The Lime Twig

5

Michael Banks and Cowles and the jockey in his colors walked past the Booter’s, past the barn and millinery shops until they reached the Baths, where they found the constable’s two-wheeler leaning against the marble wall with water dripping from one of the iron pipes down to its greasy seat. A few bees were circling the klaxon and the water made a rusty summer’s pool on the leather.

“Look out,” said Cowles, “the old constable’s after his cleanliness again.”

“He’s been drinking,” the jockey said. “He wants to sweat away the beer. That’s all.”

The entrance to the Baths was on an alley. The building was of whitewashed stone and marble, and once, years before, the entire alley side had served as a sign. Now on the dirty white the paint was faded, but most of the letters in gold and brown could still be read: across the top of the wall and in a scroll “Steam Bathing” and under that the words “Good for Gentlemen,” and then another slogan, “Steam Cleans and Cures.” On either side of the door was painted the greater-than-life-size figure of a naked man, one view seen from the front, the other from the rear, both flexing their arms and both losing the deep red flesh of their paint to the sun and weather of harsh seasons.

Banks smiled once when he walked naked from the dressing room into the steam. He was immediately hot, wet in an instant, and felt his way through the whiteness that was solid and rolling and solid again all at once. Now and then four or five square feet would clear completely, and in one of these sudden evaporations he saw Cowles standing quite still and stretching, while the jockey was taking blind tentative steps, covering his face and mouth with the fingers and thumbs. But he heard the hissing, the sightlessness returned; they were groping in the same direction. Then: “Here, Mr. Banks,” it was Cowles, obliterated but close to him in the steam, “lie here. There’s room for three of us right here.”

There were tables — three now pushed together — tables and shelves to lie upon, slippery and warm, and a collection of live red iron pipes upon which the Steam Baths operator and his two young boys threw buckets of icy water: and the steam smelled first of flame, cold mountain streams, and of the bare feet and ankles of the man and boys at work. And then it smelled of wood, stone floors, of white lime sprinkled between the slats on the stone; and of the bathers then, the molecules of hair oil and sweat from the skin. He breathed — and tasted, smelled the vapors filling the lung, the eye, the ear. So many clouds of it, so thick that the tin-sheeted walls were gone and only a lower world of turning and crawling and groaning men remained.

The shelving, wide enough for a man, was built about the room in tiers that reached nearly to the ceiling, all this space cut by braces, planks, verticals. Between the tiers were the tables with hands, feet, at the edges. It was a crowded ventless chamber and filled with noise, a confused and fearful roaring. But these men were prone and here activity was nothing more than a turning over or a writhing. Every few minutes the smallest of the two boys would fling a pail of ice water not on the pipes but across the flesh of a prostrate bather and the man would scream: no place here for undervests or socks, tie clasp or an address written out on paper.

“… Lie next to me, Mr. Banks,” and Cowles helped him up to the boards while the jockey climbed as best he could. Then the three of them were stretched out together and he felt that he himself was smiling. There was slime on the wood and steam was dripping down the braces, down the legs of soaking pine. By habit he started on his back and kept his hands at his sides, restraining his hands even when he felt the eyelids turning soft and his lips loosening, taking the seepage in. He heard the splashing of ice water but it was aisles away, and the steam was heaped up all about him, his lungs were hot. Then, later, he listened to Cowles succumbing, the flesh — a hand or foot — beating against the wood and growing still, the moans filled with resistance, helplessness, and finally relief as if confessing under the blows of a truncheon.

“… Makes you feel … like … you’ll never walk again … eh, Mr. Banks?” Now a whisper only and the head buried down under the fatty arms, one huge leg fallen over the edge, never to be retrieved.

Banks rolled over, making the effort to throw off the pinion and move despite the nervelessness of muscles, despite paralysis. “Excuse me, Needles,” he said, but the jockey had his own discomfort and did not reply.

He always saved the stomach. It was best on the stomach and he waited until just that moment before he might not be able to roll at all, then tried it, and the exertion, the slickness of wood passing beneath his skin, the trembling of the propped arm — when these were gone there came the pleasure of shoulders sagging, of being face down in the Baths. Now he opened his eyes a little and his lips parted around the tongue. He thought of water to drink. Or lemonade. Or gin. He knew the torpor now, the thirst, with all the fluids of his body come to the surface and the hair sticking closely to his skull.

And then — not able to raise his head, drifting back from numbness and feeling the rivulets sliding down his flesh — he heard the sounds, the voices, that had no business in the Baths: not the steam’s hissing nor the groans of bathers, but the swift hard sounds of voices just off the street.

“… Gander at that far comer, if you please, Sparrow. And you, Thick, shadow the walls.”

Moments later, back through the oppression: “Go down on your knees if you have to, Sparrow. …”

And the steam lay on the body of Jimmy Needles, and Cowles looked dead away. He thought he saw shadows through the puffs and billowing of the whiteness and he longed more than anything for a towel, a scrap of cloth to clutch to himself, to wipe against his eyes. In the anonymity of the Baths, amidst all those naked and asleep, he heard again the sounds and now he tried to rouse the trainer: “Cowles,” whispering, “Come awake now, Cowles.”

But then there was the ice blow of the water, and he heard the grunt of the child and pail’s ring even before the sharp splash covered him from head to foot. He froze that moment and the skin of his shoulders, legs, back and buttocks pained with the weight of the cold more shocking than a flame. When he bolted upright, finished wiping the water from his eyes, he found that Cowles was gone and in a glance saw nothing of Needles except a small hand losing hold of the flat boards as the jockey shimmied down and away.

So he followed and several times called out: “Cowles, Cowles!” But he got no answer. He crouched and crept down the length of one wall, made his way in blindness and with the floor slats cutting into his feet. He moved toward the center and was guided by the edges of the tables.

And then there were three separate holes in the steam clouds and in one he saw the stooping figure of the man with the beret; in another he saw Thick scratching his chin; and in the last, the nearest, the broad tall body of Larry fully dressed, and his dark-blue suit was a mass of porous serge wrinkled and wet as a blotter. The cloth hung down with steam. The shirt, at collar, cuffs, and across the chest, was transparent as a woman’s damp chemise and the chest was steel. He carried a useless handkerchief and the red was quickly fading from his tie, dripping down over the silken steel. Thick was wearing a little black hat that dripped from the brim, and Sparrow’s battle trousers were heavy with the water of the Baths.

Banks squatted suddenly, then spoke: “What are you after now? Three beggars, isn’t it?”

Without answering or looking down at him the men began to fade. Not gone suddenly behind the vapor’s thick intrusion, but merely becoming pale, more pale as shred by shred the whiteness accumulated in the holes where they stood. A sleeve, a hand, the tall man’s torso, a pair of wet shoes — these disappeared until nothing was left of the trio which, out of sight, continued then the business of hunting despite the steam.

“Go on,” he heard himself saying, “go on, you bloody beggars. …”

Slowly he crawled under the braces of the table and after them. The steam was heavy and his eyes began to smart. He tore his calf on a splinter. Once more, and for the last time in the Baths, he came upon the toe of Larry’s black boot, followed the trouser leg upwards to the lapel where a yellow flower was coming apart like tissue, saw the crumpled handkerchief thrust in his collar, the sheen of perspiration on the high cheeks, the drops of water collected around the eyes. But still there was the casual lean to the shoulders, one hand in one wet pocket as if he had nothing better to do than direct this stalking through a hundred and ten degrees and great dunes of steam. The boot moved, turned on the toe leather so that he saw the heel neatly strengthened by a bit of cobbler’s brass, and the man was gone again, saying: “… Found him, Thick? Have a go under the steam pipes then.”

And he himself was creeping off again, feeling his foot drag through a limpid pool, feeling the sediment on his skin. His hair was paste smeared across his scalp. He felt how naked he was, how helpless.

Then, still on all fours, he came to the comer. Under the wooden shelving, lying half-turned against a stretch of soapstone, bent nearly double at the angle of meeting walls, crowded into this position on the floor of the Baths was Cowles’ body with the throat cut. Banks crept up to him and stared and the trainer was a heap of glistening fat and on one puffy shoulder was a little black mole, growing still, Banks realized, though the man was dead. And though this Cowles — he had had his own kill once, kept dirty rooms in a tower in the college’s oldest quad, had done for the proctor with a fire iron and then, at 4 A.M., still wearing the gown darned like worn-out socks, had stolen the shallow punt half-filled with the river’s waters and, crouched heavily in the stem with the black skirts collected in his lap, had poled off under the weeping willow trees and away, lonely, at rest, listening to the fiends sighing in nearby ponds and marshes — though this Cowles now lay dead himself his blood still ran, hot and swift and black. His throat was womanly white and fiercely slit and the blood poured out. It was coming down over the collar bone, and above the wound the face was drained and slick with its covering of steam. One hand clutched the belly as if they had attacked him there and not in the neck at all.

Just as Banks caught the lime rising at the odor of Cowles’ blood he felt flesh striking against his flesh, felt a little rush of air, and Jimmy Needles lunged at him in passing and fled, hunting for the door. Before he himself could move he heard a sound from the wood above Cowles’ corpse, glanced up, and peered for several moments into the congealed blue-tinted face of the constable: an old man’s naked face reflecting cow and countryside, pint-froth and thatch in all the hard flat places of its shape.

“Here now, what’s this deviltry. …”

But then Banks too was gone, no longer crawling but running, with the unhelmeted head of the constable and the sight of Cowles’ freshly cut throat before him, reaching the door as he heard the hiss and exhalation of new blinding steam and the cry of the old nude member, only member, of the constabulary showered that moment from the small boy’s icy pail.

His hand slipped on the knob but it shut finally against the pushing of the steam, and the jockey handed him a towel. He covered himself, leaned back, stared at the bench upon which, shoulder to shoulder, were seated the three of them — Sparrow and Thick and Larry — with pools at their feet. Banks held the towel with both hands under the chin, looked at the dark men on the bench and the row of clothes hooks curling from the wall behind them. There was water about his own feet now.

“What did you kill him for?” Watching Larry in the middle but seeing the silks fluttering over the hump at the peak of the jockey’s spine: “Whatever for?” It was little more than a whisper above which he could hear the water falling from three pairs of hands, dropping from three sets of trouser cuffs. The flower had disappeared altogether from the blue lapel.

“Oh, come on,” said Sparrow, getting up, wringing the beret, “let’s have a dash to Spumoni’s!”

In the dusk surrounding the Baths the bees swarmed straight off the klaxon and made a golden thread from the bicycle to a nearby shrouded tree.

It seemed hardly more than teatime but it was dusk, fast coming on to nightfall when there’s a fluttering in steeples and the hedgerow turns lavender, when lamps are lit on ancient taxis and the men are parading slowly in the yards of jails. Castles, cottages and jails, a country preparing for night, and time to set out the shabbiness for the day to come, time for a drink.

Sparrow felt the mood: “Give us another liter of that Itie stuff,” he said. The waiter filled their glasses and Larry heaped the plates with second servings of the spaghetti and tomato sauce. The waiter could see the blue butt and shoulder holster inside his coat. “Cheers,” said Sparrow, while Jimmy Needles drank his health.

And between the tables: “You dance divine,” said Sybilline, “just divine. …”

A quartet of scar-faced Negroes was playing something Banks had first heard out of gramophones in Violet Lane, something whistled by the factory girls on their way to work. No favorite now, no waltz carried on the tones of an old comet, but music that set him trying to pump Syb’s hand up and down in time with the piano player’s tapping shoe. There was a trumpet, a marimba and bass and the piano on which a white girl was supposed to sit and sing. Beside his bench was a flabby fern in a bucket and the piano player kept a bottle there, under the dead green leaves. Banks could clearly hear the fellow’s foot going above the syncopation of the racy song.

Banks had never learned to dance but he was dancing now. He pumped her hand and Syb wasn’t afraid to move, wasn’t afraid to laugh, and he found her spangled slippers everywhere he stepped and saw the drops of candlelight — on the tables there were candles fixed to the bottoms of inverted tumblers — swelling the tiny pearls pushed into the fiery hair. For a moment, admiring the decorative row of pearls, he thought of the faces children model out of bread dough and of the eyes they fashion by sinking raisins into the dough with their stubby thumbs. Then, with the hand on her waist, he felt a bit of Sybilline’s blouse pulling out of her skirt and heard her voice, flitting everywhere fast as her feet, saying, “Let’s have a drink-up, Mike, a rum and a toss. …”

The room was filled with people from the Damps — a racing crowd. In this room in the town surrounded by farm and vicarage and throaty nightingale there were people who did their banking in High Fleet Seven and others who did their figuring in the slums, all sporting now — it was the night before the running of the Golden — and ordering Spumoni’s best. Like a theater crowd, a society in which the small person of Needles could go unnoticed, though wearing rainbow silks and cap and a numbered placard on his puffy sleeve. And Banks felt that he too went unnoticed, felt that he could drink and dance and breathe unobserved at last. There were enormous black-and-white paintings of horses about the walls along with the penciled handwritten names of endless guests. There was the odor of whisky and Italian cooking, and the Negroes never ceased their melody of love and Lambeth Walk.

“Coo, Mike,” she said just before they reached the table, “it’s going to be a jolly evening.” In Syb’s voice he heard laughter, motor cars and lovely moonlit trees, beds and silk stockings in the middle of the floor.

Glasses in hand they did not sit, but stood beside the table, because she wanted to dance again and couldn’t bear sitting down. They held hands while the small exsoldier poured and Needles sucked in his cigarette and looked up at him.

“Mr. Banks,” and it was Larry, lifting the fork, letting the candle shine across his face, “feeling a little better now?”

“Quite nicely, thanks,” he answered.

“Bottom’s up!” the girl said suddenly, and swallowed off the wine, balancing against his arm and tilting so that he saw the heart throb, the wine’s passage down the throat from which she was capable of laughing, crying, whispering. So he drank also and it was the hard dry dusty taste of wine and he was warmed and pleasurably composed. He remembered not the Baths, the Damps, poor wretched Cowles, nor the rooms in Dreary Station, but a love note he had written at the age of twelve when the city was on fire. And remembering it he looked at Sybilline and saw in her eyes the eyes of an animal that has seen a lantern swinging on a blackened hill.

“Excuse us,” he said, and put down the glass. “This is our melody.”

In his arms she was like the women he had thought of coming out of comfort rooms. Or it was what they had done in the shelters or when the bands were marching — upright, holding each other close before the parting. One of his hands was on her body and the sequins kept falling off her blouse to the floor. They were dancing on sequins. He was able now, while holding her, to try and tuck in the blouse.

“It’s shrunk,” she murmured, “it’ll never stay.” But his fingers pushed in the cloth, and over the top of her auburn head he saw the piano player leaning to drink from the bottle pulled out of the bucket and saw the marimba player’s black dusty hands — there was a big gold wedding band on one finger — shaking, trembling in mid-air. Everyone was talking horses, talking the Golden, but he was moving round the little floor with Syb.

“You know,” pulling her head away from his brown lapels, but dancing, dancing, “that other chap was hopeless. Wouldn’t even buy me an ice. But whatever did you do with his binoculars?”

He waited and then: “Gave them to a fellow selling tickets.”

Later still, when she happened to see the jockey holding his head and Sparrow slipping something to the waiter — a Neapolitan with dirty shirt and mustaches — when the candles were softly dying and the wine was dregs — and still they were turning on the floor — then she laughed, spoke against his chest: “It’ll be a jolly evening, Mike. I promise. We’ll go to bed and you’ll like my bed, Michael. …” And then in the middle of the floor with the others watching and Larry pulling sharply on his coat over the holster, sending Needles out for the hired car, then she gave him her own lips soft, venereal, sweet and tasting of sex.

But Sparrow stopped them kissing, tapped on his arm. “Come now, Banks, Larry says we’re going to a proper place.”