tailoring, and I admired my father. I enjoyed reading with him, playing chess with him, and going with him to Coney Island or the Museum. When I was fourteen he took me to the Yiddish theater to see Pillars of Society. It made a tremendous impression on me. Why do I tell you this? Not because it’s especially interesting in itself; but because it’s exactly the sort of item which you wouldn’t precisely guess for yourselves — isn’t that it? Yes. You extract the keenest of pleasures from hearing of that, and seeing me in the gallery of the theater with my father, eating buttered popcorn. Just as you enjoy, also, hearing of Crystelle Fisher. These details enable you to bring your love of me, and of humanity, and the world, to a momentary sharp focus. Can one love in the abstract? No. It is not man or nature that we love, but the torn primrose, and young Mrs. Faubion, who is being sued by her husband for divorce on grounds of infidelity; Demarest, whose fear of his father has frozen him in the habit of inaction and immobility, as the hare freezes to escape attention; and Silberstein, who was seduced by arc light under a white lilac in a Bowery back yard … However, it was my intention, when I began this monologue, to light for you, if I could, the reasons for the fact that I cannot, like Demarest, fall in love with Faubion and Cynthia. Is it now indicated? The only time I ever came near falling in love was after we had moved to the country, when Mabel Smith, the schoolteacher, took possession of me. Mabel was sentimental and maternal. She did her best, therefore (as she was also something of a hypocrite), to arouse some sort of sentiment in me. And she almost succeeded, by sheer dint of attributing it to me. She tried to make me believe that I believed she was my guiding star, and all that sort of thing. Pathetic delusion, the delusion that one needs to be thus deluded! But this holiness never became real to me. How could it? I had been a placid realist since birth, calm as a Buddha. One has emotions, certainly; but one is not deceived by them, nor does one allow them to guide one’s course … How, then, can I respond to all the exquisite romantic Dresden china that Cynthia keeps — to pursue the figure — on her mental mantel? No no! It’s not for me; or only, as you see, intellectually and imaginatively. It delights me to recognize this so totally different mechanism of behavior — and I love Cynthia, therefore, exactly as I love that hurried moon, the snowflakes, or the blue-feathered corposant who gives us his angelic blessing. But if it is a question of erotic response, I would sooner respond to Crystelle, who is now a prostitute, and with whom I’ve often, since growing to manhood, had dinner at Coney Island. Much sooner!.. Much sooner!..”

New York. Spring. The five people walked in the darkness along Canal Street. In Fagan’s Drug Store the red, green, and yellow jars were brilliantly and poisonously lighted. Sally Finkelman came out, carrying a bottle of Sloan’s liniment, and a nickel in change. Red stains of a lollypop were round her mouth. She crossed the street obliquely, and paused beside Ugo’s copper peanut stand to warm her knuckles in the little whistling plume of steam. Ugo, standing in the garish doorway, held a bag of peanuts, red and green striped, by its two ears, and twirled it, over-and-over, three times. An elevated train went south along the Bowery. The five people crossed the muddy cobbles of the Bowery under the roar of the elevated, and passing Kelly’s saloon, and Sam’s Shoe Shine Parlor beside it on the sidewalk (where French Louise was having her white slippers cleaned) went slowly toward Essex Place. In the window of Levin’s Café were two glass dishes which contained éclairs and Moscovitz; one charlotte russe (dusty); and a sheet of Tanglefoot flypaper, on which heaved a Gravelotte of flies. An electric fan whirled rainbow-colored paper ribbons over the Moscovitz. Solomon Moses David Menelek Silberstein, aged twelve, came slowly out of Essex Place, with a pair of checkered trousers over his shoulder. At the corner, under the arc light, he stooped to pick up a long black carbon, discarded from the light. Uccelli, in the alley, was grinding slowly his old-fashioned carpet-covered one-legged organ. Bubble and squeak. The monkey took off his red velvet cap. Crystelle Fisher had given him a sticky penny, which he had put into his little green velvet pocket. Winking, he took off his cap again. The organ’s wooden leg had a brass ferrule, worn down on the inner side: a leather strap, attached to the two outer corners, passed round Uccelli’s neck. Bubble bubble squeak and bubble. Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ayy. Crystelle danced a cakewalk, knees flinging her dimity high, a huge hole showing in the knee of her right stocking, a coarse lace petticoat flouncing. She snapped her fingers, jerking backward her shapely head of golden curls, her oolong eyes half shut. Coon — coon — coon — I wish that color was mine. Beryl Platt put her head out of a fourth-story window, between two black geraniums, and yodled. I can’t come out, she sang. I’ve got to wash the dishes. And mind the baby … At the corner, overtaking Silberstein, Crystelle touched his trousered shoulder — Would you like to know a secret, she said — I can turn a Catherine wheel — would you like to see me. Ha ha! Pork chops and gravy — I wish I was a baby … Are you coming round to the yard tonight?… Bubble bubble whine and bubble. Yes, I’ll be there, said Solomon, and sauntered toward the Bowery. Twenty-six Mott Street. A warm smell of benzine rose from the damp trousers. With the carbon he drew a black line along Kelly’s wall, just as French Louise was getting down from the high brass-studded shoe-shine throne. She gave Sam a nickel, and said — Where is that mutt? He said he’d only take five minutes … A train rattled north on the elevated; empty: a conductor reading a paper on the rear platform, his knees crossed … The five people, drifting slowly in the evening light under the few pale stars of New York, paused before a battered ash can on which the name Fisher had been red-leaded. Passing then through a door, which was ajar, they saw the white lilac in blossom under the arc light. Below it, on the hard bare ground, lay the bright skeleton of a fish, picked clean by the cat. There was also the sodden remains of a black stocking … Crystelle came running up the yellow brick stairs from the basement, and at the same moment Solomon reappeared at the door. Look! she said. She turned a series of swift Catherine wheels, hands to the ground, feet in the air, skirts falling about her head, her flushed face up again. Solomon, pulling a spike of lilac-whiteness toward his nose, surveyed her without expression. Pork chops and gravy, he said. You’ve got a big hole — in your stocking. I have not, she answered. You have, too, he said. Where! she answered. O Jesus, how the hell did I do that. Have you ever kissed Tunis?… Sure I have … Where?… In her cellar … Was it dark?… No, not very … Well, why don’t you kiss me?…

“Πᾶσα θάλασσα θάλασσα,” said Smith absent-mindedly. “‘Rich happiness, that such a son is drowned.’”

“Well!” cried Cynthia into the sea-darkness. “Why not? We must all, in that sense, drown someday. Is Silberstein’s drowning at twelve any worse than ours at twenty?”

“I like it,” said Faubion. “Isn’t it really better, a good deal, than all the refined hypocrisy of the honeymoon?… Always supposing that the honeymoon is the first!”

“Was it — with you?” Smith’s voice had a chuckle in it.

“Of course not! I didn’t live in a village for nothing …”

Her voice trailed away like the dying sound of a wave. A sea gull, floating astern, and crying, with turning head, Klio. Where do the sea gulls go at night? The sea gulls in mid-Atlantic? Do they sit on the waters?… Klio klio. The five blue corposants preened their blue phosphor-feathers. Demarest, leaving lifeboat No. 14, walked aft again, sucking at his cold pipe. The five people moving eastward with the ship. Five corposants. Five sea gulls. Klio, klio. Interchangeable. If one thinks in terms of quality-complexes, then a very slight dislocation of affects will give one a world in which no identities are permanent. An alarm clock rises in the east. A sky swarming with stars, at two in the morning, is merely the sensation of formication—ants crawling, as when one’s foot is asleep. Faubion, uttering a short word quickly, with averted head, is a sea gull going downwind, crying, with turning head, klio … The corposants are five celestial voices, singing in the tops of the trees. They ululate softly in chorus, while the treetops thresh in the wind, as the mad nymphs ululated when Dido and Aeneas fled into the cave from the thunder. Angels follow her — gravely, slowly — with silver and vermilion and rainbow wings — One, more luminous: lost in his own light: sits on a cherry-tree bough, and sings — Blest be the marriage of earth and heaven! Now, in the round blue room of space, The mortal son and the daughter immortal … make of the world their resting-place … The marriage hymn, prothalamium, for my wedding with Cynthia, the stained-glass widow. Stained-glass window.

“Poor Demarest!” Cynthia was laughing, in the darkness. “Poor darling Demarest!”

“Am I so much to be pitied?”

“Is he so much to be pitied?”

“Much to be pitied?”

“Pitied? Pitied?”

“Pitied?”

The bird voices echoed one another, klio klio, wheeling and screaming. The sea claws and sea beaks pitied him, and the waves, too, coming louder from the southeast, their surfy voices the voices of destroyed universes of bubbles, sea-froth, evanescent as human pity.

“Of course he is to be pitied. And loved, too, in his fashion — as Silberstein said we love the hurrying moon and the angelic corposant. Loved, therefore, and pitied, as we love and pity ourselves. Who is this William Demarest? this forked radish? this carrier of germs and digester of food? momentary host of the dying seed of man?… He came to me to play chess, a copy of The Spoils of Poynton under his shiny coat sleeve.”

“Ha ha. Demarest, the goldfish chess player.”

“Fool’s mate. Watchman, what of the knight? The psychiatrist beat him in ten moves. The mandolin player gave him his queen, and then drew the game. Nevertheless, he considers himself a very talented chess player. Poor Demarest.”

“Treasure him, nevertheless, for he is a mirror of the world.”

“We cherish him as we cherish ourselves. Is he not an epitome of universal history? Here he stands, on the deck of a dark ship, which is moving eastward at fifteen knots an hour. The steersman shifts the wheel, his eyes on the bright binnacle. The stokers stoke. The second engineer carries a long-beaked oil can up a clammy iron ladder. The first engineer lies in his stuffy bunk, reading His Wife’s Secret. Under the ship are two miles of sea, and under the sea the half-cold planet, which rushes through freezing space to destruction, carrying with it continents of worthless history, the sea, this ship, Demarest … Who is this little, this pathetic, this ridiculous Demarest? We laugh at him, and also we weep for him; for he is ourselves, he is humanity, he is God. He makes mistakes. He is an egoist. He is imperfect — physically, morally, and mentally. Coffee disagrees with him; angostura causes him anguish; borborigmi interrupts his sleep, causing in his dreams falls of cliffs and the all-dreaded thunderstone; his ears ache; his nostrils, edematous; frontal headaches … Nevertheless, like ourselves, whose disabilities differ from his only in details, he struggles — why? to avoid the making of mistakes, to escape the tyrant solipsism, and to know himself; like us, he endeavors to return to God. Let him cry out as he will, let him protest his skepticism ever so loudly, he is at heart, like every other, a believer in perfection!..”

Klio klio! Cynthia’s was the harsh melancholy voice of the sea gulls. The five sea gulls wheeled and screamed over the brown mud flat, at the edge of the eelgrass, where the obscene fiddler crabs scuttled in and out of oozy holes. Brown viscous froth, left by the receding tide. Cape Cod. What is that dark object that attracts them? A dead man. The corpse of Charlie Riehl, the hardware man, the suicide. The bluefish have picked at his head and hands these six days, since he jumped from the bridge; and now the sea gulls flap over him, crying, and the fiddler crabs advance with buzzing fiddles, crepitant army of mandibles.

“A believer in perfection.”

“A believer.”

“Perfection.”

“Rich happiness, that such a son is drowned.”

The five people crossed the meadow, stepping carefully among the fishing nets which Mr. Riley had spread out to dry. The hot sun drew a salt smell out of them, marshy and rich, fish-scaly. Passing under the arrowy-leaved ailanthus tree, and then rounding the sand-banked corner opposite Mr. Black’s forge (Mr. Black was shoeing a horse) they stepped upon the wooden bridge, tripartite, the first and third sections of which crossed the two branches of the forked river, the intermediate section being merely a built-up road-bed on the tongue of marsh. The telegraph wires were singing multitudinously in the wind, a threnody. A metal windmill clanked. They crossed the first section of bridge, looking into the deep and rapid water, and seeing the red sponges that wavered deep-down on the pediments of barnacled stone; and then paused on the squeaking path of trodden and splintered scallop shells, which was bordered with starry St. John’s Wort, coarse sappy honeysweet goldenrod, and scarlet-blistered poison ivy. Leaning then on the red wooden railing, they watched the two Rileys and Mr. Ezra Pope, the town constable, rowing the dirty dory toward a point at the farther end of the marsh. Low water. Sea gulls rose in a screaming cloud as they approached. The younger Riley, in red rubber boots, jumped out and pulled the dory up into the eelgrass. The two others got out, and all three moved slowly into the marsh, lifting high their knees. They were stooping over. Then they rose again, carrying something. It was Charlie Riehl, who had drowned himself rather than appear as a witness at the trial. Klio klio! At five in the morning it was: there among those red sponges. Feet first; with his pockets full of lead. Klio!

“Those are holes that were his eyes,” murmured Smith. “Nothing of him but hath fed—”

“Narcissus! He sees himself drowned, like this Charlie Riehl. And pities himself. Well, why not? That’s normal enough …”

Faubion held up her hands, on which the blue corposants were beginning to fade.

“Scavengers!” she cried. “That’s what we are. Devourers of the dead: devourers of ourselves. Prometheus and the vulture are one and the same. Well! I will not countenance it. Any more than Demarest does.”

She gave a little laugh, and the others laughed also, lightly and bitterly. Something had gone wrong with the scene. Disruption. Dislocation of affects. Quarrel of ghosts. Fecal coloring of imagery. The night falling over like a basket, spilling miscellaneous filth. No! Only the atom in the brain! falling infinitesimally, but by accident wrecking some central constellation. The five ghosts quarreling on the deck with harsh voices were the five sea gulls in Trout River. Charlie Riehl was himself. Drowning was consummation. It was all very simple — you turned a screw, and everything at once changed its meaning. Klio, said Cynthia. Klio, klio, sang the mad nymphs for Dido, ululating; and the vulture, tearing with sadistic beak at the liver of Prometheus—klio, klio! it cried, turning the Semitic profile of Silberstein … But this was disturbing! One must pull oneself together — set the basket of stars on end again. What was it that had caused this trouble, this quick slipping brain slide, vertigo, that sent everything skirling and screaming raucously down the abyss? Whirlpool. Cloaca. Groping for trout in a peculiar river. Plaster of warm guts. Clyster. Death, with your eyes wide open. Christ!.. He leaned hard on lifeboat No. 14 (the motor lifeboat — they took off the canvas cover to test the engine, and stepped a little wireless pole in the bow thwart) and shut his eyes. Think. Project. Sublimate. Everything depends on it. In the sweat of your brow, the ventricle contracted, the dew dripping—

“Is it not possible, then”—he cried—“this perfection of understanding and interchange? Cynthia?”

“Oh, as for that—” Cynthia’s voice seemed to come from farther off, floatingly.

“As for that!” jeered Silberstein.

“That!” quacked Smith.

He opened his eyes. The four figures, in the now almost total darkness, were scarcely perceptible — mere clots in the night. The stars had been engulfed.

“He came to me with a shabby chessboard under his arm! And he had forgotten to button—”

“Please adjust your dress before leaving …”

“He permitted me to pay his fare in the bus! Yes, he did! You may not believe it, but he did!”

“Rear seat reserved for smokers … Lovers with umbrellas at the top—”

“And do you know what he said when I asked him if he would like to come one afternoon to hear my brother William play Bach on the piano? Do you know what he said, delicious provincial little Yankee that he is and always will be?… ‘You bet!’”

“Ho ho! Ha ha! He he!”

“Suppress that stage laughter, please. Silence! His impurial highness—”

“I beg you,” said Faubion, “I beg you not to go on with this!”

“Silence! His impurial highness, greatest failure as a dramatist that the world has ever known, supreme self-devouring egotist, incomparable coward, sadist and froterer, voyeur and onamist, exploiter of women — William Demarest, late of New York, and heir of all the ages—”

“Stop!”

“What’s the matter with Faubion? Is she in love with the idiot?”

“Perhaps she’s right. We ought to be sorry for him. More to be pitied than blamed. After all, he’s an idealist: a subjective idealist.”

“Who said so? An automaton like the rest of us. Nigger, blow yo’ nose on yo’ sleeve, and let dis show pro-ceed!”

“You must remember that we are only figments of his—”

Klio! klio! klio!

The gulls, the waves, the corposants, all screamed at once. The wave in Caligula’s dream. The sea ghost, seaweed-bearded, with arms of green water and dripping fingers of foam. Oo — wash — oo — wallop—are you awake — King Buskin?… And he never said a mumbalin’ word. The blood came twinklin’ down. And he never said a mumbalin’ word … Tired, tortured, twisted; thirsty, abandoned, betrayed.

“—Silence! The transfiguration scene will now begin. Dress rehearsal. Special benefit performance for Mr. Demarest. At the first stroke of the bell, Miss Battiloro, arch snob and philanderer, several times engaged, virgin in fact but not in thought, she who stood on a June day perspiring and admiring, adoring and caloring, before the unfinished Titian, will take her place beneath the mainmast, on the port side, facing the stern. Her head will be bowed forward meekly, and in her hands she will clasp lightly, with exquisite Rossetti unlikelihood, a waxen lily. At the second stroke of the bell, the five angelic corposants will unite in the air above her, singing softly, as they tread the wind, the verses written by Mr. Demarest for the occasion—King Caligula. No weeping, by request. Listening to this heavenly music, with its message of healing for all mankind, Miss Battiloro will lift her eyes, in the attitude of one who sees, at long last, the light that never was on land or sea. While she is in this attitude, the third stroke of the bell will be given by the shipboy; and on the instant Miss Battiloro will be transformed, for all time, into a stained-glass widow. Beg pardon, I mean window. Now is everything in readiness, please? Shipboy, are you there?… He says he is there. Is Miss Battiloro ready to make this noble and beautiful sacrifice?”

“Ay ay, sir.”

“Miss Battiloro says she is ready to make this noble and beautiful sacrifice. And Mr. William Demarest — is Mr. William Demarest present? Mr. Demarest, please?”

“Oh yes, he’s here, all right!”

“Very well, then, we will proceed … Shipboy, the first bell, if you will be so kind!”

It was painfully true, every word of it. The bell note fell down from aloft, a golden ingot of sound, and Cynthia was standing under the tall tree as announced; like a charade for purity and resignation; clad in white samite; and clasping a tall lily with unimaginable delicacy. Wasn’t it perhaps, however, more Burne-Jones than Rossetti? It was a little dark, and therefore difficult to see; but Demarest thought so. Yes. And at the second bell note — three minutes have elapsed, silent save for the hushing sound of the waves — Cynthia lifted her meltingly beautiful eyes, and the five blue seraphim, treading the night air above her, began softly, sighingly, to sing. This was very affecting. In spite of the warning, it was difficult to refrain from tears. Smith, in fact, gave an audible sob, like a hiccough. At the words “resting-place,” the five seraphs disbanded, two deploying to starboard, two to port, and the fifth catapulting straight up toward the zenith. At this moment, Demarest experienced acutely a remarkable temptation. He desired to rush forward, kneel, bury his face passionately in the white samite, and cry out—γύναι, ἴδε ό ὑιόϛ σου! Before he could do more than visualize this action, however, the third stroke of the bell was given. The whole night had become a Cathedral. And above Demarest, faintly luminous in the cold starlight that came from beyond, was a tall Gothic window, where motionless, in frozen sentimentalites of pink, white, and blue, Cynthia was turned to glass.