In the morning, before he had started work, Walcott warned Coverly about Pancras. He was queer. This news excited in Coverly bewilderment, sadness and some stubbornness. He felt as Cousin Honora felt about the cart horse. He did not want to be a cart horse, but he did not want to see them exposed to cruelty. He did not see Pancras for a day or two and then one evening, when he was about to eat his dinner from the pot, the racing car roared into K Circle and Pancras rang the bell. He took Coverly back to his own house for supper and they walked again in the woods. Coverly had never found anyone so interested in his recollections of St. Botolphs and he was happy to be able to talk about the past.
After another evening with Pancras it was apparent to Coverly what his friend’s intentions were, although he did not know how to behave himself and saw no reason why he should not eat dinner with a homosexual. He claimed to himself to be innocent or naive, but this pretense was the thinnest. The queer never really surprise us. We choose our neckties, comb our hair with water and lace our shoes in order to please the people we desire; and so do they. Coverly had enough experience in friendship to know that the exaggerated attentions he was receiving from Pancras were amorous. He meant to be seductive and when they took their walk after supper he seemed to emanate a stir of erotic busyness or distress. They had come to the last of the houses and had reached the army installation—barracks and a chapel and a walk lined with whitewashed stone and a man sitting on a step hammering out a bracelet from a piece of rocket scrap. It was the emotional no man’s land of most army posts—tolerable enough in the push of war, but now more isolated and lonely than ever. They walked through the barracks area into the woods and sat down on some stones.
“We’re going to England in ten days,” Pancras said.
“I’ll miss you,” Coverly said.
“You’re coming,” Pancras said. “I’ve arranged the whole thing.”
Coverly turned to his companion and they exchanged a look of such sorrow that he thought he might never recover. It was a look that he had recoiled from here and there—the doctor in Travertine, a bartender in Washington, a priest on a night boat, a clerk in a shop—that exacerbating look of sexual sorrow between men; sorrow and the perverse wish to flee—to piss in the Lowestoft soup tureen, write a vile word on the back of the barn and run away to sea with a dirty, dirty sailor—to flee, not from the laws and customs of the world but from its force and vitality. “Only ten more days,” his companion sighed, and suddenly Coverly felt a dim rumble of homosexual lust in his trousers. This lasted for less than a second. Then the lash of his conscience crashed down with such force that his scrotum seemed injured, at the prospect of joining this pale-eyed company, wandering in the dark like Uncle Peepee Marshmallow. A second later the lash came down again—this time for having scorned a human condition. It was Uncle Peepee’s destiny to wander through the gardens and Coverly’s vision of the world must be a place where this forlornness was admitted. Then the lash crashed down once more, this time at the hands of a lovely woman who scorned him bitterly for his friend and whose eyes told him that he was now shut away forever from a delight in girls—those creatures of morning. He had thought with desire of going to sea with a pederast and Venus turned her naked back on him and walked out of his life forever.
It was a withering loss. Their airs and confessions, their memories and their theories about the atomic bomb, their secret stores of Kleenex and hand lotion, the warmth of their breasts, their powers of succumbing and forgiveness, that sweetness of love that had passed his understanding—was gone. Venus was his adversary. He had drawn a mustache on her gentle mouth and she would tell her minions to scorn him. She might allow him to talk to an old woman now and then, but that was all.
It was in the summer—the air was full of seed and pollen—and with that extraordinary magnification of grief—he might have been looking through a reading glass—Coverly saw the wealth of berries and seed pods in the ground around his feet and thought how richly all of nature was created to inseminate its kind—all but Coverly. He thought of his poor, kind parents at West Farm, dependent for their happiness, their security, their food upon a prowess that he didn’t have. Then he thought of Moses and the wish to see his brother was passionate. “I can’t go to England with you,” he told Pancras. “I have to go and see my brother.” Pancras was supplicatory and then downright angry and they came out of the woods in single file.
In the morning Coverly told Walcott that he didn’t want to go to England with Pancras and Walcott said this was all right and smiled. Coverly looked back at him grimly. It was a knowledgeable smile—he would know about Pancras—it was the smile of a Philistine, a man content to have saved his own skin; it was the kind of crude smile that held together and nourished the whole unwholesome world of pretense, censure and cruelty—and then, looking more closely, he saw that it was a most friendly and pleasant smile, the smile at the most of a man who recognizes another man to have known his own mind. Coverly asked for two days’ annual leave to go and visit Moses.
He left the laboratory at noon, packed a bag and took a bus to the station. Some women were waiting on the platform for the train but Coverly averted his eyes from them. It was not his right to admire them any more. He was unworthy of their loveliness. Once aboard the train he shut his eyes against anything in the landscape that might be pleasing, for a beautiful woman would sicken him with his unworthiness and a comely man would remind him of the sordidness of the life he was about to begin. He could have traveled peaceably then only in some hobgoblin company of warty men and quarrelsome women—some strange place where the hazards of grace and beauty were outlawed.
At Brushwick the seat beside him was occupied by a gray-haired man who carried one of those green serge book bags that used to be carried in Cambridge. The worn green cloth reminded Coverly of the New England winter—a simple and traditional way of life—going back to the farm for Christmas and the snow-dark as it gathered over the skating pond and the barking of dogs way off. With the book bag between them, the stranger and Coverly began to talk. His companion was a scholar. Japanese literature was his field. He was interested in the Samurai Sagas and showed Coverly a translation of one. It was about some homosexual samurai and when Coverly had absorbed this his traveling companion produced some prints of the samurai in action. Then the valves of Coverly’s heart felt abraded and he seemed to listen at his organs, as we will at a door, to see if there was any guilty arousal there. Then, blushing like Honora—coloring like any spinster who finds the whole sky-high creaking edifice of her chastity shaken—Coverly grabbed for his suitcase and fled to another car. Feeling sick, he went to the toilet, where someone had written on the wall in pencil a homosexual solicitation for anyone who would stand by the water cooler and whistle “Yankee Doodle.” How could he refresh his sense of moral reality; how could he put different words in Pancras’ mouth or pretend that the prints he had been shown were of geisha crossing a bridge in the snow? He stared out of the window at the landscape, seeking in it, with all his heart, some shred of usable and creative truth, but what he looked into were the dark plains of American sexual experience where the bison still roam. He wished that instead of going to the Macllhenney Institute he had gone to some school of love.