This was particularly trying for me as he had chosen me for the confidant of his “clean” passion for Lucy.
Lucy was all that Maine unconsciously potentially typified. She spent her winters raving in sanatoriums — in summer she had the most astounding mixture of the complacency of a cow and the brightness of a robin— In summer although she lived in the going on, fastest set in New York — she was the cleanest thing I have ever met. She always looked as if she were about to sing in the church choir, but in the sanatorium, even the interns were said to have learnt from her.
Maine responded. Although the mind of Maine was differently divided, keeping its sanatorium within and not without, perpetually and not intermittently — it knew at once that Lucy was like itself — quite clean.
Maine adored her — she also was never averse to lending a hand, at a little sweeping, a little shaking out.
John Straher would switch at his horse and chew a wisp with such dynamic meditation that it was painful to set within range of his knit eyebrows—
He would wag his beautiful iron-grey head in horrible perplexity and say,
I do like Lucy, I do like Lucy, gosh how I do like Lucy. She’s a nice girl is Lucy — I never saway a nicer girl than Lucy. She’s a clean girl is Lucy.
His chest would heave with a bewilderment that was tearing it. He would even whip his horse.
Then his eyes would clear with a potential poetry, that filled his conception of Lucy with the fleeing beauty of the laden autumn hedgerows — and his silence. And when he could bear it no longer, he would strike his knee with his twitching corded hand — and say—
I do like Lucy.
A short conversation for a long drive; other men with the same kind of faces had made me their confidant, they had told me how “her” body was a vase of fairest alabaster, and how they had longed to break it and sprinkle the ruby wine of “her” warm young life upon the altar of eternity— One had told how he had clasped her beautiful throat and pressed her head down, down — (nearly) — into the glowing embers of the hearth — because they were both seekers of new sensations.
These things are difficult for such as do not read the smart set to understand— John Straher was after all more lucid— Yet one wished for his own sake that he had a word or two to spare. A tremendous deal of shy sympathy — for Lucy was idiotically delightful — and a superhuman wrestle with his mind — at least achieved his fullest measure of expression.
I feel, I feel, that if she were ever sick, I should take her home to my house and nurse her— Yes! More, I should give her the best there is.
I do like Lucy.
Gosh she’s a nice girl is Lucy—
If she were sick I would nurse her.
This is a clean thing mind you. I could look her husband in the eyes any day.
But suppose she were to fall sick when her husband was in New York— Why shouldn’t I take her home and nurse her? I never seen such a nice girl as Lucy.
With nothing but a pocket vocabulary a man that looked at you like that — could have done horrible damage. As things were, it was his pleasingly redemptive doom to disappoint woman at once — but not later—
Lucy did just wish he had lived in Manhattan—
Love can talk to its “each other” with many couplings of languages as Malayan and French — but not in the language of Maine — to Maine.
I have tried to imagine how Mr. and Mrs. Granger for instance whose enlarged bridal portraits hung over the cottage grand had initiated the honeymoon with
Gosh you are a clean man—
Say but you’re a clean girl
— there was the son in the den to account for.
This stranger, this guest entertained unawares whose incognito Freud has forever unveiled. The worthies of Maine in banishment from their own breasts preferred to have taken murky refuge in their neighbours’.
They denounced “it” for they knew it must be somewhere about.
The ray of the clean mind of Maine swept through its habitations like a search light, in which those poor stark unprotected wooden houses gave a perfect representation of living “morally” inside out.
The guest that lurks even as it lurked in those steaming swamps of a yet unpopulated planet — in the hot mud and the primeval bottom of the Maine consciousness.
We were driving back. John’s horse was hoofing up a cloud of dust and John having relieved himself of his unpronounceable aspirations, his Maine masked élan vers l’idéal had his reaction. He became voluble. He was talking about the neighbours.
He told me that Mrs. Granger’s son had syphilis — that he was a devil with the women — and had imparted it to every school girl — in the village. Where every moment of everyone’s time was so meticulously “counted,” where every door and every window — so collectively and so incessantly watched — where everyone one with every reason had ascribed that particular attribute of God — allseeing — to the villagers.
Young Granger had violated the innocent who returned from school along the short straight roadway under the long straight eyes of the Maine mothers watching from their well scoured stoops. He had walked diabolically abroad when doors were doubly locked and dogs barked — and grandparents slept lightly.
He had lived “conquering” while his mother’s manifold chores had to be accomplished, his spirit like the werewolf — had miraculously emanated while he sat nightly by the window of the den without shades, transparent curtains in the bright light of the lamp, fondling his fraternity relics on the wall — and learning the danger of incurring the enmity of a people that have the gift of song.
When John Straher sang his song of Young Granger, he had that same suspicious, half tame gesture of self protectingly pushing something out of him into anywhere — no matter where else — with which I had seen Young Granger regard the women from New York, and indeed everyone except his excellent Mamma.
This black magical quality seemed according to my raconteur to be inherent to every inhabitant of Maine — and gradually as we neared the village post office where from so very far away — we could descry the most fearful miscreants leaning, as they did every night against the wooden posts and door jambs, dangling their unformulated legs from the fence — chewing their wisps of chaw — and looking seemingly out onto the infinite horizon of blind men—
As we neared this post office, I learned that some members of “our” party had already, after an unwilling stay of 48 hours, become intricated in the local saga.
The Prince who divided his attention seemingly between his monocle and his motherless boy — had issued out upon the evening of our arrival — at such time as he was actually telling us ghost stories round the log fire — to patting John Staher intimately on the back—“the filthy libertine” enquired, “Where can I find one about here?”
And had been directed to the only thing they had of that description—
“Bad Mary of Maine.”
Bad Mary was pretty bad — she was old angry and dusty and when I saw her, she was tramping up from a great distance with a basket of raspberries as her official presentation to the visitors, and she also proffered her desire to sweep anything up, to shake anything out.
There had been, according to John, nobody who had not benefitted by the embraces of those branchlike work-ridden arms and hands — the glances of that slightly glazing eye.
It was widely known that she preserved the portrait of a Spanish sailor who had once lain low with measles in her husband’s shack — and had moreover received a letter of thanks from him on his subsequent voyage.