by Jane Bowles
Laura's hair hung to her shoulders and fell over half of her brooding face. No sunlight penetrated through the thick black pine trees into her cabin, but a blue bulb simulating daylight hung over her head. She was a very great beauty.
Sally McBridge was standing on the door sill smiling at Laura. Hers was a delicate pink face with round but fanatical blue eyes. She came every summer to Camp Cataract and the staff considered her to be somewhat of a lunatic and a fool. She dressed in a provincial out-of-date manner and altogether seemed to belong to either another country or another time. At this moment she was wearing a black coat with an orange full collar and a bonnet-shaped hat. She could not have been much more than thirty-nine or forty.
"How are you?" she asked Laura. "I thought you'd be dressed and ready to have your dinner."
"I can't dress," said Laura without looking at her.
"Do you have your melancholia?" Sally questioned her with a smile. Laura refused to answer.
"I'll tell you one thing," Sally continued. "You have to live in peace whether you have it or not. You can beat life if you want to." Sally's expression at that moment was almost wicked and even calculating. Laura looked at her for the first time.
"And then what's left to you after you've beaten life?" she asked sullenly.
"Happiness is left," Sally said. "Life is chaos and happiness is system—as if in a very delicately wrought but strong cage, while the life chaos remains outside. But remember I said cage and not room. The distinction is tremendous."
"What distinction?"
"Between room and cage. Do you know what I'm implying?"
Laura shrugged her shoulders. "Don't tell me," she said. For she was very aware that Sally's explanation would be wordy and very boring to her. Sally continued, however, ignoring her remark.
"If your happiness system is like a very delicate cage, you can see out and others can see in, even though your protections are as strong as the silver wires of a cage," she said. "But in a room you're really shut off."
Laura covered her face with her hands. "I hate Camp Cataract," she said. "That's all I know."
"I love it," Sally replied in a simple tone. "Perhaps because an evergreen is my favorite tree. It's modest and always there, like a friend or a loyal dog, winter and summer alike. And when its branches are heavy with snow, there is no tree more beautiful in the universe. Do you like evergreens?"
Laura did not answer. Her eyes were brooding.
"I'm certain you would like some place like Hawaii," Sally said to her. "You're such an impatient restless type of person. A palm tree is more your emblem than a pine. Isn't that so?"
"I have never thought of it," Laura replied. "I don't think of any of the things you think of. I don't believe I've ever looked at a tree, much less thought of one. I don't have a light enough heart to sit and think about things like that."
"My heart is not light, Laura," Sally said. "I have to spend many hours in my cabin alone. I'm going there now—I had a fit of nervous irritability this afternoon, and I want to think about it."
"Anyone who can speak of a happiness system is lighthearted," Laura said flatly.
"Don' t talk nonsense, Laura. The finest brains have been occupied with such systems since the beginning of time ... orientals and occidentals alike."
"That's religion you're speaking of," said Laura. "Not a happiness system."
Quite suddenly Sally's face fell apart. She backed away from the cabin door, and Laura could hear her feet moving through the leaves.
Laura cocked an ear, but it was impossible to tell by listening to the rustle of dead leaves whether Sally was advancing deeper into the pine grove toward her cabin or if she had turned back in the direction of the lodge.
"I've hurt Sally's feelings," Laura thought. The brooding expression left her face, and at once a look of gravity and even nobility took its place. She rose to her feet. "I must go and find her."
She pulled a black dress of very thin material over her head and brushed out her stiff hair. Then she set out through the pine grove in search of Sally.
Her gait was a slow rolling one like that of a sailor. Her lips she kept held parted, and to the gravity of her expression was added a look of wonder which deepened as she approached the lodge. There was no longer any trace of apathy in her countenance. When she reached the dining terrace she stood still and looked about for Sally. The wind was blowing hard, somewhat deadening the roar of the waterfalls. Laura saw Sally moving with difficulty between the last row of tables (the row nearest to the precipice) and the heavy chain which separated the dining terrace from its edge.
"Why does she choose to cross there?" Laura asked herself. "There's barely space to get through without brushing against the diners." She hastened across the terrace herself, but at a more convenient place near the lodge steps. Pine groves surrounded the terrace at the other side as well, but through these groves a path had been cut leading to the main road. Laura reached the path first and hid behind a tree until Sally walked past. Then she came out from her hiding place and followed her. Laura knew that Sally was going to Mr. Cassalotti's restaurant in the village. During the last three weeks she had followed Sally several times to the village and joined her there.
Sally's fits of temper and shame were becoming more and more necessary to Laura. They stirred her blood. And while she hated Sally to such an extent at these moments that she wanted to strike her face, her own dignity at once seemed to swoop down upon her like some great and unexpected bird. It was not to comfort Sally, therefore, that she followed her to the village, but to enjoy for a while this calm and noble self born each time out of the other woman's rage.
She kept at a sufficient distance from Sally so that the other did not hear her footsteps. Camp Cataract, although situated in authentically wild country, was not at a very great distance from a little center, which could hardly have been called a town, but which included several stores, a restaurant, and a railroad station.
It was at this restaurant that Sally now stopped and mounted the stairs. She went into the dining room, located at the back of the house and reached only through the store which opened on the front steps. It was a dark room, with only five or six tables. There was no one about, but she could hear the members of the family moving overhead in their apartment. She chose a table next to a glassed-in scene that Mr. Cassalotti had inserted in a large wall niche. The painted drop was of a cottage with lawn and woods and a little stream running to one side of it. Mr. Cassalotti had extended the real lawn by using stage grass, and there were even little trellises about, stuck with old paper roses, too many of them contrasting oddly with the pastel-shaded flowers painted on the drop. Crowding the lawn was an assortment of poorly selected men and women fashioned in different styles and out of different materials, some being brightly painted lead and others carved out of wood. There was also, to complete the pointless staging, a child's miniature orange automobile set down right in the very midst of the lawn gathering and driven by a tiny rubber baby doll. The scene was illuminated from the sides and at this moment supplied the only light in the dining room.
The immediate urge of any diner with even the slightest degree of sensibility, if not to the actual aesthetic offense, then at least to the offense against order and the fulfillment of intention, was to punch through the glass and remove the automobile, if not half the figures. Only to the Cassalotti family and to children there was no disturbing element in this glassed-in scene.
Sally stared for a bit at the familiar lawn group, and even though she was a fanatic with usually one obsession at a time she felt a strong desire to remove the orange truck, which for a second absorbed her completely. She looked around automatically, as everyone else did, for an opening in the glass, although she knew perfectly well that there was none. Then she turned her back upon it and closed her eyes. She was trembling, and the wings of her nostrils were drawn. However, far from taking fright at the hysteria Laura's words had unloosed, or even growing despondent over it,
Sally merely underwent the experience very much the way she stood behind the waterfalls each day at Camp Cataract. Far behind her new fit she was smiling to herself, unbeatable and optimistic.
She knew that Laura had intended to upset her by drawing a line between her happiness system and the religions of the world. But it was not the seriousness of this demarcation that Sally was upset about so much as the simple fact that Laura had attacked her at all. Any criticism or show of aggression on Laura's part was enough to set Sally spinning backwards like someone clubbed over the head. This did not alter the fact that Sally considered herself to be the eventual victor. She knew too, without ever having had to reflect upon it, that Laura's connection with the universe was of greater depth and perception than her own—even though Laura was lazy and frankly jeered at life as without purpose. She had merely to speak of a serious subject when immediately the accent of her voice, the expression in her eye, lent to her words the weight of true gold. If Sally had been sincerely interested in becoming a wonderful person, she would have certainly been alarmed at recognizing a deeper accent of truth in Laura's voice than in her own. She would then have known the despair which comes of recognizing that what another understood automatically she herself would have to strive ceaselessly to understand throughout her life, and this would have caused her either to give up her own struggle—even if only temporarily, in a fit of jealous impotence—or, had she the strength, to continue along her own path, but wiser and more humble for her acquaintance with Laura.
She did neither, but instead set herself the task of conquering Laura—although exactly in what sense she meant to conquer her friend she did not herself know. Hers was an instinctive chase with a concealed objective. It is a curious fact that Sally, whose life was a series of tests and rituals of purification imposed upon herself, should have reacted so unscrupulously to the superiority—whether genuine or imagined by herself—of another woman. It was probable that she related the best and most spiritual part of her mind and heart to her life's purpose and only coarser elements in her nature to her friends.
The door opened and Laura entered the dining room. Her beauty was even darker and more mobile than usual, as she stood for a second in the light of the half-open doorway. Sally looked up and noted how the shadows gave to Laura's face its actual dimension, which ordinarily in a cruder light lay behind the features, only half guessed at by the beholder. Now her features and the beauty behind them were the same thing. Sally looked at her beauty but was neither covetous nor jealous. She was conscious only of the effort it cost her to control her own features and even her arms and legs.
"I hate my nervous system," she said to herself, "but I'll get the better of it someday." Laura was approaching slowly toward the table, a look of great sobriety and weariness upon her face. Sally saw this out of the corner of her eye. "That's the way the attack always begins," she commented to herself. "I mustn't let her get started. I'm the one who should attack anyway. But perhaps today is not a very appropriate day for a beginning. Why are the Cassalottis sitting around their rooms in the middle of the afternoon?" Laura was upon her. She could not conceal this from herself any longer.
"Hello, Sally," Laura said to her, and with no further remarks she seated herself at the table. Sally's eyes were stretched wide in their sockets with the strain of attempting to control her nerves while she waited for Laura's assault to begin. These attacks were never overt but on the contrary so disguised that any third person present would not suspect any aggression at all. Even Sally, by some mysterious but compelling rule of conduct, never raised her voice or in any way let it be too apparent in her answers to Laura that she was conscious of any hostility. And although Sally was quite aware that she was being attacked, her temper was held in abeyance by some mysterious rule of manners, and she spoke pleasantly as if she did not understand the hostility behind Laura's words.
Camp Cataract, for so many years a symbol of escape from the strife of difficult human relations, had become since Laura's arrival the very seat of this type of strain for Sally. But it was a strange fact that Sally did not realize this at all. Having divided her life into two parts, she was incapable of including a third, or at least of treating with it in a profound manner. With Laura, although she never let this be apparent, she was greedy, belligerent, and without scruple.
Neither one of them spoke for a little, and then Laura asked where the Cassalottis were.
"Hanging around their apartments, Italian style, I guess," said Sally.
"Well, I would like a beer," said Laura. "So I'm going to go and get them down in a minute. Would you like a beer?"
Sally looked straight with glistening round eyes and a little fixed smile on her lips. "You know I don't drink, Laura," she said.
"I forgot," Laura answered, "and anyway, you might change."
"I don't change."
"Really?" Laura pretended surprise. "Well, you should try to see what it's like to behave like somebody else for a change. Why don't you get drunk?" Laura rested her chin in her hand and looked thoughtfully at Sally.
"You want nothing but havoc and destruction around you, isn't that so?" Sally asked.
"Do you think I do?"
"You're a wrecker—look at your cabin. I'm not criticizing, but please don't ask me to be like you." Sally's head began to jerk a little with excitement. "Please don't ask me to be like you," she repeated.
Laura was surprised—Sally had never been so openly antagonistic before.
"I would not want you to be like me, Sally," she said in her sincere voice, with even a note of tenderness in her tone. "I would not want anyone to be like me. I've got melancholia. You know that." Her beautiful eyes were now so warm and solicitous that Sally could not continue to snap at her without making a fool of herself, so she kept her mouth tightly shut.
After a bit Laura spoke again.
"You like to sit in your cabin alone, don't you?" she asked Sally.
"I love it," said Sally.
"Why don't you get a sterno cooker? Then you could heat cans and make little stews for your dinner in the cabin."
"I like to sit on the terrace and watch the waterfall while I eat," said Sally, immediately feeling on her guard.
"Beryl could choose things from the lodge kitchen and bring them to you. A sterno cooker doesn't cost very much."
"I'd just as soon sit on the dining terrace and watch the waterfall while I eat," Sally repeated. She was almost sure the attack was on again, but not positive.
"Those little cookers are not very smelly either," Laura continued. "And Beryl could easily bring you plates and cutlery from the main dining room. You could tip her and she would even wash the plates each day and return them to you."
"I don't want to eat in my cabin," Sally said. But the spirit which had moved her a while ago to reprimand Laura was gone, and instead the familiar sensation of heaviness and impotence invaded her limbs and her head.
"Well, I think you really do," said Laura casually, turning away and glancing about the room, as if to demonstrate that she was losing interest in the conversation, "I suppose you really do but you haven't got a sterno cooker."
Sally half shut her eyes. "This is the attack, all right," she said to herself. "But I'll sit through it this time and not defend myself. It's nearly over anyway, I think."
Sally was correct in her guess that Laura's attack was nearly over. In fact, no sooner had she voiced this opinion to herself than Laura was on her feet.
"I am going upstairs," she said, "to drag the Cassalottis down here. I want my beer. Come with me."
Sally rose a little uncertainly to her feet. It was difficult for her to get up quickly when she was in a nervous state, and for one awful moment she thought she was going to fall back in her chair once more, but she managed to reach Laura's side looking fairly normal. They left the dining room and went into a small dark hallway. Laura, who was very familiar with the Cassalotti house, pulled on a door which opened onto a closed stairway. The walls of the
stairway were papered in a small flower pattern and very dirty. They started to mount the stairs—slowly because of their steepness. Sally felt her head turning a little. The air in the stairway was stale. But her dizziness was more the result of Laura's proximity than of the bad air in the stairway. Since there was no bannister, she let the flat of her palm travel along the cold, flower-papered wall. This comforted her to a certain extent until they reached the landing.
The terrible gloom and boredom that had descended upon Laura earlier in the day, back at Camp Cataract, had now completely vanished, not from her memory but from her feelings. At last the day was cluttered with possibilities and adventures. The ascension of the stairs aided her optimism, and by the time she reached the landing a happy excitement was fully upon her.
"Cassalottis!" she called in her husky voice, now ringing with gaiety.
"Hello, Laura Seabrook." Rita Cassalotti's voice was gentle but without warmth.
Laura fairly galloped down the length of the uncarpeted hallway, knocking into a wrought iron stand that supported a trough of ferns on the way. The stand teetered for a moment on its high legs, but it did not fall over.
"I want beer, you bums," Laura shouted as she flung open the Cassalottis' parlor door. Greetings were exchanged while Sally hung back in the hallway, not caring to move forward or backward. She knew that Laura wanted to be rid of her.
"She's moved on to the Cassalottis and everybody else might as well be dead," Sally reflected. "But I'll stay. Certainly I shan't come and go at her convenience." Her head was beginning to ache as a result of the afternoon's complications.
