Thunder on the Left (1925)/Chapter 21
JOYCE had slipped out early. There was something unbearable in the house's morning stir, its sense of preparation for living in which she would have no part.
Under the pine trees she was far enough from the house to consider it as a whole. She studied its weatherbeaten secrecy. She had the anxious apprehension of the artist, who needs to feel his subject, purge it of mere reality, before he can begin work. The long line of the roof sagged a little, like an animal inured to carry burdens. The two semicircled bays, flanking the veranda, kept the garden under scrutiny. Each of all those windows had its own outlook on life. A thread of smoke stole from the kitchen chimney, sifting into the hazy morning. Imperceptible greyness was in the nebulous light, filtered through a gauze of ocean fog. The house was waiting, waiting. That vapoury air dimmed the bright world like breath on a mirror. Yet, for her mood, it was somehow right. A morning of fire and blue would have been indecent.
Houses, built for rest and safety, and then filled with the tension of such trivial sufferings. I wonder if any one has ever done a true portrait of a house? The opaque pearly light now seemed to her more sincere than any glamour of sun or moon. But how reluctant it was to surrender its meaning. She could hear the excited voices of the children, calling to and fro. Her mind was still pursuing something, she didn't know just what. It was like trying to think of a forgotten word. The house hasn't yet quite got over being empty so long, she thought. It's still a little bit empty. Or it believed that being lived in again would be such fun, and now it's disappointed. It had forgotten that life is like this.
She began to paint. This picture was for George, to remind him of things he did not know he knew. It must have love in it, and something more, too. The name of this picture, she said to herself, is A Portrait of a House Saying Good-bye.
The shading was very odd along the veranda, between the two turreted bays and beneath the overhang of the sleeping porch. The light came from no direction, it was latent and diffused, softened in slopes and patches among many angles. She had already dabbed in the profile of the building when she realized what it was that she wanted. It was not the outside of the house but an interior that was forming in her mind. She left the outline tentative, as it was, and imagined the side of the house to be transparent. Under the sharp projection of the balcony her brush struck through the glassed veranda and found itself in the dining room. The tinted panes gave her a clean spot of colour to focus on. Below these the room was obscure, but then the brush had discovered a pool of candlelight to dip in. Shadowy figures were sitting there, but just as she was about to sketch them they seemed to dissolve from their chairs and run toward the windows, looking outward furtively. There was another, too, outside the little sitting room, whispering in a dapple of black and silver chiaroscuro. Oh, if I could only catch what this means. If someone could help me. If George were here to help me. His large patience, his dear considering voice with the wandering parentheses of thought that she had so often mocked and loved. Voice so near her now and soon so impossible to hear. No one would help her. No one can ever help the artist. Others she saves, herself she cannot save. . . .
She had saved him. She had saved Phyllis's George, given Phyllis the greatest gift of all. Given her back those Georges, enriched with understanding and fear. But could she save her own poor phantom, or even herself? At any rate she was going back to her own life. She thought of that adored city waiting for her, its steep geometries of building, its thousand glimpses that inflame the artist's eye. Extraordinary: you'd expect to find a painter exultantly at work on every street corner; and how rarely you see 'em!—The correct miseries of polite departure, a few gruesome hours in the train (ripping out the stitches of her golden fancy) and she would be there. There, where the whole vast miracle seemed, in moments of ecstasy, to have been planned for her special amazement and pleasure. The subway, with rows of shrewd and weary faces; girls with their short skirts and vivid scarves; men with shaven, sharply modelled mouths . . . the endless beauty of people, and their blessed insensibility to the infernal pang. . . . Yes, that was what Phyllis could do for him better than she: dull and deaden that nerve in his mind: chloroform George the Fourth, the poor little bastard!
She was going back to her own life. Back to the civilized pains of art: its nostalgia for lost simplicity, its full and generous tolerance, its self-studious doubt, its divinely useless mirth, its disregard of things not worth discussing among the cheerfully disenchanted. Ah, never try to explain things you know are true. As soon as you begin to do that, they seem doubtful.
A darkness kept coming into the picture. It was as though the silence that had been stored up in that house was now draining out of it, seeping into the absorbent air. The fog was thickening and distorted perspectives. The house was out of drawing. That tricky shadow under the balcony was baffling: it made the whole porch seem out of plumb. Holding up a brush to get a true horizontal, she saw that Martin was coming across the lawn.
"Why, it's Bunny!" he said, pointing to the figure she had suggested with a few hasty strokes. "I know now why she wanted you to help me."
Joyce did not look up.
"You must go, at once," she said.
"I was lying in bed, waiting for it to be time to get up. I saw that some of the wallpaper, by the window, was torn. When I looked at it I found the mouse pattern underneath. It's the old nursery."
"That's what Bunny meant! Go and look in the cupboard, see if you can find it, the mouse I gave you. That's your only chance."
"I think I understand now."
"You mean, you know that we're the same"
"Yes, that this is what we're all coming to. Except Bunny . . . and—and you. You haven't done it, not quite. . . ."
"Martin, I'm worst of all," she cried. "I'm neither one nor the other."
"No, I think Ben is the worst," he said slowly. "It's too bad; he was such a nice boy. Of course George is pretty awful, but I didn't know him before."
"Quick, go away. Don't try to learn too much. You must go for their sake. If they find out who you are"
She had a sick presentiment that they must hurry. And still he lingered, and she could feel Time sloping toward some bottomless plunge.
"Perhaps I don't want to go. There's something I don't quite understand. You all look at each other so queerly: look, and then turn away. And you and George in the garden. What is it? What's happened that hurts you all so?"
How could she answer? How tell him that the world is often too fierce for its poor creatures, overstrains and soils them in their most secret nerves; and that with all their horrors they would not have it otherwise. He had come like the unspoiled essence of living, groping blindly for what it divines to be happy and real and true; he was thwarted and damned by the murderous pettiness of his own scarred brethren. If I had two friends called Food and Hunger, I'd never introduce them to each other. Must she, who was born to love him, be the one to tell him this?
"You must go. Don't you see, it isn't only us. It's you too. You and George. . . . Oh, I tried not to tell you. George is just you grown up."
He looked at her, appalled.
"You're the George that was once. That's why he hates you so.—You're George the Fifth, I suppose," she said, forgetting he wouldn't understand.
"I won't be like George!" he exclaimed. "But I shan't go unless you'll come with me. It wouldn't be any fun unless you were there. Help us to get away, and we'll never come again."
She did not tell him that she could never go back; that he must go alone; that they would always be lonely.
"Are you sure?" he asked pitiably. "Have I got to be like that? Like George, I mean?"
"Hurry, hurry," was all she could say.
He was running toward the house.
She tried to follow, but some sluggish seizure was about her limbs. The house, shadowy in deepening mist, loomed over her. She seemed to hear its passages patter with racing feet. There was a face at the pantry window. Perhaps there was a face at every window. There always is. She dared not look.
There were racing feet. The three children burst onto the porch above her.
"Time for breakfast!" they called. "And then we'll be ready for the Picnic!"
Now she knew. The whole dumb face of the house had been warning her; George's premonition last night was the same. She tried wildly to wave them back, but her voice was sealed. Frolicking with anticipation, Janet and Sylvia and Rose ran to the railing and leaned over to shout to her.
"See if there are any cobwebs! If there are, it's not going to rain."
Time swayed over her like an impending tree, tremulous, almost cut through. It seemed so gingerly poised that perhaps the mere fury of her will could hold it stable for a moment. Where was Martin? Oh, if he found the mouse in time he would get back before this happened and perhaps his memory would be wiped clean. She saw George appear at the door of the porch with tools in his hands, and his face turn ghastly.
"We're going to have ginger ale at the Picnic," Sylvia was calling.
She tried to hold Time still with her mind. She was frantically motioning the children back, crying out and wondering whether her voice made any sound. The balustrade was going, she saw the old splintery wood cracking, swaying, sagging. There was a snapping crash of breaking posts. The children's faces, flushed with gaiety, their mouths open, suddenly changed. They leaned forward and still farther forward, holding out their arms to her as though for an embrace. They were beginning to fall. After so many little tears and troubles, how could they know that this was more than one last strange tenderness. And as the railing shattered and they fell, she saw that Martin was at the door of the porch. He had found it.