And he stood there while Laskell jointed his rod, fixed on the reel, threaded the line through the guides, and tied on the leader. The fly that Laskell chose was a Coachman. It was not a rational choice, but he could not, under Duck’s eye, stop to study the stream as Kermit Simpson had taught him to do. When he was ready, Duck said, “Well, good luck.” Then he said, “You one of those fishermen takes a flask with him?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t bring one.”
“I just thought,” Duck said.
He went away. But he left his void behind him, left it with Laskell and in him. His mind was not dirty or low as he had said Laskell might think it. It was simply void. It was nothing, the pure will of nothingness. Or it was the nothingness of pure will. It was not wickedness. It was emptiness masking itself as mind and desire. Laskell thought of the wan white Eunice Folger of Duck’s speculations, and of Emily, Duck’s wife, whose relation with this man he, Laskell, had but a few minutes before made to count for so much to his credit. And he thought of Mrs. Folger and Nancy, and of their poor misplaced confidence in Duck’s “manliness,” and of his own misplaced confidence in their female judgment. It was perhaps funny that he had no sooner decided to accept their estimate of Duck’s masculinity than Duck himself had been to such pains to set him straight. But Laskell felt no impulse to laugh.
Lack of practice made him awkward with his casting. He dutifully reminded himself of all the things he must think about—arm close to the body, wrist loose, the fly to touch the water before the leader. He did not believe that it made any difference. He did not really believe that there were fish in the stream, or that he could catch them, or that fish had ever been caught by this method. You equipped yourself expensively, you learned the technique, you did everything the way you had been taught, and even, for the deceptive pleasure of it, you debated the theory of flies with other fishermen, arguing about just what it was that the fish saw when the fly floated over its head. But nothing really happened, or whatever happened happened for quite other reasons and not because you did what you did.
He moved slowly upstream, unsure of his footing. His thighs were tired and he moved more carefully than the current required. He did not like the way he moved. He was not being wary but nervous.
But the stream began to do some of its work on Laskell. The morning mist cleared away and the air freshened. The sun came through the overhang of the trees. He saw a muskrat standing by its hole and then vanish into it. A kingfisher worked the stream ahead of him for a few minutes. It was as blue and direct as lightning.
His blood began to pick up a little with the exercise. Some sense of possibility returned to him. He began to like being alone. He forgot about Duck, forgot about Mrs. Folger’s estimate of Duck, and Nancy’s, and his own, and how they had just been contradicted by Duck’s own statement. He forgot about everything except himself, and then he forgot about himself. He began to note the likely places to drop his fly and to feel that they might yield something. After an hour he could do as well with the rod as he had ever done.
By noon the sun was out full and the sky was clear. He settled on a broad shelving rock to eat his sandwiches. He ate slowly, then he lit a cigarette. He was enjoying himself enormously.
But perhaps he sat too long. Suddenly he felt too much alone, and he began to think what he was alone in. His awareness of the life of the stream and of the banks became intense. He did not think of the trout he was presumably fishing for but of the blind and primeval things, the things of slime and darkness, the slugs and hellgrammites and leeches that must inhabit the stream. He thought of the eels that lived here, whose flesh made as fine eating, in its own way, as the trout. He remembered that it was said that the eels of every stream, all over the world, eventually made their way to the Sargasso Sea to die, moving from tributary stream to stream, in their necessity sometimes crossing the land to come at last to the sea, where, in the interlaced company of millions of their kind, they gave up the eel ghost.
He got up to enter the stream again and he saw, just behind where he had been sitting, the corpse of a huge white moth, of a staring and powdery white, with a body like a ship and a spread of wings like sails. Its big chrysalis lay near it, so perhaps it had never flown even once since it had emerged, but had been attacked while it waited for the first impulse and knowledge of flight to come to its wings. It lay there wrecked and dead, and insects worked their careful way in trains into the hull of its body. Seeing it, so white and wholly dead, Laskell shuddered.
The woods thinned out as he made his way up the stream. The banks were broader here, and there was a heavy bordering brush of laurel. The sun was now very strong on the surface of the water and it hurt his eyes.
They were standing there in the full light of the sun and seemed to emerge from the glare of the water, and their heads were piled with white soapsuds, so that, what with one circumstance and another, they at first seemed an illusion of brightness.
They stood with arms upraised, shampooing vigorously. The water came to Susan’s waist and Emily’s thighs. They were facing each other and laughing and Emily reached out and rubbed the suds into Susan’s hair. She stooped so that Susan could do the same for her. Then Susan pushed her mother backwards into the water and when Emily emerged her long hair was washed of the suds and hung dark and heavy on both sides of her face. She shoved it behind her ears and then, in retaliation, she pushed Susan down, but with a kind of slow care, holding the child’s hand.
She examined Susan’s hair to see that all the soap was gone from it. It seemed not to be, for at a word from her mother, Susan ducked down again, disappearing under the water with a single movement, as though she were curtsying. Emily too ducked under the surface again, and for a moment her hair floated out on the surface. She stood up with her head bent to one side and wrung out the hair as if it were a cloth or a hank of yarn. Susan’s gestures were as large as her mother’s as she wrung out her own smaller crop. Then they trudged out of the stream and were lost to Laskell’s sight. And yet by a strange ocular confusion, he was not wholly certain that they had left the stream—they had seemed so dissolved in sunlight that he had thought they might still be there but not clearly seen. Then he heard their chatter and laughter on the bank.
Laskell stayed where he was. His body felt extraordinarily alert, poised for movement, but he was willing not to move. They had not seen him and for all Emily Caldwell’s reputed principles about nakedness, he did not want them to know that he had seen them. He did not move—the sight seemed to be still there even after Emily and Susan had actually left the stream.
The pair dawdled a good while on the bank, and Laskell waited carefully. The memory of the sight suffused him with light or reason, or both. His line drifted downstream behind him. When he no longer heard their voices on the bank, he knew they were gone. He slowly reeled in his line and took off the Coachman, which had not brought him a single strike. He put on a Quill Gordon, which, he thought, might be better for the glare of the stream. Fastening the knot, he thought of Emily and Susan walking home in the sun with towels over their shoulders and their hair spread out on the towels to catch the sun.
There was no point in casting over their bathing place. What fish were there would now have been hopelessly disturbed, but he did cast over it anyway. Her voice was so unexpected—“Any luck?” was of course what she said—that he turned in the very act of the cast, and it may have been that a stone beneath his foot moved with his shift of weight, or it may have been that the cause of the accident was beneath another surface than that of the stream, but his ankle twisted and he felt his balance going with that slow, conscious deliberateness with which balance always goes, the illusion that at any moment it can be saved, and then he was down and under. His awareness, once the self-protective jump of his heart had passed, was of humor and relief and of the light on the bottom.
Emily Caldwell was standing there beside him when he got up, making gestures toward helping him. She could scarcely have tho
ught there was any danger—still, when someone falls into the water one naturally goes to his help, and she was there to rescue him if there were need. But there was actually nothing to rescue except Laskell’s hat. It had begun to float placidly downstream. She snatched for it with a kind of indignation at its waywardness.
“It’s my fault, all my fault,” she said. “I startled you. I’m sorry.”
But Laskell was laughing. The waders were filled and were holding the water. He was encased in water and he stood holding the rod out from him as if he feared getting it wet.
“It’s my fault,” she insisted.
He felt ridiculous and happy. She handed him the hat and he put it on his head so that its wet and drooping brim would complete his comic ruin. She looked at him and burst out laughing.
With his heavy weight of water, Laskell walked to the bank. “What are you going to do?” Emily said. Her own skirt had got wet halfway up; and she wore no shoes.
“I’m going to sit here and dry out,” Laskell said.
He unlaced his wading boots and drew them off with difficulty. His ankle was sore from the twist, but it was not sprained. He took off the big woolen socks. He unfastened the shoulder straps of the waders but he could not get the heel of the waders down over his own heel.
She saw this and said, “Would you like me to pull?”
“Please,” he said.
It was never easy to get them off and now it was harder because they were wet inside. But she was strong and persistent and they came off at last. He wrung out the cuffs of his trousers. The shirt that he took off she laid neatly on a rock to dry. There was nothing else to do, so she sat down beside him. She fluffed out her hair in the sun.
He smiled at her. “Where’s Susan?” he said.
“Oh, Susan’s gone to pick berries.” And she blushed, for anyone could hear in her tone the certainty that Susan would not be coming back.
She said, “How do you know that Susan was here? Could you hear us?”
“Yes, I could hear you. And I saw you—saw you washing your hair.”
“Did you?” she said quite comfortably. She was clearly a woman of some vanity. He thought she had good reason to be.
He looked at her frankly and curiously. She could not but be aware of what their situation might hold, what with her assurance to him that her daughter would not be coming back. Yet she met his look with a kind of sadness, not at all pained or fearful, only submissive. It was not in the least to him that she was submitting and that was what, to Laskell, made that look of hers so wonderful. It illuminated for him the presence that had been in his voice, unbidden, when he had said, “I saw you washing your hair.” She was submitting to the quite impersonal presence that had made his voice ring so simply and wonderingly as he said that. His heart began to quicken with excitement.
But he made no move, and she, not abashed by whatever he might have seen in her face, not put out because he did not immediately act upon what he saw, said to him, “They tell me you have been very ill. Are you all right now?”
“Oh, yes!” he said, as if there had never been any question of that. “Never felt better.”
“But you were very ill? Was it dangerous?”
“Well,” he said, and thought about it. “Yes, I suppose it was in a way.”
“In a way?”
“I mean the doctor told me afterward that there had been some danger. But I never knew about it until after.”
“Danger is danger,” she said firmly. “Who took care of you?”
“I had two nurses,” Laskell announced. He grinned reminiscently.
“Two?” She was much impressed.
“Yes, two. Day and night. As different as day and night. Miss Debry and Miss Paine.”
It was funny that he should tell her about Miss Debry first, about her starch and her cap and her talkativeness and her beauty. Emily Caldwell listened quietly with her large, mild look turned to him. She did not interrupt or ask questions until he reached the point where he had told Dr. Graf that he would prefer to keep Miss Paine, letting Miss Debry go.
“Oh!” said Emily.
“I know,” said Laskell, “I must have been sicker than I thought. Yes, I must have been very sick—in my mind too. I could lie there for hours on end just looking at a flower. It was a particular flower, a rose.”
And, strangely enough, here he was telling Emily Caldwell what he had not been able to tell Nancy or Arthur or any-one else, about the complex emotions he had had about the flower. It was difficult to tell. But not because he was embarrassed or because she was unreceptive, but because he was no longer very much interested in it and found it hard to remember the details. And yet he wanted to tell it, so that it would be no longer part of him, so that it would be an object in the world, existing outside himself.
“Paine said to me, ‘You seem to be having quite a love affair with that flower.’ And she was right.”
“Ah well,” Emily said, “so long as you were in love with something!”
It was too easy an escape and he refused to accept it. He presented her with the worst of his conclusions about that affair. “I think it was death I was in love with.”
She looked at him very hard. “What makes you say that?” she asked brusquely.
He shrugged. “It’s an idea I had,” he said. And then he gave her the reasons he had worked out. He told her about the “satisfaction” that Dr. Graf had heard in his voice when he had asked the question about nearly dying. He told her of Paine’s arch remark, “I think he doesn’t want to get well.” And as best he could he told her of his perception that his sense of perfect rest, of an existence without any of the conditions of existence, his feeling of identification with the perfection of the flower, was but a disguised desire for non-existence. And as he told it, almost querulously insisting on his point, he became aware of the area of weariness that he had within himself, the spot of fatigue around which all his energies, when he had them, were organized. Yes, he insisted, he had been in love with death.
“And if?” said Emily.
“What?” he said.
“And supposing?” she said. “And supposing you were?”
He was puzzled and annoyed. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I’m not sure you were. When Susan was a baby I used to do the same thing—I mean just look and look and look. It became like a trance. I felt she was so complete and I was so complete. It wasn’t that I was admiring her. It was—Well, I don’t know what it was. But it wasn’t what you say it was.”
He was not ready to admit the similarity of the two experiences. Nor did she press it, but returned to his. “And supposing you were?” she said again.
“Were what?”
“In love with death a little. It was only a little. Supposing you were. You have a right. Are you supposed to hate it?”
He did not then know from what authority she spoke, but he heard authority in her voice, enough to make him stare at her and not answer.
“Are you?” she insisted, a little passionately.
“No,” he had to admit.
“Well then!” she said, bridling with pleasure and tossing her head at having won the argument.
He could not have reconstructed the dialectic by which she had reached her victory and he did not try. He was quite satisfied that she had won. He felt the legs of his trousers. They were still very wet. He stood up to shake them from his legs to which they were clinging. He went to the rock on which she had laid his shirt and felt the shirt. It was dryer than his trousers but still pretty damp. She, as if in politeness, as if to join him in this interest in damp clothes, squeezed out the hem of her skirt and spread it out over her knees. She lifted her arms and fluffed out her long hair and tossed it about in the sun. He came and stood beside her and looked down at her. She did not stop tossing her heavy hair until he knelt down beside her, and even then she did not take her hands from it—she met his look with motionless gravity, her arms still raised. She did not take her
hands from her hair until he first touched her.
It was only later, when they were lying precisely side by side, their clasped hands hidden from sight between them, that Laskell felt that he understood not so much the logic as the basis in fact of her argument. His mind, submerged deeper and deeper beneath the dark and unoppressive somnolence of his body, held a last awareness of its willing extinction, the price of the passion it had been unable to stop and scarcely able to observe. It made a last effort at its autonomy—it concurred in its evanescence, and as it faded into the doze, it drew the expense of spirit that had just been made into a conjunction with all the expenditures of spirit of any kind, this sexual kind, or the exhaustion and stillness at the end of a work, or of a life fully and finally expended; and it even, before Laskell closed his eyes on it, flaunted the recollection that men had used the word “die” for the last destroying agony of love, which they sought.
It all seemed very clear to Laskell at the point of his falling asleep, but when he awoke it made no sense at all, but was only one of those revelations that come from the influence of sleep or drugs in which the sensation of understanding is so great that one has the certainty that one has understood something. It seemed that he opened his eyes almost immediately after closing them. And he opened them on a world of difficulty. He saw that he was in a “situation,” he wondered if he were “involved.”
The words that carried the meaning of his fear were so vulgar that he shook his head to drive them away. His body was grateful, but his mind, as if in revenge for its defeat and submergence, raised the ugly and vulgar question. He felt more truly himself than he could remember having felt for a long time. The carping remnants of his illness seemed finally to have gone, and not until they were gone did he know how much they had been there. For this, he saw, he must be grateful to Emily Caldwell. Yet how much more grateful to Emily Caldwell he would now be if she would vanish, at this very moment, having made this strange beneficent visitation of hers. That would be the right and proper way for the event to shape itself, the economical way. What she had done, what she had made known of herself, these were of this very instant, of this time and place. It could never happen again by so complete and fortunate a chance—and he would spoil what had happened by trying to reproduce it. In order to see her again he would undertake to circumvent all the circumstances that surrounded her. There were her husband and her child and her poverty, and Nancy’s hostile eye, and Mrs. Folger’s. Above all, he thought, there was the barrier of her own mind. He did not know by what great chance she had today said just the right things which had had so strange and relieving an effect upon him, not when he remembered the many affected and pretentious things she had said in the past. He wished that the astonishing truth of her few chance words and the astonishing truth of her body would never have to give way to the foolish articulations of her intellect. He feared the moment when she would speak. She would say something about “freedom” or “paganism.” He wished that now, at this moment, she would vanish in the golden cloud in which she had come.
The Middle of the Journey Page 26
