“It is astounding that we should meet again like this!”
It was a mistake — but Cynthia met it lightly.
“Isn’t it? It makes one feel—” She hesitated, and gave a little laugh in which there was no tension, but rather an assumption of security and distance, the perfection and inviolability of her personal view, which she need not, if she did not wish, bother to communicate to him.
“How small the world is?” laughed Demarest.
“Oh, that! if you like … I was thinking rather, that it made one feel like Buddhists, or some such thing — meeting, reincarnated, every thousand years or so; and always in the same way; and always inconsequentially; and always with tremendous surprise.”
She smiled at him delightfully, again rocking back with Hindu-bright elbows, on the railing, which burned vivid and real against the darkness of the sea. The familiar shape of her arms, the familiar gesture and attitude, the colors, the youthful frankness, all these, together, suddenly released in him a torrent of remembered feelings.
“Pilgrims,” he said — falling in with her image, in which she had so candidly delighted—“who meet once in every cycle for the exchange of a remark on the weather? If they have anything so mundane as weather in their purgatories and paradises!”
“And infernos.”
“Yes!”
The two women approached, slowing their steps a little.
“Mother — you remember Mr. Demarest?”
“How do you do.”
“How do you do.”
To the pale girl, who stood under the light, waiting cynically, he was not introduced. Flight, prearranged, was in the air.
“I’ll let you rejoin your friend,” said Cynthia, moving off slowly. Smith! His friend Smith!
She smiled: Demarest smiled and nodded: and the three women walked swiftly away. Good God — Good God — said the blood beating in his brain. He moved blindly toward the companionway. He must rejoin his friend — by all means. Yes. And he must take his friend down to the other deck — he suddenly felt that he didn’t want to face them again, particularly with old Smith by his side; Smith and his comic-opera tweed hat. Nothing first class about Smith! Ha ha. Nor about himself either. He hadn’t had time, worse luck, for the necessary light touch on that point. How awful. She would look for him in the passenger list, and not find him, and laugh. How much it would explain to her! “Mother — how very funny. Mr. Demarest must be in the second cabin!” “Funny? It doesn’t especially surprise me — I always felt there was something—” Et cetera. Then that pale girl, cynical — she would laugh, too. They would all laugh merrily together, with heads thrown back. What the Spanish call carcajada—loud laughter, boisterous and derisive. Sexual laughter, the ringing scorn of the female for the defeated or cowardly male, the skulker … He rounded the corner, but there was no Smith. Instead, at the far end, he saw the three women coming toward him. Cynthia appeared to be talking, the others turning their heads toward her. He must escape. Irresolute, he began pretending (absurd) that he was looking for a lost friend. What — he isn’t here? Then I’d better turn. He turned, went briskly around the corner again, then rattled down the companionway.
In the smoking room, as he paid for his glass of port, Smith reappeared.
“Well, who’s your swell friend?” he said, composing himself in the corner.
“Ah, that’s the great chimera I was telling you about.”
“What! The one you were going to see? How come?”
“The chimera — more so than ever,” murmured Demarest. “Have a game?”
“Sure, I don’t mind.”
IV
Zring, went the Irish girl’s bed curtains again, and tschunk went the electric switch on the wall, leaving dark the reticulated grill over the upper berth; and then the bunk creaked, and creaked sea-sawingly; as the Irish girl got into it, and creaked as she corkscrewed her Irish body down the ship-folded bedclothes; and an elbow thumped the matchboard partition close to Demarest’s ear, and then grazingly bruised it again, and then a padded round knee bumped, and the elbow again more softly knocked … Who’s there, i’ the name of the devil?… Is it you, strumpet? Knock again. Knock at the door, or come in without knocking. Is it you, darling? In the dark? where? Listen to the wind moaning, humming through the ventilators. Listen to the sea, the vast sound of sea, pouring down into the infinite, cataract of the world. What are we? We are silences drowned in an abyss of sound. The ship is sinking. The world is sinking. God is sinking. What difference, therefore, does it make who you are? Don’t pause to knock, but approach swiftly through the night of sound and water, step serenely from thrum to thrum of the ship’s engines, from heartbeat to heartbeat of the terraqueous god. Is it you, with the candle in your hand, you in a nightgown? Ah Psyche with the regions which! You with a pocket flashlight? In, in brief candle! We’ll fear not for scandal. But diddle and dandle. And fondle and fry. Seven bells; the ship, sleepwalking, tintinnabulates like a gipsy. The shipboy, hearing bells below him, looking down at the dark ship, and dark decks, and dark sea, and the dark bow lowering into a wide dim wash of white, and the dark waves coming white-maned and flattening in white — the shipboy sleepily strikes once the small sea bell, and the bird of sad sound flies on short quick wings into the infinite misery … MISERY … Misery is consciousness. Misery is death. Misery is birth. Misery is creation. Rain is falling in Portobello Road, the evening is winter, the cobbled mud is inferno, and the cold rain slowly falls in large, fat flakes, larghe falde, snowflakes falling into slime and grease. The man, shuffling, undersized, leans pushing the barrow, on which lies the two-year-old boy under rags of sacking, unmoving, turning only his large eyes full of pain. The woman hobbles beside the barrow, weeping, pressing the back of a blue hand against her cheek, turning her shrunken face to one side and downward as she whines. The man is silent, pushing the barrow rapidly; the woman trots. Rain falls into the boy’s eyes. They are hurrying home … The man is thinking, while the dirty water runs under his cap and down his face, he is used to it, he doesn’t mind the cold trickle among his hair and down his neck — but this other thing he is not used to, he wants to shout out something horrible about it, shaking his fist, except that he is too tired and can’t find the words. Let me dictate for you a course of action which will satisfy this longing. Begin by shouting at your woman—“For Christ’s sake shut your jaw and stop your bloody whining. Stop it, or I’ll knock your damn teeth out.” Continue by striking her once in the back of the neck, so that she stumbles and falls into a puddle, moaning, and kneels there, moaning, as if unable to move. Grab her arm, twist it, and wrench the slattern to her feet. Hit her again, this time in the face, your fingers open — the slap will warm your hand. Shout at her, so that all the people in Portobello Road will hear. “What’s the matter — are you drunk? I’ll black your eye for you if you don’t get a move on you.” Think again. Think of nothing but misery, of Portobello Road endless and eternal, of yourself and your slut and your paralyzed boy walking there in the winter rain forever. Do you require speech? Would it do you good to abuse her, to call her a draggle-tailed, snaggle-toothed, swaggle-bellied, broken-gaited ronyon? Enumerate her physical defects. A wart over her left eye; a wart on her right eyelid; a wart (with hairs on it) on the chin; a pendulous wart, like a little pink cauliflower, coral-hued and corrupt, between the lean breasts; and a sore on the right thigh. Scars on the legs, bluish or coppery. Puncture wounds on the inner surface of the left arm, below the joint: five, and red. Five corresponding puncture wounds on your own left arm. Blest be the marriage betwixt earth and heaven! Now, — in the open sore of space, — the mortal son and the daughter immoral, make of the world their trysting place. Ten positives in succession, the hollow steel needle pricking and sliding under the taut skin, and into the swollen vein, the glass tube steadily filling with poisoned blood as the little steel piston withdraws. The blessed spirochete. Swarms. The blood boiling with hook-nosed spirochetes. MISERY. Horror, the maggot, hatches and quarries in the very pulse of love. Rain is falling in Portobello Road, hissing in the paraffin flares that light the barrows and crowds, illuminating the bestial faces and dirty hands. Barrows heaped with kippers. Rotten cabbages, rain-soaked. Collar buttons and woolen stockings. Terracotta Venuses. Winkles. Toy balloons. Detumescent pigs singing like cicadas on a hot night in New Jersey. The man, undersized, leans pushing the barrow on which the boy lies unmoving, turning an apathetic eye toward the smoky flares. The woman trots, moaning. Announce your grief. Stand at the corner where the crowd is densest, and shout it to them pitilessly—“You think you are miserable, do you! Well, look at me, look at us! Syphilis, that’s what we got, syphilis!” … This was where Goya lived: in Portobello Road. The man pushing the barrow was Goya. The woman, trotting and whining, with averted eyes, was Goya. Goya was the paralyzed boy lying numb and cold under wet-glazed rags. Goya sold maggoty kippers from a torchlit barrow: he inflated the singing pig, over and over again.