“What are you doing here, boy?” I said.
“I’m going to sleep with you,” he said, and took off his jacket.
“Are you mad, child, taking your jacket off in here?” I said. “Put it on again at once.”
“I am neither a child nor a boy,” he said. “I want to sleep with you.”
“Yes, but you’re a philosopher,” I said. “Philosophers don’t sleep with people.”
“This isn’t a world to philosophize about,” he said, “so the next step is to abandon philosophy. The only thing I know is that you attacked me just now and I felt you; so the next step is to sleep with you. Let me into bed.”
“That’s not the way to go about it if a man wants to sleep with a woman,” I said.
“How then?” he asked.
“There, you see, my lad,” I said. “You don’t even know how.”
“I’m none of your lad,” he said. “And I shall sleep with you if I like; if not willingly, then forcibly.”
“All right, my dear,” I said. “But you overlook the fact that I’m strong.”
It was taking me all my time to ward off his fumblings.
“I’m not your dear,” he said. “I’m a man. I’ve slept hundreds of times with every damned thing there is. Aren’t you in love with me at all?”
“I was once in love with you,” I said. “It was my first night in this house. The police threw you into the hall. You were dead; stone dead; yes, absolutely wonderfully dead; a dead unweaned infant, and your soul with God, quite certainly. Next day you had come to life; and your face had once again tightened up in that horrible way that makes death beautiful by comparison. But now you aren’t drunk enough. Drink some more. Drink until you are utterly helpless and don’t even know of it when you are rolled through a puddle. Then I shall fall in love with you again. Then I shall do everything for you that is best for you: carry you to your room, wash you; perhaps even put you to bed completely, even though I didn’t dare do that once; but quite certainly tuck you in.”
12. The maiden Fruit-blood
The maiden Fruit-blood often stared at me in a trance until I became afraid; sometimes I seemed to see refracted in her eyes all the life that exists in plants from the time that a little seed manages to germinate despite all the accumulated disadvantages of Iceland and Greenland, right up to the point where the god starts looking at you with those burning lustful murderer’s eyes of his from the deep. Sometimes I would stamp my foot and say curtly, “Why are you staring like that, child?” But she would go on staring and chewing her chewing gum slowly and calmly. Sometimes she would start gliding through the rooms with a cigarette smoldering in a long tube, just like a cinema shark. Sometimes she would flip through her lessons with a great deal of smoking and chewing, or scribble a composition in enormous vertical lettering, and the scratching of the pen could be heard a long way away like canvas being torn; but soon she would be back into some American light reading with a cover picture of a masked murderer with blood-stained knife and a terrified bare-thighed girl with high insteps and slender ankles wearing stiletto heels; or start leafing through the pile of fashion magazines which arrived for the mother and daughter from all over the world every week and sometimes every day. A young sprig of a tree, nothing but springiness and sap, a mirage in female form, a parlor-reared Naiad-shape; and I, this lump from the far valleys; was it any wonder that sometimes I felt uneasy in her presence?
I cannot forget the first morning that I went in to her with coffee, and stood in front of the bed in which she lay sleeping.
“Good morning,” I said.
She woke up and opened her eyes and looked at me from out of another world.
“Good morning,” I said again.
She looked at me for a long time in silence, but when I was just about to say it for the third time she sprang up and interrupted me hysterically—“No, don’t say it, don’t say it. Oh, don’t say it, I beg of you.”
“May one not wish you good morning?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I can’t bear it. They are the two most disgusting and horrible and frantic words I have ever heard in my whole life. Will you never, never say it?”
Next morning I laid the coffee silently on her bedside table and was going out again. But then she flung aside the eiderdown, sprang out of bed and ran after me, and fastened her nails into me.
“Why don’t you say it?” she demanded.
“Say what?” I asked.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’m yearning to hear you say it.”
One day when I was going about my work she had laid aside her lessons before I knew it and had started gazing at me. All at once she stood up, came right over to me, fastened her nails into me, and said, “Say something.”
I asked, “What?”
She went on pinching me slowly and calmly, digging her nails in and gazing at me with a smile, watching carefully to see how I was standing the pain.
“Shall I crush you?” she asked.
“Try it,” I said.
“Let me kill you.”
“Go ahead.”
“I love you,” she said.
“I thought that was something girls never said to one another,” I said.
“I could eat you.”
“You would soon have your fill of that.”
“Don’t you feel it at all, then?” she said, and stopped smiling, losing interest.
“A little,” I replied. “Not much.”
Her interest revived at that, and she dug her dark-painted nails yet deeper into my arm and said, “How do you feel it? Oh, tell me how you feel it.”
I think that in the beginning she had considered me an animal in the same way that I had thought her a plant. The plant wanted to know how the animal felt things. On the other hand, I was never aware of any dislike from her towards me; naturally, she thought it ridiculous that a great clod-hopper should drag so vulgar an object as a harmonium into a civilized house and start pounding out on it the child’s exercises which she herself had learned at the age of four, before she could even read; but she bore no more ill will towards a north-country girl than a tulip does towards a cow.
Another day: she came over to me when I was in the middle of my bondwoman work, put her arms round me, nestled up close to me, bit me, and said, “Damn you”; and then walked away.
Yet another day: when she had been silently scrutinizing me for a long time she said, right out of the blue, “What are you thinking about?”
I said, “Nothing.”
“Tell me, won’t you tell me? I beg you to.”
But I felt that the gulf between us was so deep and so broad that even though I had been thinking something, and even if it had been something innocent, I would not have told her it.
“I was thinking of a brown sheep,” I said.
“You’re lying,” she said.
“Well, well. It’s a good thing someone knows better than I myself do what I’m thinking.”
“I know all right,” she said.
“You were thinking about him,” she said.
“Whom?”
“The one you sleep with.”
“And what if I don’t sleep with anyone?” I asked.
“Then you were thinking of the other thing,” she said.
“What other thing?”
“That soon you will die,” said the girl.
“Thanks very much,” I said. “So now I know. I didn’t know it before.”
“Yes, so now you know.” She slammed shut the book she had been reading, stood up, and sat down at the piano and began to play one of those heart-rendingly lovely soulful mazurkas by Chopin. But only the beginning; when least expected she dashed headlong into some demented jazz.