Black in the blackness, something enormous emerged on to the road just in front of us. Ruth’s scream was as loud as Madeline’s and Roderick’s combined. She clutched my arm, she hid her face against the sleeve. The apparition snorted. Ruth screamed again. There was another snort, then the clatter of retreating hoofs. ‘It’s only a stray horse,’ I said. But her knees had given way and, if I hadn’t caught her and lowered her gently to the ground, she would have fallen.
There was a long silence. ‘When you’ve had enough of sitting in the dust,’ I said ironically, ‘maybe we can go on.’ ‘What would you have done if it had been a ghost?’ she asked at last. ‘I’d have run away and not come back till it was all over.’ ‘What do you mean “all over”?’ she asked. ‘Well, you know what happens to people who meet ghosts,’ I answered. ‘Either they die of fright on the spot, or else their hair turns white and they go mad.’ But instead of laughing, as I had meant her to do, Ruth said I was a beast and burst into tears. That dark clot, which the horse and Poe and her own fancy had crystallized out of her solution of feeling, was too precious a thing to be lightly parted with.
You know those enormous lollipops on sticks that children lick at all day long? Well, that’s what her fear was—an all-day sucker; and she wanted to make the most of it, to go on sucking and sucking to the deliciously bitter end. It took me the best part of half an hour to get her on her feet again and in her right mind. It was after her bedtime when we got home and Ruth went straight to her room. I was afraid she’d have nightmares. Not at all. She slept like a top and came down to breakfast next morning as gay as a lark. But a lark that had read her Poe, a lark that was still interested in worms.
After breakfast we went out caterpillar hunting and found something really stupendous—a big hawk-moth larva, with green and white markings and a horn on its rear end. Ruth poked it with a straw and the poor thing curled itself first one way, then the other, in a paroxysm of impotent rage and fear. ‘It writhes, it writhes,’ she chanted exultantly; ‘with mortal pangs the mimes become its food, and the angels sob at vermin fangs with human blood imbued.’ But this time the fear-crystal was no bigger than a diamond on a twenty-dollar engagement ring. The thought of death and corruption which she had savored, the previous night, for the sake of its own intrinsic bitterness, was now a mere condiment, a spice to heighten the taste of life, and make it more intoxicating. ‘ “Vermin fangs,” ’ she repeated, and gave the green worm another poke, ‘ “Vermin fangs…” ’
And in an overflow of high spirits she began to sing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’ at the top of her voice. Incidentally,” Rivers added, “how significant it is that that disgusting song should crop up as a by-product of every major massacre! It was invented in World War I, revived in World War II and was still being sporadically warbled while the slaughter was going on in Korea. The last word in sentimentality accompanies the last words in Machiavellian power politics and indiscriminate violence. Is that something to be thankful for? Or is it something to deepen one’s despair about the human race? I really don’t know—do you?”
I shook my head.
“Well, as I was saying,” he resumed, “she started singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world,’ she changed the next line to ‘and I were the vermin fangs,’ then broke off, made a dive for Grampus, the cocker spaniel, who eluded her and rushed off, full tilt across the pasture, with Ruth in hot pursuit. I followed at a walk and, when at last I caught up with her, she was standing on a little knoll, with Grampus panting at her feet. The wind was blowing and she was facing into it, like a miniature Victory of Samothrace, the hair lifting from her small flushed face, her short skirt blown back and fluttering like a flag, the cotton of her blouse pressed by the air stream against a thin little body that was still almost as flat and boyish as Timmy’s. Her eyes were closed, her lips moved in some silent rhapsody or invocation.
The dog turned his head as I approached and wagged a stumpy tail; but Ruth was too far gone into her rapture to hear me. It would have been almost a sacrilege to disturb her; so I halted a few yards away and quietly sat down on the grass. As I watched her, a beatific smile parted her lips and the whole face seemed to glow as though with an inner light. Suddenly her expression changed; she uttered a little cry, opened her eyes and looked about her with an air of frightened bewilderment. ‘John!’ she called thankfully, when she caught sight of me, then ran and dropped on her knees beside me. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘And there’s old Grampus. I almost thought…’ She broke off and, with the forefinger of her right hand, touched the tip of her nose, her lips, her chin. ‘Do I look the same?’ she asked. ‘The same,’ I assured her, ‘but if anything a little more so.’
She laughed, and it was a laugh not so much of amusement as of relief. ‘I was nearly gone,’ she confided. ‘Gone where?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It was that wind. Blowing and blowing. Blowing everything out of my head—you and Grampus and everyone else, everyone at home, everyone at school, and everything I ever knew or ever cared about. All blown away, and nothing left but the wind and the feeling of my being alive. And they were turning into the same thing and blowing away. And if I’d let go, there wouldn’t have been any stopping. I’d have crossed the mountains and gone out over the ocean and maybe right off into one of those black holes between the stars that we were looking at last night.’ She shuddered. ‘Do you think I would have died?’ she asked. ‘Or maybe gone into a catalepsy, so that they’d think I was dead, and then I’d have woken up in a coffin.’
She was back again with Edgar Allan Poe. Next day she showed me a lamentable piece of doggerel, in which the terrors of the night and the ecstasies of the morning had been reduced to the familiar glooms and tombs of all her rhyming. What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”
“Aren’t you being unduly optimistic about experience?” I questioned. “Is it always so golden and poetical?”
“Intrinsically golden,” Rivers insisted. “Poetical by its essential nature. But of course if you’re sufficiently steeped in the tripe and hogwash dished out by the molders of public opinion, you’ll tend automatically to pollute your impressions at the source; you’ll re-create the world in the image of your own notions—and of course your own notions are everybody else’s notions; so the world you live in will consist of the Lowest Common Denominators of the local culture. But the original poetry is always there—always,” he insisted.
“Even for the old?”
“Yes, even for the old. Provided, of course, that they can recapture their lost innocence.”
“And do you ever succeed, may I ask?”
“Believe it or not,” Rivers answered, “I sometimes do. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that it sometimes happens to me. It happened yesterday, as a matter of fact, while I was playing with my grandson. From one minute to another—the transformation of lead into gold, of solemn professorial hogwash into poetry, the kind of poetry that life was all the time while I was with the Maartenses. Every moment of it.”
“Including the moments in the laboratory?”
“Those were some of the best moments,” he answered me. “Moments of paper work, moments of fiddling around with experimental gadgets, moments of discussion and argument. The whole thing was pure idyllic poetry, like something out of Theocritus or Vergil. Four young Ph.D.’s in the role of goatherd’s apprentices, with Henry as the patriarch, teaching the youngsters the tricks of his trade, dropping pearls of wisdom, spinning interminable yarns about the new pantheon of theoretical physics. He struck the lyre and rhapsodized about the metamorphosis of earth-bound Mass into celestial Energy. He sang the hopeless loves of Electron for her Nucleus. He piped of Quanta and hinted darkly at the mysteries of Indeterminacy.
It was idyllic. Those were the days, remember, when you could be a physicist without feeling guilty; the days when it was still possible to believe that you were working for the greater glory of God. Now they won’t even allow you the comfort of self-deception. You’re paid by the Navy and trailed by the FBI. Not for one moment do they permit
