Christopher Morley

“ Side by side, his arm about her, he and Phyllis looked down into the cool green refreshment of birdsong and dew. The light was filled with a sense of mist, too thin to be seen, but sunshine was incapable behind it. Filmy air globed them in, as the glimmering soap-bubble spheres a breath of the soap’s perfume. A dream, a fog stained with dim colour, a bubble of glamour, farce, and despair; all the sane comfortable words are no more than wind. One gush of violets rebuts them. Life is too great for those who live it. ”

“ They were like savages at a campfire, rehearsing some cheerful ceremonial to dispel sorcery. The bare mahogany of the dining table was glossed with panels of dim colour. This led her eyes upward to the red and blue window. It reminded her distantly of some poem, some perfect enchantment that mocked the poor futility of her own obsession. That most magic outcry of unreflecting love, from the most wretched of lovers: the eternal collision between life as dreamed and life as encountered.
There was a burst of laughter.
“She’ll never guess that,” she heard Ruth saying.
“All ready,” George called. ”

“ VI PHYLLIS could feel the whole flat of visible world gently tilting. Equilibrium, if there had been any, was gone: they had begun to slide. George, receding across the level grass, seemed to descend a downward slope. Martin was lying at ease on the ground beside her, with one knee bent and the other leg cocked across it. Perhaps that’s why he’s so fond of lying on the ground. It’s easier to keep from sliding. He seemed to have forgotten she was there and was humming to himself. She felt he had the advantage that silent people always have over the talkative. ”

“ Martin found it ticklish to be flensed, so they lay and made tunnels. The tide was going, the flat belt of wet beach was like a mirror, reflecting the rich sword-blade colour of the West.
But Martin was a little puzzled.
“What did you say your names are?” he asked again.
“Janet and Sylvia and Rose,” they said, delighted at his stupidity. For it is always thrilling to tell people your name: it proves that you too belong to this important world. ”

“ There, where the whole vast miracle seemed, in moments of ecstasy, to have been planned for her special amazement and pleasure. The subway, with rows of shrewd and weary faces; girls with their short skirts and vivid scarves; men with shaven, sharply modelled mouths ... the endless beauty of people, and their blessed insensibility to the infernal pang.... Yes, that was what Phyllis could do for him better than she: dull and deaden that nerve in his mind: chloroform George the Fourth, the poor little bastard! ”

“ Ruth was always so intensely conscious of the existence of other people that a merely random speculation as to what her friends were doing could prevent her all day long from concentrating on her own affairs. Others were more real to her than herself. Now she was painfully haunted by that look of conviction and fulfilment on the girl’s face. Joyce looked unhappy (she consoled herself a little with that) ; but it was a thrilling kind of unhappiness: an unhappiness scarcely to be distinguished from ecstasy. ”

“ Ruth’s eyes followed her, and it was in Ruth’s face that Phyllis first saw Joyce was beautiful. She brought some of the moonlight with her. No man can ever admire a woman’s loveliness as justly as another woman, for he rarely understands how her fluctuating charm depends on the hazard of the instant. Something had happened to make Joyce beautiful, and Phyllis was surprised by an immense compassion. ”

“ And this fellow Martin, with his cool mockery, was beginning to get on his nerves.
The engine leapt into life with the same eager alacrity as if they had been starting off for a long drive. Yes, the human objective means nothing to the routine of Nature. She looses her lightning indifferently, whether between the sooty termini of a spark plug or from charged cloud to earth. She squanders as much energy in a meadow of hallooing crickets as in a human spirit tormented by conflicting passions. ”

“ George said. “I can find it easier than Ben. There’s a flashlight in the car.”
He walked back to the stable. A lemonade-coloured moon was swimming above the maple tree. He did not bother to get the torch but slipped up the stair, moving noiselessly on rubber soles. The scarf was lying just at the top, where the steps emerged into the old harness room. He was about to glance into the hayloft, to satisfy his sentimental vision of how it would have looked to him and Joyce, a cavern of country fragrance, a musk of dead summers still banked there in pourried mounds. ”

“ She imagined a painting of that aisle of sandy road, climbing through the tall resiny grove. Religion would be a good name for it.—George had never seemed so far away as now when she sat beside him. Would it always be like that? Oh, teach yourself not to love things, she thought. Be indifferent. It’s love that causes suffering, it’s tenderness that weighs heavy on the heart. How ridiculous to say that God loves the world. [137] He doesn’t give a damn about it, really. That’s why He’s so cheerful ... such a competent artist. ”

“ The ring of feet along the paved corridors, the blunt slam of elevator gates, the steady tick of a typewriter in an adjoining office, telephones trilling here and there in the big building like birds in an aviary, the murmur of the streets rising up to them through warm heavy air. Always, in that city, she was a little mad. Where such steep terraces cut stairways on sky, where every tread falls upon some broken beauty poets are too hurried to pick up, how can one be quite [112] sane? God pity the man (George said once) who has none of that madness in his heart. ”

“ It was vain to remind himself that Walter Scott had written novels all night long, that Napoleon had planned campaigns in the agony of stomach-ache, that Elbert Hubbard was never at a loss for a Little Journey. In a nervous fidget he pared his nails, sharpened pencils, rearranged the glasses on the sideboard, emptied Ben’s cigar débris from the living-room ash tray. He trod stealthily, in stocking feet, for fear of disturbing Joyce. Without his usual couch to sleep on, his usual table to work at, he felt homeless. ”

“ Had his sorry dreams been any wiser than those of Janet and Sylvia? His absurd vision of being an artist in living, of knowing the glamour and passion of some generous fruitful career, of piercing into the stormy darkness that lies beyond the pebbly shallows of to-day—all risible! Life is defeat. Hide, hide the things you know to be true. ”

“ VIII THE beach was a different world. Under the plum-glossed wall of storm the bay was level, dusky, and still, crumbling in low parallels of surf. The waves collapsed in short flat crashes. The children flashed in the warm dull water: they wore three tight little green bathing suits: their legs so tanned it seemed as though long brown stockings were snugly drawn above their polished knees. They tumbled with the soft clumsy grace of young animals and were happy without knowing it. Janet could swim; Sylvia still used water-wings to buoy her up ”

“ George always wanted to know to whom Lizzie might be signalling with these homely pennants. They are a kind of signal, Phyllis thought. A signal that life goes on, notifying any other household within eyeshot that here too the humble routine of kitchen and washtub and ironing board, of roof and meat and sleep, triumphs in the end over the wildest poet’s dream. ”

“ Even he and Phyllis are young, they don’t need to do anything definite about life, not yet. Keep your mind on the small beautiful details, the crackling yield of bread-crust under the knife, the wide hills over the sea, sunset on open spaces that evaporates all passion, all discontent. He picks up his napkin from the rug, helps himself to vegetables, [55] and begins to eat. How delicious life is, even for an abject fool like me, he thinks. ”

“ No one would help her. No one can ever help the artist. Others she saves, herself she cannot save....
She had saved him. She had saved Phyllis’s George, given Phyllis the greatest gift of all. Given her back those Georges, enriched with [264] understanding and fear. But could she save her own poor phantom, or even herself? At any rate she was going back to her own life. She thought of that adored city waiting for her, its steep geometries of building, its thousand glimpses that inflame the artist’s eye. Extraordinary: you’d expect to find a painter exultantly at work on every street corner ”

“ I wonder if any one ever feels old?
“The Picnic is our great annual adventure,” Phyllis was saying. “I hope you won’t think us too silly, but we do look forward to it enormously. It’s such fun to forget about things once in a while and just have a good time.”
“Yes,” said George, “we worry about it for weeks beforehand. And we always invite more people than the house can properly hold.”
Phyllis flashed a little angry brightness across the table.
“You mustn’t think us too informal if things are a bit crowded, that’s part of the fun.”
“What is informal?” asked Mr. Martin, quite gravely. ”

“ God help us, he thought, people can’t even sin without finding dusty little moral justifications for it. This is what civilization has brought us to!—But what a way for a man to be thinking, with a half-written booklet on Summer Tranquillity lying on his desk.
He stepped onto the sleeping porch, where two cots had been put for Janet and Sylvia, to look at the broken railing. Projecting above the veranda, it overlooked the garden and the pale sickle of beach, distinct in glassy light. He could see Martin and the children, tiny figures frolicking on the sand. ”

“ It was just like Ruth to ruin the stable for him.
“Well, I don’t want to spoil any one else’s plans,” said Ben.
“We could play hide-and-seek in the hay,” Martin suggested.
Now they were all piling into the car, to ride round the house to the stable. This was of a piece with the absurdity of everything else, George thought. People were always driving up in crowds to visit his secrets. Like sight-seeing busses loaded with excursionists. The world loves to trample over your private ecstasies and leave them littered [171] with scraps of paper and banana peel. ”

“ But I don’t know whether I altogether enjoy people who understand so well. That’s the trouble about George: he’s getting weirdly acute, poor soul. Now, Mr. Martin: he looks divinely sympathetic, but I don’t think he quite.... People wonder why one always confides in those who don’t understand. But of course! To confide in people who do is too terrible. Giving yourself away—yes, exactly: you no longer are keeper of your own gruesome self. That’s why the Catholic notion is so sound: confession to God is nothing at all, you know He doesn’t care. ”

“ But conscious life tends to take the level of the lowest present: with Ruth and Ben and even the house itself steadfast against her, how could she speak out? The darkness that, outdoors, had been sweet privacy, was here obverted into secrecy: secrecy lay under the chairs, behind the doors, between the ticks of the clock. ”

“ It’s queer to think of all the people in the world, and how troubled they are when they look each other straight in the eyes. If I knew why that is, I’d know everything. The devil of it is, women have begun to think. That’s [49] why everything is so uneasy. Why even Phyllis has begun to think. I mustn’t let her, because she’s too fond of being comfortable. It’ll only upset her. She must be kept amused. That’s the beauty of money, it’s a substitute for thinking. It can surround you with delightful distractions. It’s like women, too: it comes to the fellows who know how to entertain it. ”

“ The little table was under the pine trees, the other side of the croquet oval. The grove smelt warm and slippery. Now there are the long hours of the afternoon to be lived through, somehow. George sprawled himself on the brown needles, the smoke of his pipe drifted past her in a blue whiff. Mr. Martin put a chair for her.
“I love these pine trees,” she said. “They’re always whispering.”
“It isn’t polite to whisper.”
[61] She smiled at him. He does say the quaintest things.
“Nature never is polite. On an afternoon like this the whole world seems to yawn in your face.” ”

“ Soft shells pulverize, hard shells polish, sand hills slither, seaweeds [93] dry and blacken: the bay takes the sea in its great arms and is content: and inland the farmyard dogs, those spotted moralists, are scandalized by the moon. The moon—chaste herself, bright persuasion of unchastity in others. For life is all one piece, of endless pattern. No stitch in the vast fabric can be unravelled without risking the whole tapestry. It is the garment woven without seams.
Here was beauty; and they, not knowing it, were part of it unawares. ”

“ Why did Nounou let the children leave their croquet mallets lying all anyhow about the lawn? Remind George that Nounou’s wages will be due on the twenty-third. If you don’t remind George of those things he complains about being taken by surprise. Beyond the hedge of rose bushes, a blue glimpse of water. It was a heavenly place. There must be some consolation in a garden like this. If one could breathe it in deeply and not think, not think, just slack off the everlasting tension for a few moments. ”

“ Like lettuce and mayonnaise, George had said, admiring the frail yellow collar. It brought out the clear blue of the eyes, like sluiced pebbles. She was almost amazed (looking closely) to see how clear they were, after so many angers, so much—physiology. One can be candid in solitude. Thirty-four. What was that story she had read, which said that a woman is at her most irresistible at thirty-five? Mother had sent it to her, in a magazine, and had written in the margin True of my Phyllis. She laughed. What a merciless comedy life is. ”