Ceremony of the Innocent (12 page)

More and more puzzled, Ellen said, “She called me ‘Daughter of Toscar.’” She looked away from Jeremy shyly. “‘Beautiful daughter of Toscar.’”

Jeremy scrutinized the girl’s face. “Your Mrs. Schwartz is no witch,” he said. “Or perhaps she is. How much of this have you read, Ellen?”

“Only a little here and there, sir. I try to understand; sometimes I have to read a page over and over before it comes to me—Everyone says I’m very stupid, and perhaps I am,” and her face expressed her depression.

Jeremy quoted, “‘Let not the poet shed tears only for the public weal.’ Do you know what that means, Ellen?”

Ellen fell into thought. She slowly sat down, uninvited and absorbed. She began to rub her index finger over the stiff laciness of the tablecloth. “‘Public weal,’” she murmured. “That’s what the Mayor is always talking about. It means good for the people, doesn’t it?”

“Well, that’s a fair translation. Go on, Ellen.”

She pursed up her lips and gazed at a wall. “I think it means, what Thoreau said, that the poet should be unhappy about other—things, maybe more important ones.”

Jeremy’s big white teeth flashed in mirth. “Correct. What would you say was at least as important as the public weal?”

“Well. I think a single person, sir, just one person, is as important as millions of others. Maybe more. You can understand a person, and what he feels and—and—” She fumbled for a word. “His feelings, his thoughts, his—well, his sadness—are clearer and closer than just a mass of people. It isn’t a matter, sir, I think Thoreau means, of a lot; I think he means that any one person, and his feelings, are—are equal—to what a million feel.”

“In short, quantity does not increase importance. Is that what you mean, Ellen?”

She contemplated what he had said, then she nodded her head brightly. “Yes, sir. People are ‘public weal,’ but a person is a person, and so he is more important. I don’t think I really know what it means.”

“I think you do. In short, one man’s agony is as great as the agony of ten thousand others. Multiplication adds nothing. Ellen, I think we’ve added a new dimension to what Thoreau said in this case. He went on to talk about dormice and hawks, which has nothing to do with what we have been discussing. Aren’t you going to eat?”

Ellen hastily took up her fork as if she had unintentionally offended him. She sat awkwardly on the edge of her chair, half fearing she would be ordered from it at a new caprice. But when she saw that he took her presence for granted, and that this was no mere pretension of kindness or condescension, she began to eat with appetite. It seemed to her that the kitchen, with the red light of the last sun at the window, was the most heavenly of places, for it was filled with contentment and friendship and not malice or discomfort.

Jeremy had become somber, and seeing the darkness of his face, Ellen was not alarmed, for now she was full of trust and she realized that this fine gentleman was not bored with her and that, in fact, he was not thinking of her at all. Gentlemen had many serious things to consider and one should know that and not be offended or hurt or afraid when they subsided into thought. He knew the awesome world she did not know, for his life was not her life, and she was a stranger in his world though he could enter hers easily. For a moment or two she was wistful and again filled with longing. He would not remain in this house; he would go and she would be left behind. He would forget, but she would not forget. Her longing deepened to yearning and sorrow and a desire not to be forgotten, not to be abandoned. She was not yet fourteen, but she was in love as a woman is in love.

Where he went she could not go and she felt her first true and adult anguish. He knew thousands of people like himself, but she knew only him. He would laugh and talk with them, but she had no one else. Her spirit put out hands to hold him and she knew that he would not even feel the woeful grasp. Jeremy looked up quickly and saw the pain on her face. “What is it, Ellen?” he asked, and she appeared older to him, for that was no childish expression in her eyes, which were now filling with tears.

“I was thinking,” she said in a choked voice, “that sorrow is the very worst thing of all.” She spoke freely, no longer expecting ridicule or misapprehension or rebuke, such as she always expected from others.

He put down his knife and fork. She was very young; what did she know of sorrow? He had been about to say that, then stopped himself. She knows well, he thought, and if she hasn’t actually experienced sorrow in her few years she is aware of it, and all of its tragedy.

“What has made you sorrowful, Ellen?” he asked, and his voice was full of compassion.

She was on the point of crying out, “Because you will leave me and I will never see you again, and I can’t bear it!” But horror and full realization came to her of what this cry would mean to him. He would think her not only bold but impudent and he would laugh at her as a presumptuous minx. She struggled for inane words which would not betray her, and then to her greater horror and humiliation she burst into tears. She dropped her face helplessly in her hands and bent her head and grief swelled in her, a grief she could not fully understand except that it was enormous and she had never known such before in its intensity and despair.

Jeremy regarded her in silence. He did not know what to do. He did not know why she was weeping and with such adult abandon. But he sensed the barrenness of her young life, her hopeless estate, the loveless desert in which she lived, the misery of her future and her eventual insignificant death. He believed that she had suddenly realized that herself, and his compassion—the first true compassion he had ever known—made him almost physically ill and wretched.

He stood up, and stood near her as she cried. The light in the kitchen was dimming; there was a mournful bleakness in it now, for all the redness of the lids of the stove, for all the smell of good coffee and the lavish food on the table. He looked down at the bent head and the heaving mass of faintly glistening hair and at the rough and childish hands through the fingers of which tears were spurting. Her sobs were profound and heavy.

“Ellen,” he said, and then he reached out and touched her for the first time, her shoulder and part of her soft white neck. It was as if he had touched fire. A huge tingling ran through him and he became rigid. Then desire struck him even while his pity and tenderness increased, and it was a desire greater than any other he had experienced before. He forgot that she was still almost a child; to him she had become the beloved and mourning woman whom he must comfort, and then take, not only with lust, but in consolation and love and protectiveness.

Ellen had become still at his touch. She had stopped weeping. Slowly, she dropped her hands and lifted her wet face to him, mutely, unashamed, piteously confident of understanding, helplessly waiting for solace. When he reached out and raised her from her chair she came into his arms at once. She was silent, but her tears still ran over her cheeks. He looked down at her. He felt his arms were filled with the whole world, rich and satisfying and infinitely inciting and adorable.

Instinctively, and with the passion of love, she pressed her face into his shoulder and her young arms rose and wrapped themselves about his neck, and all the suffering—nameless though it was—was swept away in an almost unbearable bliss. She felt the strength of his arms about her; it was as if she had reached an impregnable shelter, a home, which nothing could threaten, and that she was safe at last from the agony she had endured all her short life. When he gently kissed her lips she answered that kiss with fervent innocence and trust.

Jeremy held her gently, then with increasing passion, smoothing her long hair with his hand, pressing her closer to him, and she pressed in return. Then, though he longed to take her, he wanted nothing more than to lie down beside her in a soft dark place and hold her and speak soothingly and lovingly to one who had never heard these things before, and to take her somewhere where she would be secure and never menaced again, never hungry, never driven to labor and torment.

Neither of them in their perfect communion heard the door open and neither of them heard two simultaneous gasps.

Then a man exclaimed, “Oh, in the name of God! What is this?”

A woman cried shrilly, “Well, I never! I never, never!”

The gaslight flared up and Jeremy and Ellen blinked confusedly in the glare, and drew apart, and Jeremy said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

C H A P T E R   6

FRANCIS HAD ENDURED HIS UNCLE’S long and incoherent though vigorous speech, which everyone but himself had applauded. He had endured the brass band through all its marches and was then too sluggish to enjoy the other music. Besides, he did not care for German airs; they conjured up suffering and death, both of which made him uneasy, restless and afraid. He was no man to face realities. He had a horror of grim actuality and confrontation with life as it is. It was his absurd belief that if it were not for “them” existence could be pure and simple and “good” and just and rich, but who were those who opposed this Utopia he was not quite certain. He was only certain they existed—somewhere, brooding over their heaps of gold. The fact that his father was a very rich man did not annoy him. Those riches provided for his ease, which he considered only his due. Had he asked to be born? The fact that the world had not asked him to be born, either, never occurred to him. Or, rather, if it did occur he hastily obliterated it. He preferred to consider himself a “victim.”

Yet he was not a hypocrite in his convictions. He was entirely sincere, a fact which vexed his cousin Jeremy Porter, for Jeremy would often say that a hypocrite who knows he is a hypocrite is less dangerous than a man who does not know it, and acts accordingly. The fact was that Francis was also a gentle and kindly young man, who frequently had generous impulses, though these were conditioned by inner winces. He was penurious by nature, and in this he resembled his fellow “humanitarians.” Jeremy considered him a disaster to the world, for Francis was more or less convinced, though secretly, that he was of the elite. He thought the manner in which the world was established was cruel and barbarous, heartless and unjust. Therefore, he was born to rescue mankind and deliver it from his version of injustice. He was not—though he insisted he was—truly egalitarian. Deep in his subconscious mind was the view—which he shared with his fraternity—that “one day” society would be rearranged in a new hierarchy—with himself and his brothers in absolute control.

It never occurred to Francis to help the “exploited” to a new dimension of existence, where they would have valid opportunities to improve themselves, and new horizons and new potentials for exerting their innate gifts. On the other hand, Jeremy was all for giving every man an opportunity’ to use his talents, unrestricted by poverty, despair, and evil circumstance, and to alleviate his hopelessness. Francis wished to help “the oppressed” through better wages, more food, adequate shelter, and more leisure. That these were not complete fulfillment, and left the immortal human soul still bare and unsatisfied, did not occur to him. He believed that the “exploited” wanted only to be physically comfortable. Jeremy was, therefore, closer to the hoped-for liberation of mankind from dire existence than was Francis.

In short, Jeremy was concerned with the whole of mankind, body and soul. Francis was concerned only with its animal appetites, thus relegating man to the level of well-fed domestic animals. (He excluded himself from this bestiality, of course, for was he not of superior birth and education?) Jeremy believed that the world had not yet taken full advantage of the endowments of men; Francis believed that the “proletariat” desired only mean gratifications and pleasures, with firm punishment, certainly, if they dared threaten his own high position and sanctity.

Jeremy despised fools, whiners, the greedy, the lazy, and the incompetent. Francis thought the misfits “pathetic” and resented the industrious and the independent, who, he thought in his vague if passionate way, were the “exploiters.”

These were impassable differences between the cousins, and so they were always to be divided, and felt for each a strong hatred, and extended this hatred into situations which had no bearing on their philosophies at all. The fact that Jeremy had a profound respect for all that was truly human, and that Francis wished only to direct its destiny into dialectical materialism—with himself guiding that destiny—made them irreconcilable enemies, and affected their relations with others, in a very immaterial fashion. Their terms could never meet; their semantics were based on inherent character.

Their grim conflict rose to violent heights when Francis and Mrs. Jardin confronted Jeremy and Ellen in the kitchen of the Porter house. Francis had become so bored with the Independence Day proceedings that he had developed a “fever.” Mrs. Jardin, who was also bored, had wished to return to her beloved kitchen. So Francis had brought her home. (Francis had been bored because he did not believe in the Constitution of the United States and resented it. He considered it a “document for the oppression of mankind.”)

Francis cried, “How dare you! What are you doing to that innocent girl?”

“Innocent?” shrilled Mrs. Jardin. “That thing, that strumpet that trollop? Look at her! All rumpled and red in the face, but not with shame, you can be sure! There’s no shame in her. Bad, bad, bad from the day she was born and I warned Mrs. Porter, but she—”

“Shut up,” said Jeremy. He turned to Francis and his dark face became darker with contempt and repugnance. “What am I doing? I am trying to comfort an unfortunate girl who has been abused all her life. Sit down, Ellen,” and he took her by her trembling arm and led her to a chair, then stood beside her with his protecting hand on her shoulder. She crouched on the chair, forlorn and silently weeping. She began to remove the tears with the back of her hand.

Francis took a step towards her, but Jeremy clenched his fist and made a threatening gesture with it. It was evident, by his expression, that he hoped his cousin would advance on him. Francis discreetly stood back, but his light-blue eyes glittered with hatred.