“Jehovah, Sabaoth, Elohim, Eloi, Helion, Jodhevah, Shaddai! May God give us to die in our own way! I haunt the
pissoirs
as naturally as Highland Mary her cows down by the Dee—and by the Hobs of Hell, I’ve seen the same thing work in a girl. But I’ll bring that up later! I’ve given my destiny away by garrulity, like ninety per cent of everybody else—for, no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar. Is it my fault that my only fireside is the outhouse? And that I can never hang my muffler, mittens and Bannybrook umbrella on anything better than a bit of tin boarding as high as my eyes, having to be brave, no matter what, to keep the mascara from running away? And do you think that those circular cottages have not brought me to great argument? Have you ever glanced at one when the night was well down, and seen it and what it looked like and resembled most, with its one coping and a hundred legs? A centipede. And you look down and choose your feet, and, ten to one, you find a bird with a light wing, or an old duck with a wooden knee, or something that has been mournful for years. What? I’ve held argument with others at long tables all night through about the particular merits of one district over another for such things, of one cottage over another for such things. And do you suppose I was agreed with, and had anyone any other one’s ideas? There was as much disagreement as there might have been had we all been selecting a new order of government. Jed would say North, and Jod would say South, and me sitting between them going mad because I am a doctor and a collector and a talker of Latin, and a sort of petropus of the twilight and a physiognomist that can’t be flustered by the wrong feature on the right face, and I said that the best port was at the
Place de la Bastille
. Whereupon I was torn into parts by a hundred voices—each of them pitched in a different
arrondissement
, until I began clapping like the good woman in the shoe, and screaming for silence; and for witchery I banged the table with a
formidable
and yelled out loud: ‘Do any of you know anything about atmosphere and sea level? Well,’ I says, ‘sea level and atmospheric pressure and topography make all the difference in the world!’ My voice cracked on the word ‘difference,’ soaring up divinely, and I said: ‘If you think that certain things do not show from what district they come, yea, even to an
arrondissement
, then you are not out gunning for particular game, but simply any catch, and I’ll have nothing to do with you! I do not discuss weighty matters with water wits!’ And at that I ordered another and sat with my chin up. ‘But,’ said one fellow, ‘it’s the face that you tell by.’ ‘Faces is it!’ I screamed, ‘the face is for fools! If you fish by the face you fish out trouble, but there’s always other fish when you deal with the sea. The face is what anglers catch in the daylight, but the sea is the night!’”
Nora turned away. “What am I to do?”
“Ah, mighty uncertainty!” said the doctor. “Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse-meat that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears. Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.”
Tears began to run down Nora’s face.
“And do I know my Sodomites?” the doctor said unhappily, “and what the heart goes bang up against if it loves one of them, especially if it’s a woman loving one of them. What do they find then, that this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and they come down with a dummy in their arms. God’s last round, shadow-boxing, that the heart may be murdered and swept into that still quiet place where it can sit and say: ‘Once I was, now I can rest.’
“Well, that’s only part of it,” he said, trying to stop her crying, “and though your normal fellow will say all are alike in the dark, negro or white, I say you can tell them, and where they came from, and what quarter they frequent, by the size and excellence—and at the Bastille (and may I be believed) they come as handsome as
mortadellas
slung on a table.
“Your
gourmet
knows, for instance, from what water his fish was snatched, he knows from what district and to what year he blesses his wine, he knows one truffle from another and whether it be Brittany root or if it came down from the North, but you gentlemen sit here and tell me that the district makes no difference—is there no one who knows anything but myself? And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
“Have I not shut my eyes with the added shutter of the night and put my hand out? And it’s the same with girls,” he said, “those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary. They acquire an ‘unwilling’ set of features. They become old without reward, the widower bird sitting sighing at the turnstile of heaven, ‘Hallelujah! I am sticked!
Skoll! Skoll!
I am dying!’
“Or walks the floor, holding her hands; or lies upon the floor, face down, with that terrible longing of the body that would, in misery, be flat with the floor; lost lower than burial, utterly blotted out and erased so that no stain of her could ache upon the wood, or snatched back to nothing without aim—going backward through the target, taking with her the spot where she made one—”
“Yes!” Nora said.
“Look for the girls also in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication:
“‘May you be damned to hell! May you die standing upright! May you be damned upward! May this be damned, terrible and damned spot! May it wither into the grin of the dead, may this draw back, low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin! May this be your torment, may this be your damnation! God damned me before you, and after me you shall be damned, kneeling and standing away till we vanish! For what do you know of me, man’s meat? I’m an angel on all fours, with a child’s feet behind me, seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters of night at the water hole of the damned, and I go into the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me? May you pass from me, damned girl! Damned and betraying!’
“There’s a curse for you,” he said, “and I have heard it.”
“Oh!” Nora said. “Don’t—don’t!”
“But,” he continued, “if you think that is all of the night, you’re crazy! Groom, bring the shovel! Am I the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom, the Greek who said it with the other cheek? No, I’m a fart in a gale of wind, an humble violet under a cow pad. But,” he said with sorrow, “even the evil in us comes to an end, errors may make you immortal—one woman went down the ages for sitting through
Parsifal
up to the point where the swan got his death, whereupon she screamed out, ‘Godamercy, they have shot the Holy Grail!’—but not everyone is as good as that; you lay up for yourself in your old age, Nora, my child, feebleness enough to forget the passions of your youth, which you spent your years in strengthening. Think of that also. As for me, I tuck myself in at night, well content because I am my own charlatan. Yes, I, the Lily of Killarney, am composing me a new song, with tears and with jealousy, because I have read that John was his favourite, and it should have been me, Prester Matthew! The song is entitled, ‘Mother, put the wheel away, I cannot spin tonight.’ Its other name, ‘According to me, everyone is a kind-of-a-son-of-a-bitch,’ to be sung to two ocarinas and one concertina, and, if none of the world is about, to a Jew’s-harp, so help me God! I am but a little child with my eyes wide open!”
“Matthew,” Nora said, “what will become of her? That’s what I want to know.”
“To our friends,” he answered, “we die every day, but to ourselves we die only at the end. We do not know death, or how often it has essayed our most vital spirit. While we are in the parlour it is visiting in the pantry. Montaigne says: ‘To kill a man there is required a bright shining and clear light,’ but that was spoken of the conscience toward another man. But what of our own death—permit us to reproach the night, wherein we die manifold alone. Donne says: ‘We are all conceived in close prison, in our mothers’ wombs we are close prisoners all. When we are born, we are but born to the liberty of the house—all our life is but a going out to the place of execution and death. Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep?’ Yet he says, ‘Men sleep all the way.’ How much more, therefore, is there upon him a close sleep when he is mounted on darkness.”
“Yes,” she said, “but—”
“Now, wait a minute! It’s all of a certain night that I’m coming to, that I take so long coming to it,” he said, “a night in the branchy pitch of fall—the particular night you want to know about—for I’m a fisher of men and my gimp is doing a
saltarello
over every body of water to fetch up what it may. I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
“Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes; this is its wonderful unhappiness—and now I am come to Jenny—oh, Lord, why do women have partridge blood and set out to beat up trouble? The places Jenny moults in are her only distinction, a Christian with a wanderer’s rump. She smiles, and it is the wide smile of the self-abused, radiating to the face from some localized centre disturbance, the personification of the ‘thief.’ She has a longing for other people’s property, but the moment she possesses it the property loses some of its value, for the owner’s estimate is its worth. Therefore it was she took your Robin.”
“What is she like?” Nora asked.
“Well,” said the doctor, “I have always thought I, myself, the funniest-looking creature on the face of the earth; then I laid my eyes on Jenny—a little, hurried decaying comedy jester, the face on the fool’s-stick, and with a smell about her of mouse-nests. She is a ‘looter,’ and eternally nervous. Even in her sleep I’ll pronounce that her feet twitch and her orifices expand and contract like the iris of a suspicious eye. She speaks of people taking away her ‘faith’ in them, as if faith were a transportable object—all her life she has been subject to the feeling of ‘removal.’ Were she a soldier she would define defeat with the sentence: ‘The enemy took the war away.’ Having a conviction that she is somehow reduced, she sets about collecting a destiny—and for her, the sole destiny is love, anyone’s love and so her own. So only someone’s love is her love. The cock crew and she was laid—her present is always someone else’s past, jerked out and dangling.
“Yet what she steals she keeps, through the incomparable fascination of maturation and rot. She has the strength of an incomplete accident—one is always waiting for the rest of it, for the last impurity that will make the whole; she was born at the point of death, but, unfortunately, she will not age into youth—which is a grave mistake of nature. How more tidy had it been to have been born old and have aged into a child, brought finally to the brink, not of the grave, but of the womb; in our age bred up into infants searching for a womb to crawl into, not be made to walk loth the gingerly dust of death, but to find a moist, gillflirted way. And a funny sight it would be to see us going to our separate lairs at the end of day, women wincing with terror, not daring to set foot to the street for fear of it.
“But I’m coming by degrees to the narrative of the one particular night that makes all other nights seem like something quite decent enough—and that was the night when, dressed in openwork mittens, showing the edge of a pantaloon (and certainly they had been out of style three mothers behind her), Jenny Petherbridge—for that is her name in case you’d care to know it,” he said with a grin, “wrapped in a shawl of Spanish insight and Madrid fancy (as a matter of fact, the costume came later, but what do I care?)—stepped out in the early fall of the year to the Opera—I think, and I am not mistaken, it was nothing better than
Rigoletto
—walking in the galleries and whisking her eyes about for trouble—that she swore, even after, she had really never wanted to know anything about—and there laid her eyes on Robin, who was leaning forward in a box, and me pacing up and down, talking to myself in the best
Comédie Française
French, trying to keep off what I knew was going to be trouble for a generation, and wishing I was hearing the Schumann cycle—when in swishes the old sow of a Danish count. My heart aches for all poor creatures putting on dog and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it from. And I began to think, and I don’t know why, of the closed gardens of the world where all people can make their thoughts go up high because of the narrowness and beauty, or of the wide fields where the heart can spread out and thin its vulgarity (it’s why I eat salad), and I thought we should all have a place to throw our flowers in, like me who, once in my youth, rated a
corbeille
of moth-orchids—and did I keep them? Don’t get restless—I’m coming back to the point. No, I sat beside them a little while having my tea, and saying to myself, ‘You’re a pretty lot, and you do my cupboard honour, but there’s a better place awaiting you—’ and with that I took them by the hand around to the Catholic church, and I said, ‘God is what we make Him, and life doesn’t seem to be getting any better,’ and tiptoed out.