“Not advice. You must have gathered at supper what his opinion of my mentality is.”
“He revealed pretty clearly what his own mentality is. The only thing in the house that really pleased him was Pinkie’s colored head-rag.”
“Not advice,” Roger said. “I don’t know why he shows me his stuff. He does it like you’d give caviar to an elephant.”
“And of course you accept his dictum about the elephant. And I suppose you are going to get them to publish his book, too.”
“Well, there’s some good stuff in it. And maybe if he sees it in print, he’ll really get busy. Work. Or maybe someone will make him mad enough to really write something. Something with an entrail in it. He’s got it in him. It may not be but one poem. But it’s there. Maybe if he can just stop talking long enough to get it out. And I thought if he came down here, where he will have to walk four miles to find somebody to talk to, once Amos comes to recognize that blue coat.”
“Ah,” Anne said. “So you wrote him to come. I knew you had, but I’m glad to hear you admit it of your own free will. Go on to bed,” she said. “You haven’t done a stroke of work today, and Lord only knows now when you will.”
Thus life went along in its old pleasant way. Because poets are all different from one another, it seemed; this one, anyway. Because it soon developed that Anne doesn’t see this poet at all, hardly. It seems that she can’t even know he is in the house unless she hears him snoring at night. So it took her two weeks to get steamed up again. And this time she is not even combing her hair. “Is it two weeks he’s been here, or just two years?”
She is sitting at the dressing table, but she is not doing anything, which any husband, even an artist, should know is a bad sign. When you see a woman sitting half dressed before a dressing table with a mirror and not even watching herself talk in the mirror, it’s time to smell smoke in the wind.
“He has been here two weeks, but unless I happen to go to the kitchen, I never see him, since he prefers Pinkie’s company to ours. And when he was missing that first Wednesday night, on Pinkie’s evening off, I said at first, ‘What tact.’ That was before I learned that he had taken supper with Pinkie’s family at her house and had gone with them to prayer meeting.
And he went again Sunday night and again last Wednesday night, and now tonight (and though he tells me I have neither intelligence nor imagination) he would be surprised to know that I am imagining right now that sky-blue dressing-sacque in a wooden church full of sweating niggers without any incongruity at all.”
“Yes. It’s quite a picture, isn’t it?”
“But apart from such minor embarrassments like not knowing where our guest is, and bearing upon our patient brows a certain amount of reflected ridiculousness, he is a very pleasant companion. Instructing, edifying, and selfeffacing.
I never know he is even in the house unless I hear your typewriter, because I know it is not you because you have not written a line in — is it two weeks, or just two years? He enters the room which the children are absolutely forbidden and puts his one finger on that typewriter which Pinkie is not even permitted to touch with a dust-cloth, and writes a poem about freedom and flings it at you to commend and applaud. What is it he says?”
“You tell. This is fine.”
“He flings it at you like — like . . . Wait; I’ve got it: like flinging caviar at an elephant, and he says, ‘Will this sell?’ Not, Is this good? or Do you like it? Will this sell? and you—”
“Go on. I couldn’t hope to even compete.”
“You read it, carefully. Maybe the same poem, I don’t know; I’ve learned recently on the best authority that I am not intelligent enough to get my poetry at first hand. You read it, carefully, and then you say, ‘It ought to. Stamps in the drawer there.’” She went to the window.
“No, I haven’t evolved far enough yet to take my poetry straight; I won’t understand it. It has to be fed to me by hand, when he has time, on the terrace after supper on the nights when there is no prayer meeting at Pinkie’s church. Freedom.
Equality. In words of one syllable, because it seems that, being a woman, I don’t want freedom and don’t know what equality means, until you take him up and show him in professional words how he is not so wise, except he is wise enough to shut up then and let you show both of us how you are not so wise either.” The window was above the garden. There were curtains in it. She stood between the curtains, looking out. “So Young Shelley has not crashed through yet.”
“Not yet. But it’s there. Give him time.”
“I’m glad to hear that. He’s been here two weeks now. I’m glad his racket is poetry, something you can perpetrate in two lines. Otherwise, at this rate . . .” She stood between the curtains. They were blowing, slow, in and out. “Damn. Damn. Damn. He doesn’t eat enough.”
So Roger went and put another cushion in the pram. Only she didn’t say exactly that and he didn’t do exactly that.
Now get this. This is where it starts. On the days when there wasn’t any prayer meeting at the nigger church, the poet has taken to doping along behind her in the garden while she cut the flowers for the supper table, talking to her about poetry or freedom or maybe about the flowers.
Talking about something, anyway; maybe when he quit talking all of a sudden that night when he and she were walking in the garden after supper, it should have tipped her off. But it didn’t. Or at least, when they came to the end of the path and turned, the next thing she seemed to know was his mug all set for the haymaker. Anyway, she didn’t move until the clinch was over. Then she flung back, her hand lifted. “You damned idiot!” she says.
He doesn’t move either, like he is giving her a fair shot. “What satisfaction will it be to slap this mug?” he says.
“I know that,” she says. She hits him on the chest with her fist, light, full, yet restrained all at the same time: mad and careful too. “Why did you do such a clumsy thing?”
But she doesn’t get anything out of him. He just stands there, offering her a clean shot; maybe he is not even looking at her, with his hair all over the place and this sky-blue coat that fits him like a short horse-blanket. You take a rooster, an old rooster. An old bull is different.
See him where the herd has run him out, blind and spavined or whatever, yet he still looks married. Like he was saying, “Well, boys, you can look at me now. But I was a husband and father in my day.”
But an old rooster. He just looks unmarried, a born bachelor. Born a bachelor in a world without hens and he found it out so long ago he don’t even remember there are not any hens. “Come along,” she says, turning fast, stiff-backed, and the poet doping along behind her. Maybe that’s what gave him away. Anyway, she looks back, slowing. She stops. “So you think you are the hot shot, do you?” she says. “You think I’m going to tell Roger, do you?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You mean, you don’t care whether I tell him or not?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Yes what?”
It seems she can’t tell whether he’s looking at her or not, whether he ever looked at her. He just stands there, doping, about twice as tall as she is. “When I was a little boy, we would have sherbet on Sunday,” he says. “Just a breath of lemon in it. Like narcissus smells, I remember.
I think I remember. I was . . . four . . . three. Mother died and we moved to a city. Boarding-house. A brick wall. There was one window, like a one-eyed man with sore eyes. And a dead cat. But before that we had lots of trees, like you have. I would sit on the kitchen steps in the late afternoon, watching the Sunday light in the trees, eating sherbet.”
She is watching him. Then she turns, walking fast. He follows, doping along a little behind her, so that when she stops in the shadow of a clump of bushes, with her face all fixed, he stands there like this dope until she touches him. And even then he doesn’t get it.
She has to tell him to hurry. So he gets it, then. A poet is human, it seems, just like a man.
But that’s not it. That can be seen in any movie. This is what it is, what is good.
About this time, coincident with this second clinch, Roger happens to come out from behind this bush. He comes out kind of happen-so; pleasant and quiet from taking a little stroll in the moonlight to settle his supper. They all three stroll back to the house, Roger in the middle. They get there so quick that nobody thinks to say goodnight when Anne goes on in the house
