They’re left at last hanging by a single thread—and it’s fraying away, fraying away, minute by minute.’ The voice broke and, by the muffled sound of the last words, I knew that Katy had covered her face with her hands. ‘All alone,’ she whispered, ‘absolutely alone.’ The dying, the living—everyone is alone always. There was a little whimper in the darkness, then a shuddering, convulsive movement, a hardly human cry. She was sobbing.
I loved her and she was in anguish. And yet the only thing I could find to say was, ‘Don’t cry.’” Rivers shrugged his shoulders. “If you don’t believe in God or an afterlife—which of course as a minister’s son, I didn’t, except in a strictly Pickwickian sense—what else can you say in the presence of death? Besides, in this particular case, there was the grotesquely embarrassing fact that I couldn’t decide what to call her. Her grief and my compassion had made it impossible to say ‘Mrs. Maartens,’ but on the other hand ‘Katy’ might seem presumptuous, might even sound as though I were trying to exploit her tragedy for the baser purposes of a scoundrel, who found it impossible to forget Miss Floggy and the dung-slide of Henry’s subhuman soliloquy.
‘Don’t cry,’ I went on whispering, and in lieu of the prohibited endearments, of the Christian name which I dared not pronounce, I laid a timid hand on her shoulder and clumsily patted her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. And then, brokenly, ‘I promise I’ll behave properly tomorrow.’ And after another paroxysm of weeping, ‘I haven’t cried like this since before I was married.’ It was only later that the full significance of that last phrase began to dawn on me. A wife who permitted herself to cry would never have done for poor old Henry. His chronic weakness had compelled her to be unremittingly strong. But even the most stoical fortitude has its limits. That night Katy was at the end of her tether. She had suffered a total defeat—but a defeat for which, in a sense, she was grateful.
Circumstances had been too much for her. But, by way of compensation, she had been granted a holiday from responsibility, had been permitted, if only for a few brief minutes, to indulge in the, for her, unprecedented luxury of tears. ‘Don’t cry,’ I kept repeating. But actually she wanted to cry, she felt the need of crying. Not to mention the fact that she had the best possible reasons for crying. Death was all around her—it had come for her mother, it was coming, inevitably, so it seemed, for her husband, it would be there in a few years for herself, in a few more years for her children. They were all moving toward the same consummation—toward the progressive cutting of the lines of communications, toward the slow, sure attrition of the sustaining threads, toward the final plunge, alone, into the emptiness.
“From somewhere far away over the housetops a clock struck the three-quarters. The chimes were a man-made insult added gratuitously to a cosmic injury—a symbol of time’s incessant passage, a reminder of the inevitable end. ‘Don’t cry,’ I implored her, and forgetting everything but my compassion, I moved my hand from the nearer to the further of her shoulders, and drew her closer. Shaken by sobs and trembling, she pressed herself against me. The clock had struck, time was bleeding away and even the living are utterly alone. Our only advantage over the dead woman up there in Chicago, over the dying man at the other end of the house, consisted in the fact that we could be alone in company, could juxtapose our solitudes and pretend that we had fused them into a community. But these, of course, were not the thoughts I was thinking then.
Then there was no room in my mind for anything but love and pity and an intensely practical concern for the well-being of this goddess who had suddenly become a weeping child, this adored Beatrice who was now trembling, in just the way that little dogs can tremble, within the circle of my protecting arm. I touched the hands with which she was covering her face; they were stone cold. And the bare feet—cold as ice. ‘But you’re frozen!’ I said almost indignantly.
And then, thankful that at last it was possible for me to translate my pity into useful action, ‘You must get under the bedclothes,’ I commanded. ‘At once.’ I visualized myself tenderly tucking her in, then drawing up a chair and sitting, quietly watchful, like a mother, while she went to sleep. But when I moved to get out of bed, she clung to me, she wouldn’t let me go. I tried to disengage myself, I tried to protest. ‘Mrs. Maartens!’ But it was like protesting against the clutch of a drowning child; the act was at once inhuman and useless. And meanwhile she was chilled to the bone and trembling—trembling uncontrollably. I did the only thing that was left for me to do.”
“You mean, you got under the covers too?”
“Under the covers,” he repeated, “with two cold bare arms round my neck and a shuddering, sob-shaken body pressed against my own.”
Rivers drank some whisky and leaning back in his chair, sat for a long time smoking in silence.
“The truth,” he said at last, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth. All the witnesses take the same oath and testify about the same events. The result, of course, is fifty-seven varieties of fiction. Which of them is nearest the truth? Stendhal or Meredith? Anatole France or D. H. Lawrence? The fountains of our deepest life shall be Confused in Passion’s golden purity or the Sexual Behavior in the Human Female?”
“Do you know the answer?” I inquired.
He shook his head.
“Maybe one could describe the event in relation to three co-ordinates.” In the air before him Rivers traced with the stem of his pipe two lines at right angles to one another, then from their point of intersection, added a vertical that took his hand above the level of his head. “Let one of these lines represent Katy, another the John Rivers of thirty years ago, and the third, John Rivers as I am today. Now, within this frame of reference, what can we say about the night of April 23rd, 1923?
Not the whole truth, of course. But a good deal more of the truth than can be conveyed in terms of any single fiction. Let’s begin with the Katy line.” He drew it again, and for a moment the smoke of his pipe waveringly marked its position in space. “It’s the line,” he said, “of a born pagan forced by circumstances into a situation with which only a thoroughgoing Christian or Buddhist could adequately deal. It’s the line of a woman who has always been happily at home in the world and who suddenly finds herself standing on the brink of the abyss and invaded, body and mind, by the horrible black emptiness confronting her.
Poor thing! She felt herself abandoned, not by God (for she was congenitally incapable of monotheism) but by the gods—all of them, from the little domestic lares and penates to the high Olympians. They had left her and taken everything with them. She had to find her gods again. She had to become a part once more of the natural, and therefore divine, order of things. She had to re-establish her contacts with life—with life at its simplest, life in its most unequivocal manifestations, as physical companionship, as the experience of animal warmth, as strong sensation, as hunger and the satisfaction of hunger. It was a matter of self-preservation.
And that isn’t the whole story,” Rivers added. “She was in tears, grieving for the mother who had just died, grieving for the husband who might die tomorrow. There’s a certain affinity between the more violent emotions. Anger modulates only too easily into aggressive lust, and sorrow, if you give it a chance, will melt almost imperceptibly into the most delicious sensuality. After which, of course, He giveth His beloved sleep. In the context of bereavement, love is the equivalent of barbiturates and a trip to Hawaii. Nobody blames the widow or the orphan for resorting to these alleviations. So why condemn them for trying to preserve their life and sanity by the other simpler method?”
“I’m not condemning them,” I assured him. “But other people have other views.”
“And thirty years ago I was one of them.” He ran his pipe up and down the imaginary vertical in front of him. “The line of the virgin prig of twenty-eight, the line of the ex-Lutheran and ex-mother’s boy, the line of the Petrarchian idealist. From that position I had no choice but to think of myself as a treacherous adulterer, and of Katy as—what? The words were too hideous to be articulated. Whereas from Katy’s goddess-eye viewpoint nothing had happened that was not entirely natural, and anything that was natural was morally good.
Looking at the matter from here,” (and he indicated the line of John Rivers-Now) “I’d say we were both of us half right and therefore wholly wrong—she by being beyond good and evil on the merely Olympian level (and the Olympians, of course, were nothing but a pack of superhuman animals with miraculous powers), and I by not being beyond good and evil at all, but still mired up to the ears in the all too human notions of sin and social convention.
To be
