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《Black Venus》
Contents
BLACK VENUS
Black Venus
The Kiss
Our Lady of the Massacre
The et of Edgar Allan Poe
Overture and Ial Music for A Midsummer Nights Dream
P藏书网eter and the Wolf
The Kit Child
The.99lib. Fall River Axe Murders
-1
Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart. The sus the sky in winding sheets of gaudy cloud; anguish ehe city, a sense of the bitterest regret, a nostalgia for things we never knew, anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the insolable season. In America, they call it "the Fall", bringing to mind the Fall of Man, as if the fatal drama of the primal fruit-theft must recur again and again, with cyclic regularity, at the same time of every year that schoolboys set out to rob orchards, invoking, in the most everyday image, any child, every child, who, offered the choice between virtue and knowledge, will always choose knowledge, always the hard way. Although she does not know the meaning of the >99liｂ.ord, &quret", the woman sighs, without any precise reason.
Soft twists of mist ihe alleys, rise up from the slow river like exhalations of an exhausted spirit, seep in through the cracks in the window frames so that the tours of their high, lonely apartment waver a. On these evenings, you see everything as though your eyes are going to lapse to tears.
She sighs.
The custard-apple of her stinking Edehis forlorn Eve, bit -- and was all at oransported here, as in a dream; a she is a tabula rasa, still. She never experienced her experience as experience, life never added to the sum of her knowledge; rather, subtracted from it. If you start out with nothing, theyll take even that away from you, the Good Book says so.
Indeed, I think she never bothered to bite any apple at all. She wouldnt have known what knowledge was for, would she? She was iher a state of innoor a state of grace. I will tell you what Jeanne was like.
She was like a piano in a try were everybody has had their hands cut off.
On these sad days, at those melancholy times, as the room sinks into dusk, he, instead of lighting the lamp, fixing drinks, making all cosy, will ramble on: "Baby, baby, let me take you back where you belong, back to your lovely, lazy island where the jewelled parrot rocks on the eree and you ch sugar-e between your strong, white teeth, like you did when you were little, baby. Whe there, among the lilting palm-trees, uhe purple flowers, Ill love you to death. Well go bad live together in a thatched house with a veranda rown with fl vine and a little girl in a short white frock with a yellow satin bow in her kinky pigtail will wave a huge feather fan over us, stirring the languishing air as we sway in our hammock, this way and that way. . . the ship, the ship is waiting in the harbour, baby. My monkey, my pussy-cat, my pet. . . think how lovely it would be to live there. . ."
But, on these days, nipped by frost and sulking, nor pussy she; she looked more like an old crow with rusty feathers in a miserable huddle by the smoky fire which she pokes with spiteful sticks. She coughs and grumbles, she is always chilly, there is always a draught gnawing the back of her neck or ping her ankles.
Go, where? Not there! The glaring yellow shore and harsh blue sky daubed in crude, unblended colours squeezed directly from the tube, where the perspectives are abrupt as a childs drawings, your eyes hurt to look. Fly-blown towns. All there is to eat is green bananas and yams and a brochette of rubber goat to chew. She puts on a theatrical shudder, enough to shake the affronted cat off her lap. She hates the cat, anyway. She t look at the cat without wanting tle it. She would like a drink. Rum will do. She twists a flute of discarded manuscript from the aper basket into a spill for her small, foul, black cheroot.
Night es in o of fur and marvellous clouds drift past the windows, those spectral clouds of the night sky that are unily visible when no light is there. The whim of the master of the house has not let the windows alone; he had all the panes except the topmost ones replaced with frosted glass so that the inmates could pursue an uninterrupted view of the sky as if they were living in the gondola of a balloon such as the one in which his friend Nadar made triumphant asts.
At the inspiration of a gust of wind such as now rattles the tiles above us, this handsome apartment with its Persian rugs, its walnut table off which the Bias served poisons, its carved armchairs from whose bulbous legs grin and grimace the queto faces, the crust of fake Tios on the walls (hes an iigable oisseur, if, as yet, too young to have the sixth sehat tells you when youre being ed) -- at the invitation of the mysterious currents of the heavens, this well-appointed will loose its ms ireet below and take off, depart, whisk across the dark vault of the night, tangling a stillborn, crest moon in its ropes, nudging a star at lift-off, and will deposit us --
"No!" she said. "Not the bloody parrot forest! Dont take me on the slavers route back to the West Indies, fodsake! Ahe bloody cat out, before it craps on your precious Bokhara!"
They have this in oher has a native land, although he likes to pretend she has a fabulous home in the bosom of the blue o, he will force a home on her whether shes got one or not, he ot believe she is as dispossessed as he. . . Yet they are only at home together when plating flight; they are both waiting for the wind to blow that will take them to a miraculous elsewhere, a happy land, far, far away, the land of delighted ease and pleasure.
After shes got a drink or two inside her, however, she stops coughing, grows a bit more friendly, will sent to unpin her hair a him play with it, the way he likes to. And, if her native indolence does not prove too much for her -- she is capable of sprawling, as in a vegetable trance, for hours, for days, in the dim room by the smoky fire -- heless, she will sometimes lob the butt of her cheroot in the fire and be persuaded to take off her clothes and dance for Daddy who, she will grudgingly admit when pressed, is a good Daddy, buys her pretties, allocates her the occasional lump of hashish, keeps her off the streets.
Nights of October, of frail, sickle moons, when the earth ceals the shining aplice of assassins in its shadow, to make everything all the more mysterious -- on such a night, you could say the moon was black.
This dance, which he wanted her to perform so mud had especially devised for her, sisted of a series of voluptuous poses one following another; private-room-in-a-borde?9９ｌｉb.llo stuff but tasteful, he preferred her to undulate rhythmically rather than jump about and shake a leg. He liked her to put on all her bangles and beads when she did her dance, she dressed up i of king jewellery hed given her, paste, nothing she could sell or shed have sold it. Meanwhile, she hummed a elody, she liked the ones with ribald words about what the shoemakers wife did at Mardi Gras or the size of some fishermans legendary tool but Daddy paid no attention to what song his siren sang, he fixed his quick, bright, dark eyes upon her decorated skin as if, sucker, authentically entranced.
"Sucker!" she said, almost tenderly, but he did not hear her.
She cast a long shadow in the firelight. She was a woman of immense height, the type of those beautiful giantesses who, a hundred years later, would grace the stages of the Crazy Horse or the o de Paris in sequin cache-sexe and tinsel pasties, diviall, the colour aure of suede. Josephine Baker! But vivacity, exuberance were never Jeannes qualities. A slumbrous rese of anything you could , drink or smoke, i.e. burn, was her salient characteristiption, bustion, these were her vocations.
She sulked sardonically through Daddys sexy dance, watg, in a bored, fasated way, the elaborate refles of the many strings of glass beads he had giverag about above her on the ceiling. She looked like the source of light but this was an illusion; she only shone because the dying fire lit his presents to her. Although his regard made her luminous, his shadow made her blacker than she was, his shadow could eclipse her entirely. Whether she had a good heart or not underh, is anybodys guess; she had been raised in the School of Hard Knocks and enough hard knocks beat the heart out of anybody.
Though Jeanne was not proo introspe, sometimes, as she wriggled around the dark, buoyant room that tugged at its ms, longing to take off on an aerial quest for the Cythera beloved of poets, she wondered what the distin was between dang naked in front of one man who paid and dang naked in front of a group of men who paid. She had the impression that, somewhere in the difference, lay morality. Tutors in the School of Hard Knocks, that is, other chirls in the cabaret, where in her sixteenth summer, she had tunelessly croaked these same Creole ditties she now hummed, had told her there was all the differen the world and, at sixteen, she could ceive of no higher ambition than to be kept; that is, kept off the streets. Prostitution was a question of number; of being paid by more than one person at a time. That was bad. She was not a bad girl. When she slept with anyone else but Daddy, she never let them pay. It was a matter of honour. It was a question of fidelity. (In these ethical surmises slumbered the birth of irony although her lover assumed she romiscuous because she romiscuous.)
Now, however, after a few crazy seasons in the clouds with him, she sometimes asked herself if shed played her cards right. If she was going to have to danaked to earn her keep, anyway, why shouldnt she danaked for hard cash in hand and earn enough to keep herself? Eh? Eh?
But then, the very thought anising a new career made her yawn. Dragging herself around madames and music halls and so on; what an effort. And how much to ask? She had only the haziest notion of her own use value.
She danaked. Her necklaces and earrings ked. As always, when she finally got herself up off her ass and started dang she quite e. She felt almost warm towards him; her good luck he was young and handsome. Her bad luck his finances were rocky, the opium, the scribbling; that he. . . but, at "that", she snapped her mind off.
Thinking resolutely of her good luck, she held out her hands to her lover, flashed her teeth at him -- the molars might be black stumps, already, but the pointed es still white as vampires -- and invited him to join in the dah her. But he never would, never. Scared of muzzing his shirt or busting his collar or something, even if, when stoned, he would clap his hands to the rhythm. She liked it when he did that. She felt he reciating her. After a few drinks, she fot the other things altogether, although she guessed, of course. The girls told over the ghoulish litany of the symptoms together in the dressing room in hushed scared voices, peeking at the fortuelling mirror and seeing, not their rosy faces, but their ed skulls.
When she was on her own, having a few drinks in front of the fire, thinking about it, it made her break out in horrible hags laughter, as if she were already the hag she would bee enjoying a grim joke at the expense of the pretty, secretly festering thing she still was. At urgisnacht, the young witch boasted to the old witch: "Naked on a goat, I display my fine young body." How the old witch laughed! "Youll rot!" Ill rot, thought Jeanne, and laughed. This cackle of geriatriicism ill became such a creature made for pleasure as Jeanne, but ox not the emblematic fate of a creature made for pleasure and the price you paid for the atroixture of corruption and innoce this child of the sun brought with her from the Antilles?
For herself, she came , arrived in Paris with, nothing worse than scabies, malnutrition and ringworm about her person. It was a bad joke, therefore, that, some turies before Jeannes birth, the Aztec goddess, Nanahuatzin, had poured a ucopia of wheelchairs, dark glasses, crutches and mercury pills on the ships of the quistadores as they took their spoiled booty from the New World to the Old; the raped tis revenge, perpetrating itself in the beds of Europe. Jeanne ily followed Nanahuatzins trail across the Atlantic but she brought igeance -- shed picked up the germ from the very first protector. The marusted to take her away from all that, enough to make a horse laugh, except that she was a fatalist, she was indifferent.
She bent over backwards until the huge fleece of a black sheep, her unfastened hair, spilled on to the Bokhara. She ple acrobat; she could make her bato a mahogany rainbow. (Notice her big feet and huge, strong hands, capable enough to have been a nurses hands.) If he was a oisseur of the beautiful, she was a oisseur of the most exquisite humiliations but she had always been too poor to be able to afford the luxury of aowledging a humiliation as such. You took what came. She arched her bauch a small boy could have run under her. Her reversed blood sang in her ears.
Upside down as she was, she could see, iopmht-hand windowpane he had left unfrosted, the sickle moon, precise as if pasted on the sky. This moon was the size of a broad nail-paring; you could see the vague outline of the rest of its surface, obscured by the shadow of the earth as if the earth were ched between the moons shining claw-tips, so you could say the moohe world in its arms. An exceptionally brilliant star suspended from the her prong on a taut, invisible leash.
The basalt cat, the pride of the home, its excretory stroll along the quai cluded, now whined for readmittaside the door. The poet let Puss in. Puss leapt into his waiting arms and filled the apartment with a happy purr. The girl plotted tle the cat with her long, agile toes but, indulgent from the exercise of her sensuality, she soon laughed to see him loving up the cat with the same gestures, the same endearments, he used on her. She fave the cat for its existehey had a lot in on. She released the bow of her back with a twang and plumped on the rug, rubbiretched tendons.
He said she danced like a snake and she said, snakes t dahey"ve got no legs, and he said, but kindly, youre an idiot, Jeanne; but she knew hed never so much as seen a snake, nobody whod seen a snake move -- that quick system of transverse strikes, lashing itself like a whip, leaving a rippling snake in the sand behind it, terribly fast -- if hed seen a snake move, hed never have said a thing like that. She huffed off and plated her sweating breasts; she would have liked a bath, anyway, she was a little worried about a persistent vaginal discharge that smelled of mice, something new, something ominous, something horrid. But: no hot water, not at this hour.
"Theyll bring up hot water if you pay."
His turn to sulk. He took to ing his nails again.
"You think I dont need a wash because I dont show the dirt."
But, even as she lauhe first darts of a shrews assault that she could have protracted for a tense, scratchy hour or more, had she been in the mood, she lost the taste for it. She was seized with sudden indifference. What does it matter? were all going to die; were as good a?s dead already. She drew her knees up to her and crouched in front of the fire, staring vatly at the embers. Her face fixed in sullement. The cat drew silently alongside, as if on purpose, adding a touch of satanic glamour, so you could imagih were having silent versations with the demons in the flames. As long as the cat left her alone, she let it alohey were aloogether. The quality of the separate self-absorptions of the cat and the woman was so private that the poet felt outmanoeuvred and withdrew to browse in his bookshelves, those rare, precious volumes, the jewelled missals, the inabula, those books acquired from special shops that incurred damnation if you so much as opehe covers. He cherished his arduously aroused sexuality until she repared to aowledge it again.
He thinks she is a vase of darkness; if he tips her up, black light will spill out. She is not Eve but, herself, the forbidden fruit, and he has eaten her!
Weird goddess, dusky as night,
reeking of musk smeared on tobacco,
a shaman jured you, a Faust of the savannah,
black-thighed witch, midnights child. . .
-2
Ihe Faust who summoned her from the abyss of which her eyes retain the devastating memory must have exged her presence for his soul; black Helens lips suck the marrow from the poets spirit, although she wishes to do no such thing. Apart from her meals and a few drinks, she is without many scious desires. If she were a Buddhist, she would be halfway on the road to sainthood because she wants so little, but, alas, she is still pricked by needs.
The cat yawned and stretched. Jeanne woke from her trance. Folding another spill out of a dismantled soo ignite a fresh cheroot, her bib of cut glass a-jingle and a-jangle, she turo the poet to ask, in her inimitable half-raucous, half-caressing voice, voice of a crow reared on honey, with its dawdling at of the Antilles, for a little money.
Nobody seems to know in what year Jeanne Duval was born, although the year in which she met Charles Baudelaire (1842) is precisely logged and biographies of his other mistresses, Aglaé-Josephine Sabatier and Marie Daubrun, are well doted. Besides Duval, she also used the names Prosper and Lemer, as if her name was of no sequence. Where she came from is a problem; books suggest Mauritius, in the Indian o, or Santo Domingo, in the Caribbean, take your pick of two different sides of the world. (Her pays dine of less importahan it would have been had she been a wine.) Mauritius looks like a shot in the dark based on the fact the Baudelaire spent some time on that island during his abortive trip to India in 1841. Santo Domingo, bus Hispaniola, now the Domini Republic, a troubled history, borders upon Haiti. Here Toussaint LOuverture led a successful slave revolt against French plantation owners at the time of the French Revolution.
Although slavery had been abolished without debate throughout the French possessions by the National Assembly in 1794, it was reimposed in Martinique and Guadeloupe -- though not in Haiti -- by Napoleon. These slaves were not finally emancipated until 1848. However, Afri mistresses of French residents were often manumitted, together with their children, and intermarriage was by no means a rare occurrence. A middle-class Creole population grew up; to this class belong the Josephine who became Empress of the Fren her marriage to the same Napoleon.
It is uhat Jeanne Duval beloo this class if, in fact, she came from Martinique, which, since she seems to have been Francophone, remains a possibility.
He made a note in Man Coeur Mis à Nu: "Of the Peoples Hatred of Beauty. Examples: Jeanne and Mme Muller." (Who was Mme Muller?)
Kids ireets chucked sto her, she so tall and witchy and when she issed, teetering along with the vulnerable, self-scious dignity of the drunk which always invites mockery, and, always she held her bewildered head with its enormous, unravelling cape of hair as proudly as if she were carrying upon it an enormous pot full of all the waters of Lethe. Maybe he found her g because the kids ireet were chug sto her, calling her a "black bitch" or worse and spattering the beautiful white flounces of her olih handfuls of tossed mud they scooped from the gutters where they thought she belonged because she was a whore who had the o sashay to the er shop for cheroots or ordinaire or rum with her uck up in the air as if she were the Empress of all the Africas.
But she was the deposed Empress, royalty in exile, for, of the entire aerogeneous wealth of all those tries, had she not been dispossessed?
Robbed of the broeway of Benin; of the iros of the Amazons of the court of the King of Dahomey; of the esoteric wisdom of the great uy of Timbuktu; of the urbanity of glamorous desert cities before whose walls the horsemen wheel, weling the night on trumpets twice the length of their own bodies. The Abyssinia of black saints and holy lions was not even so much as a legend to her. Of those savannahs where mele with leopards she knew not o. The splendid tio which her skin allied her had been excised from her memory. She had been deprived of history, she was the pure child of the y. The y -- white, imperious -- had fathered her. Her mother went off with the sailors and her granny looked after her in one room with a rag-covered bed.
Her granny said to Jeanne: "I was born in the ship where my mother died and was thrown into the sea. Sharks ate her. Another woman of some other nation who had just still-born suckled me. I dont know anything about my father nor where I was ceived nor on what coast nor in what circumstances. My foster-mother soon died of fever in the plantation. I was weaned, I grew up."
heless, Jeaained a ive iance; if you tried to get her to do anything she didnt want to, if you tried to erode that little steely of her free will, which expressed itself as lethargy, you could see how she had worn away the patience of the missionaries and so e to i, not even self-pity, only the twenty-nine legally permitted strokes of the whip.
Her granny spoke Creole, patois, knew no other language, spoke it badly and taught it badly to Jeanne, who did her best to vert it into good French when she came to Paris and started mixing with swells but made a hash of it, her heart wasnt in it, no wonder. It was as though her tongue had been cut out and another one sewn in that did not fit well. Therefore you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not uand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lovers poetry but, that it erpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed u because his eloquence denied her language. It made her dumb, a dumbness all the more profound because it maed itself in a harsh clatter of ungrammatical recriminations and demands which were not directed at her lover so much -- she was quite fond of him -- as at her own dition, great gawk of an ignorant black girl, good for nothing: corre, good for only ohing, even if the spirochetes were already burrowing away diligently at her spinal marrow while she bore up the superb weight of oblivion on her Amazonian head.
The greatest poet of alienation stumbled upon the perfect straheirs was a match made in heaven. In his heart, he must have known this.
The goddess of his heart, the ideal of the poet, lay resplely on the bed in a room morosely papered red and black; he liked to have her make a spectacle of herself, to provide a sumptuous feast for his bright eyes that were always bigger than his belly.
Venus lies on the bed, waiting for a wind to rise: the sooty albatross hankers for the storm. Whirlwind!
She was acquainted with the albatross. A scallop-shell carried her stark naked across the Atlantic; she clutched an enormous handful of dreadlocks to her pubic mound. Albatrosses hitched glides on the gales the wee black cherubs blew for her.
The Albatross fly around the world i days, if only it sticks to the stormy places. The sailors call the huge bird ugly names, goonies, mollyhawks, because of their foolish clumsiness on the ground but wind, wind is their element; they have absolute mastery of it.
Down there, far below, where the buttocks of the world slim down again, if you go far south enough you reach again the realm of perpetual cold that begins and ends our experience of this earth, thes of ice mountains where the bull-r winds bay and bellow and no people are, only the stately penguin in his frock coat not unlike yours, Daddy, the estimable but,?9９liｂ. unlike you, uxorious penguin who balahe precious egg on his feet while his dear wife goes out and has as good a time as the Antarctic may afford.
If Daddy were like a penguin, how much more happy we should be; there isnt room for two albatrosses in this house.
Wind is the element of the albatross just as domesticity is that of the penguin. In the "R Forties" and "Furious Fifties", where the high winds blow ceaselessly from west to east between the remotest tips of the inhabited tis and the blue nightmare of the uninhabitable ice, these great birds glide in delighted glee, south, far south, so far south it is the notional south of the poets parrot-forest and glittering beach; down here, down south, only the phlegmatioe, flightless birds form the audience for the wonderful aerielistes who live in the heart of the storm -- like the beoisie, Daddy, sitting good and quiet with their eggs on their feet watg artists such as we dare death upon the high trapeze.
The woman and her lover wait for the rising of the wind upon which they will leave the gloomy apartment. They believe they asd and soar upon it. This wind will be like that from a new pla.
The young man ihe aroma of the ut oil which she rubs into her hair to make it shine. His agonised romanticism transforms this homely odour of the Caribbean kit into the perfume of the air of those tropical islands he sometimes persuade himself are the happy lands for which he longs. His lively imagination performs an alchemical alteration on the healthy tang of her sweat, freshly awakened by dang. He thinks her sweat smells of amon because she has spices in her pores. He thinks she is made of a different kind of flesh than his.
It is essential to their e that, if she should put on the private garments of nudity, its non-sartorial regalia of jewellery and rouge, then he himself must retain the publieteenth-tury mase impedimenta of frock coat (exquisitely cut); white shirt (pure silk, London tailored); oxblood cravat; and impeccable trousers. Theres more to Le Déjeuner sur lHerbe thahe eye. (Ma, another friend of his.) Man does and is dressed to do so; his skin is his own business. He is artful, the creation of culture. Woman is; and is therefore, fully dressed in no clothes at all, her skin is on property, she is a being at oh nature in a fleshly simplicity that, he insists, is the most abominable of artifices.
Once, before she became a kept woman, he and a group of Bohemians trived to kidnap her from her ers at the cabaret, spirited her, at first protesting, then laughing, off with them, and they wandered along the streets in the small hours, looking for a place to take their prize for another drink and she urinated ireet, right there, didnt annou; o off into an alley to do it on her own, she did not even leave go of his arm but straddled the gutter, legs apart and pissed as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Oh, the ued ese bells of that liquid cascade!
(At which point, his Lazarus arose and knocked unbidden on the coffin-lid of the poets trousers.)
Jeached up her skirts with her free hand as she stepped across the pool shed made, so that he saw where she had splashed her white stogs at the a seemed to his terrified, exacerbated sensibilities that the liquid was a kind of bodily acid that burned away the knitted cotton, dissolved her petticoat, her stays, her chemise, the dress she wore, her jacket, so that now she walked beside him like an ambulaish, savage, obse, terrifying.
He himself always wloves of pale pink kid that fitted as tenderly close as the rubber gloves that gynaecologists will wear. Watg him play with her hair, she tranquilly recollected a red-haired friend in the cabaret who had served a brief apprenticeship in a brothel but retired from the profession after she discovered a signifit proportion of her ers wanted nothing more of her than permission to ejaculate intnifit Titian mane. (How the girls giggled over that.) The red-haired girl thought that, on the whole, this messy business was less distasteful and more hygienic than regular intercourse but it meant she had to wash her hair so often that her ing, indeed -- she was a squint-eyed little thing -- unique glory was stripped of its essential, natural oils. Seller and odity in one, a whore is her own iment in the world and so she must take care of herself; the squinting red-head decided she dare not risk squandering her capital so recklessly but Jeanne never had this temperament of the tradesperson, she did not feel she was her own property and so she gave herself away to everybody except the poet, for whom she had too much respect to offer su ambivalent gift for nothing.
"Get it up for me," said the poet.
"Albatrosses are famous for the courtship antics they carry on throughout the breeding season. These involve grotesque, awkward dang, apanied by bowing, scraping, snapping of bills, and prolonged nasal groans."
Birds of the World, Oliver L. Austin Jnr
They are not great builders. A slight depression in the ground will do. Or, they might hollow out a little mound of mud. They will make only the most squalid cessions to the earth. He envisaged their bed, the albatrosss , as just such a fleeting kind of residen which Destiny, the greatest madame of all, had closeted these twe birds together. In this transitory exile, anything is possible.
"Jeanne, get it up for me."
Nothing is simple for this fellow! He makes a performance worthy of the édie Fran?aise out of a fuck, bringing him off is a five-act drama with farcical interludes and other passages that could make you cry and, afterwards, cry he does, he is ashamed, he talks about his mother, but Jeanne t remember her mother and her granny sed her with a ships mate for a couple of bottles, a bargain with which her granny said she was well satisfied because Jeanne was already getting into trouble and growing out of her clothes and ate so much.
While they had been untangling together the history ression, the fire went out; also, the small, white, shining, winter moon iop left-hand er of the top left-hand pane of the few sheets of clear glass in the window had, apanied by its satellite star, pleted the final se of its slow arc over the black sky. While Jeaoically laboured over her lovers pleasure, as if he were her vineyard, she laying up treasure in heaven from her thaoil, moon and star arrived together at the lht-hand windowpane.
If you could see her, if it were not so dark, she would look like the victim of a robbery; her bereft eyes are like abysses but she will hold him to her bosom and fort him for betraying to her in his self-disgust those trace elements of on humanity he has left inside her body, for which he blames her bitterly, for which he will glorify her, awardihe eternity promised by the poet.
The moon and star vanish.
Nadar says he saw her a year or so after, deaf, dumb and paralysed, Baudelaire died. The poet, finally, so far estranged from himself that, in the last months before the disease triumphed over him, when he was shown his refle in a mirror, he bowed politely, as to a stranger. He told his mother to make sure that Jeanne was looked after but his mother didnt give her anything. Nadar says he saw Jeanne hobbling on crutches along the pavement to the dram-shop; her teeth were gone, she had a mammy-rag tied around her head but you could still see that her wonderful hair had fallen out. Her face would terrify the little children. He did not stop to speak to her.
The ship embarked for Martinique.
You buy teeth, you know; you buy hair. They make the best wigs from the shorn locks of novices in vents.
The man who called himself her brother, perhaps they did have the same mother, why not? She hadnt the fai idea what had happeo her mother and this hypothetical, high-yellow, demi-sibling popped up in the nick of time to take over her disordered finances with the skill of a borrepreneur -- he might have been Mephistopheles, for all she cared. Her brother. Theyd salted away what the poet mao smuggle to her, all the time he was dying, when his mother wasnt looking. Fifty francs for Jeanne, here; thirty francs for Jeahere. It all added up.
She was surprised to find out how much she was worth.
Add to this the sale of a manuscript or two, the ones she hadnt used to light her cheroots with. Some books, especially the ones with the flowery dedications. Sale of cuff-links and drawerful upon drawerful of pink kid gloves, hardly used. Her brother knew where to get rid of them. Later, any memorabilia of the poet, even his clumsy drawings, would fetch a surprising sum. They left a portfolio with aerprising agent.
In a new dress of black tussore, her somewhat ravaged but carefully repaired face partially cealed by a flattering veil, she chugged away from Europe on a steamer bound for the Caribbean like a respectable widow and she was not yet fifty, after all. She might have been the Creole wife of a minor civil servaing off home after his death. Her brother went first, to look out the property they were going to buy.
Her voyage was interrupted by no albatrosses. She hought of the slavers route, unless it was to pare her grandmothers crossing with her own, fortable one. You could say that Jeanne had found herself; she had e down to earth, and, with the aid of her ivory e, she walked perfectly well upon it. The sea air did her good. She decided to give up rum, except for a si last thing at night, after the ats were pleted.
Seeing her, now, in her deing years, every m i black, leaning a little oick but stately as only one who has snatched herself from the lions mouth be. She leaves the charming house, with its vine-covered veranda; "Good m, Mme Duval!" sings out the obsequious gardener. How sweet it sounds. She is taking last nights takings to the bank. "Thank you so much, Mme Duval." As soon as she had got her first taste of it, she became a glutton for deference.
Until at last, ireme old age, she succumbs to the ache in her bones and a ce of grieving girls takes her to the churchyard, she will tio dispeo the most privileged of the ial administration, at a not excessive price, the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairean syphilis.
The lines on page 237 are translated from:
SED NON SATIATA
Bizarre déité, brune e les nuits,
Au parfum mélangé de musc et de havane,
Oeuvre de quelque obi, le Faust de la savane,
Sorcière au flanc débène, enfant des noirs minuits,
Je préfère au stance, à lopium, au nuits,
Lélixir de ta bouche où lamour se pavane;
Quaoi mes désirs partent en caravane,
Tes yeux sont la citerne où boivent mes ennuis.
Par ces deux grands yeux noirs, soupiraux de ton ame,
? démon sans pitié! verse-moi moins de flamme;
Je ne suis pas le Styx pour tembrasser neuf fois,
Hélas! et je ne puis, Mégère libertine,
Pour briser ton ce et te mettre aux abois,
Dans lenfer de ton lit devenir Proserpine!
Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
The other poems in Les Fleurs du Mal believed to have been written about Jeanne Duval, are often called the Black Venus Cycle, and include "Les Bijoux", "La Chevelure", "Le Serpent qui danse, "Parfum Exotique", "Le Chat", "Je tadore à legal de la vo?te noe", etc.
The Kiss-1
The winters iral Asia are pierg and bleak, while the sweating, foetid summers bring cholera, dysentery and mosquitoes, but, in April, the air caresses like the touch of the inner skin of the thigh and the st of all the fl trees douses the citys throat-catg whiff of cesspits.
Every city has its own internal logic. Imagine a city drawn in straightfeometric shapes with crayons from a childs c box, in ochre, in white, in pale terracotta. Low, bloerraces of houses seem to rise out of the whitish, pinkish earth as if born from it, not built out of it. There is a faint, gritty dust over everything, like the dust those pastel crayons leave on your fingers.
Against these bleached pallors, the iridest crusts of ceramic tiles that cover the a mausoleums ensorcellate the eye. The throbbing blue of Islam transforms itself to green while you look at it. Beh a bulbous dome alternately lapis lazuli and veridian, the bones of Tamburlaihe sce of Asia, lie in a jade tomb. We are visiting an authentically fabulous city. We are in Samarkand.
The Revolution promised the Uzbek peasant women clothes of silk and on this promise, at least, did not welch. They wear tunics of flimsy satin, pink and yellow, red and white, blad white, red, green and white, in blotched stripes of brilliant colours that dazzle like an optical illusion, and they bedeck themselves with much jewellery made lass.
They always seem to be frowning because they paint a thick, black liraight across their foreheads that takes their eyebrows from one side of the face to the other without a break. They rim their eyes with kohl. They look startling. They fasten their long hair in two or three dozen whirling plaits. Young girls wear little velvet caps embroidered with metallic thread and beadwork. Older women cover their heads with a couple of scarves of flower-printed wool, one bound tight over the forehead, the other hanging loosely on the shoulders. Nobody has worn a veil for sixty years.
They walk as purposefully as if they did not live in an imaginary city. They do not know that they themselves and their turbanned, sheepskin-jacketed, booted menfolk are creatures as extraordinary to the fn eye as a uni. They exist, in all their glittering and i exoticism, in direct tradi to history. They do not know what I know about them. They do not know that this city is not the entire world. All they know of the world is this city, beautiful as an illusion, where irises grow iters. Ieahouse a green parrot he bars of its wicker cage.
The market has a sharp, green smell. A girl with black-barred brows sprinkles water from a glass over radishes. In this early part of the year you buy only last summers dried fruit -- apricots, peaches, raisins -- except for a few, precious, wrinkled pomegranates, stored in sawdust through the winter and now split open oall to shoet of gars remains within. A local speciality of Samarkand is salted apricot kernels, more delicious, even, than pistachios.
An old woman sells arum lilies. This m, she came from the mountains, where wild tulips have put out flowers like b藏书网lown bubbles of blood, and the wheedling turtle-doves are ing among the rocks. This old woman dips bread into a cup of buttermilk for her lund eats slowly. When she has sold her lilies, she will go back to the place where they are growing.
She scarcely seems to inhabit time. Or, it is as if she were waiting for Scheherazade to perceive a final dawn had e and, the last tale of all cluded, fall silent. Then, the lily-seller might vanish.
A goat is nibbling wild jasmine among the ruins of the mosque that was built by the beautiful wife of Tamburlaine.
Tamburlaines wife started to build this mosque for him as a surprise, while he was away at the wars, but whe word of his immi return, one arch still remained unfinished. She went directly to the archited begged him to hurry but the architect told her that he would plete the work on time only if she gave him a kiss. One kiss, one single kiss.
Tamburlaines wife was not only very beautiful and very virtuous but also very clever. She went to the market, bought a basket of eggs, boiled them hard and staihem a dozen different colours. She called the architect to the palace, showed him the basket and told him to choose any egg he liked a it. He took a red egg. What does it taste like? Like an egg. Eat another.
He took a green egg.
What does that taste like? Like the red egg. Try again.
He ate a purple egg.
One eggs tastes just the same as any , if they are fresh, he said.
There you are! she said. Each of these eggs looks different to the rest but they all taste the same. So you may kiss any one of my serving women that you like but you must leave me alone.
Very well, said the architect. But soon he came back to her and this time he was carrying a tray with three bowls on it, and you would have thought the bowls were all full of water.
Drink from each of these bowls, he said.
She took a drink from the first bowl, then from the sed; but how she coughed and spluttered wheook a mouthful from the third bowl, because it tained, not water, but vodka.
This vodka and that water both look alike but each tastes quite different, he said. And it is the same with love.
Then Tamburlaines wife kissed the archite the mouth. He went back to the mosque and fihe arch the same day that victorious Tamburlaine rode into Samarkand with his army and banners and his cages full of captive kings. But when Tamburlaio visit his wife, she turned away from him because no woman will return to the harem after she has tasted vodka. Tamburlai her with a knout until she told him she had kissed the archited then he sent his executioners hotfoot to the mosque.
The executioners saw the architect standing on top of the ard ran up the stairs with their knives drawn but when he heard them ing he grew wings and flew away to Persia.
This is a story in simple, geometric shapes and the bold colours of a childs box of crayons. This Tamburlaines wife of the story would have painted a black stripe laterally across her forehead and done up her hair in a dozen, dozen tiny plaits, like any other Uzbek woman. She would have bought red and white radishes from the market for her husbands dinner. After she ran away from him perhaps she made her living in the market. Perhaps she sold lilies there.
Our Lady of the Massacre
My name is her here nor there since I used several in the Old World that I may not speak of now; then there is my, as it were, wilderness hat now I never speak of; and, now, what I call myself in this place, therefore my name is no clue as to my person nor my life as to my nature. But I first saw light in the ty of Lancashire in Old England, in the Year of Our Lord 16--, my father a poor farm servant, and me mam ah died of plague when I was a little thing so me and me brothers and sisters left living were put on the parish and what became of them I do not know, but, as for me, I could do a bit of sewing and keep a place so when I were nine or ten years of age they set me up as a maid of all work to an old woman that lived in our parish.
This old woman, or lady rather, never married and was, as I found out, of the Roman faith, though she kept that to herself, and once a good deal richer than she had bee. Besides, her father, wanting a son aing nowt but she, taught her Latin, Greek and a bit of Hebrew a her a great telescope with which she used to view the heavens from her roof though her sight was too bad to make out much but what she did not see, she made up, for she said she had pht for the things of this world but clear sight into the oo e. She ofte me have a squint at the stars, too, for I was her only panion and she learned me my letters, as you see, and would have taught me all she knew herself, had she not, as soon as I e to her, cast my horoscope for me, her father havihe charts and zodiacal instruments. And, having I done so, told me I would not he language of Homer at no time in all my life, but a little versational Hebrew she did teach me, for reasons as follows:
That the stars, whom she had sulted on behalf of her dear child, as she pleased to call me, assured her that I would take a long voyage over the O to the New World and there bear a blessed babe whose fathers fathers never sailed in Noahs Ark. And, from her reading, which had worn her eyes out, she had cluded that those "red children of the wilderness" could be her than the Lost Tribe of Israel, so shalom, she taught me, besides the words for "love" and "hunger", and much else that I have fotten, so that I could talk to my husband when I met him. And if I had not been a steady girl, she would have turned my head with all her nonsense for she would have it that the stars foretold I should grow up to be nowt less than Our Lady of the Red Men.
For, she says, that try far beyond the sea is named Virginia, after the virgin mother of God Almighty, and its rivers flow directly from Eden so, wheives are verted to the true religion -- "which task I charge you with, child," and she gives me a mouthful of Ave Marias -- when that shall be aplished, why, the whole world will end and the dead rise up out of their coffins and all go to heaven that deserve it and my little babby sit smiling over everything with a gold on his head. Then shed babble away in Latin and cross herself. But I old nobody about her Roman ways nor about her star-gaziher, for if they hadnt hanged her for a heretic, theyd have hanged her for a witch, poor creature.
One day the old lass lies down and never gets up again and her cousins e and shift all the goods with a pennorth of value to em but they could find no plae in their house so I must shift for meself.
I take it into my head to go to London, where I persuade myself I make my fortune, and I walk the highway, sleeping in barns and hedges, for I was har99lｉb?dy, and makes good time -- five days. When I gets to London, I stole my first penny loaf, to keep me from starving, which led directly to my undoing, a gentleman that spies me slip the loaf into my pocket, instead of raising a hue and cry, follows me into the streets, takes my arm, inquires: whether it be want or ination that makes me take it. I flares up at that: Want, sir! says I and he says, such a pretty young "Lancashire milkmaid" as I was should not want for nothing while he had breath in his body and so flattered and coaxed me that I went with him to a room with a bed in it in a public house where he was well known. When he finds Ive never dohe thing before, he weeps; beats his breast for shame for debaug me; gives me five gold sns, the most mohat ever I saw until then; as for, so he says, the church, to pray fiveness, which is the last that I saw of him. So I went on the on with my first fall, which was a fortunate one, and the "Lancashire milkmaid" was soon in a fair way of trade as the "Lancashire whore".
Now, had I been tent with ho wh, no doubt I would be dressed in silk riding my coa Cheapside still and never eat the bitter bread of exile. But you could say that, when I clapped my eye on his , I was as if struck with love and though want made a thief of me, first, it was avarice perfected me i and wh was my "cover" for it since my ers, blinded as they were with lust and often fuddled with liquor, were easier to pluck, living, than geese, dead.
It was a gold watch out of the bosom of a city alderman that took me to e for I quarrelled with my landlady over my rent and she took his plai of me to the magistrate out of spite. So, just as my old Lancashire mistress said, I sailed the O tinia but I went in a vict transport. They burned my hand, to brand me, as they used victs, and sold me to work my senten the plantation for seven years, after which they said I should be a free woman again.
My master took a liking to me, for I was not yet aged above seventeen, and he had me out of the tobacco fields into his kit. But the overseer did not like it, that I should get the taste of his whip no more, aered me unmercifully that, since I had been a whore in Cheapside, I should not play the ho maid with him in Virginia. ing at me alone in the house, my master having goo church, it being Sunday m, this overseer thrust one hand in my bosom and the other up my skirt, says I shall have it whether I wants it or no. I picked up the big carving knife and whacks off both his ears, first ohen tother. What a sight! blood enough f-stig; he roars, he curses, I runs out into the garden with the knife in my hand, it dripping.
Seeing me in such a fluster, the gardener ing up with a basket of vegetables cries: "Whats this, Sal?"
"Well," says I, "the overseer just now tried to board me and Ive had the ears off him and would it had been his pillocks too."
The gardener, being a good-natured kind of Negro man and a slave, hisself, and hisself tickled ooo often by the overseers whip, ot forbear to laugh but says to me: "Then you must be off into the wilderness, Sal, and cast your fate to the tender mercies of the savage Indian. For this is a hanging matter."
He gives me his handkerchief with his bit of dinner in it and a tinder-box he had about him, which I stow away in my apron pocket, and I show the plantation a pair of heels, I tell you, adding to my list of crimes that most heinous: escape from bondage.
I am a good walker as you may judge from my trudge from Lancashire to London and by the time night es on and I sit down to eat the gardeners bit of bread and ba there are fifteen odd miles between myself and the plantation and rough going, too, for my master had cleared land from the forest to grow his tobay plan is, to walk until I gets to where the English have no dominion, for I have heard the Spaniards and the French are on this coast, as well, and there, I thought, Id ply my trade amongst strangers, for a whore needs nowt but her skin to set up business.
You must know I had no knowledge of geography and thought, from Virginia to Florida but ten or twelve days march, at the most, for I k was very far and could think of no distance further than that, for the great vastness of the Americas was then unknown to me. As for the Indians, I thought, well! if I keep off the overseer with my knife, Id be more than a match for them, if I should meet them, so slept sound uhe sky, took a bearing by the sun in the m a on.
I had water out of the streams and it was the season of berries so I made my breakfast off a bit of fruit but my guts began to rumble by diime and I cast my eye about for more solid fodder. Seeing the brakes full of small beasts and birds unknown to me, I thought: "How I go hungry if I use my wits!" So I tied my shs together to make a little snare and trapped a small, brown, furry thing of the rabbit kind, but earless, and slit its throat, ski, toasted it on the end of my carving-knife over a fire I made with the blessed tinder-box the gardener give me. So all I wanted was salt and a bit of bread.
After I eat my dinner, I saw how the oak trees were full of as at this season and thought that I might grind up those as between two flat stones, with a bit of effort, and so get a kind of flour, as had been do home in times of want. I reasoned how I could mix this flour to dough with water. Then I could bake the dough in cakes in the ashes of my fire and have bread with my meat. And, if I wanted fish on a Friday, as was my Lancashire ladys , I could tickle the trout with which the stream abounded, which is a trick every try girl knows and not unlike pig a pocket. Also, it seemed to me, if I dried the mulberries in the sun, they would eat sweet for a month. When I got so far in planning my diet, I thought: why, I get along here very well in the woods on my own for a while even if I must eat meat without salt!
For, I thought, I have steel and fire and the climate is temperate, the land fruitful; this earthly paradise surely will provide for me! I build a shelter out of branches and bide my time until the fuss over the lop-eared overseer dies down, then make my way South in my own good time. Besides, to tell the truth, my nostrils were too full of the stink of humanity to relish a quick return to the world in some bordello in Florida. But I thought that I should travel on a little more, for safetys sake, into the deep wilderness, so that no hunting party might find me auro the noose. Of which I had a very powerful fear and, I may tell you, more dread of the white man, which I khan of the red man, who was at that time unknown to me.
So I walked on another day, taking my living from the try easily enough; then one day more and never heard a voice but the birds whistle; but the day after that I heard a woman singing and saw one of the savage tribe in a clearing and thought to kill her, before she killed me, but then I saw she had no on but ig herbs and putting them in a fine basket. So I steps back to hide myself from her lest she be some Indian servant of a planter, although I do think that I walk, now, where no person of my try ever trod before. But she hears the leaves move and sees me and jumps as if shed seen a ghost so that she knocks over her basket and her herbs spill out.
I hink twice about it but step across to pick up the spilled herbs for her as if I was ba Cheapside and run to help some fruit-seller that overturns her basket of apples.
This womahe brand on my hand and grunts to herself, as though she knows the meaning of it and will not fear me for it, or, rather, does not fear me because of it, but, all the same, does not like the look of me. She holds back from me though she takes her basket from me again as if to leave me in the forest. But I am struck by her looks, she is a handsome woman, not red but wondrous brown, and it came into my mind to open my bodice, show her my breasts, that, though I had whiter skin, I could give suck as well as she and she reached out and touched my bosom.
She was a woman of about middle age dressed in nowt but a buckskin skirt and she grunted when she saw my stays -- for I still wore my English apparel, though it was ragged -- and motioned me, as I thought, that whalebone was not the fashion among the Indian nation. So off go my stays and I throws them into a bush and breathes easier for it. Then she asks me, by signs, to give her the big knife Id stu my apron.
"Now Im for it!" I thinks but hands it over and she smiles, though not much, for these savages are not half so free with their feelings as we are, and says in a word I take to mean "Knife". I say it after her, pointing to it, but she shakes her head and runs her finger down the blade, so I say, after her: "Sharp". Or, a word you might put into English as: acute. And that was the first word of the Algonkian language that ever I spoke, though not the last, by any means. Then, seeing this old woman with a shape, not, as I see, marked by child-bearing, and remembering the Virgin Queen my missus taught me of, I try her out with: "Shalom". Which she politely repeats after me but I tell it means nowt to her.
She motions me: shall I go with her? I think the overseer will never e to look for me among the red men! So I goes with her to the Indian town and in this way, no other, was I "taken" by em although the Minister would have it otherwise, that they took me with violence, against my will, haling me by the hair, and if he wishes to believe it, the im.
The Kiss-2
Their , pretty town was built within a low wood fence or stockade, the houses built of birchbark set in gardens with vines with pumpkins on em and the cooking of their meat sav the air, as it was about diime. They were cooking what they call succotash, a great pot on an open fire and a naked savage squatting before it, calm as you please, fanning the flames with a birchbark fan. The town was surrounded by tidy fields of tobacd and a river near. But no kind of beast did I see, nor cows nor horses nor chis, for they keep none. She takes me to her own lodge, where she lives by herself on at of her business, and gives me water to wash in and a bunch of feathers to dry myself, so that I was much refreshed.
I had heard these Indians were mortal dragons, aced to eat the flesh of dead men, but the pretty little naked children playing with their dollies in the dust, oh! never could such little ducks be reared on ibal meat! And my Indian "mother", as I soon called her, assured me that though their cousins to the North roasted the thighs of their captives and ceremoniously partook thereof, it was, as you might say, a sacramental meal, to honour the departed by dev him; and I have often disputed with the Minister on this point, that the Iroquois dinner is but the Mass in a state of nature. And the Minister will say, either: that I lived so long with Satan that I grew aced to his ways, or, that the Romish Mass is but the Iroquois feast in britches.
As for me, all I ever eat among the Indians was fish, game or fowl, boiled or broiled, besides cooked in various ways, beans, squash in season ad this such a healthy diet that it is very rare to see a sick body amongst them and never did I see there aher shaking with palsy or suffering toothache or with sore eyes or crooked with age.
The weather being warm, at first I blushed to see the nakedness of the savages, for the men were aced to go clad in nowt but breech-clouts at that season and the women with only a rag about em. But soon I thought nothing of it and exged my petticoat for the bu one my mive me and she gave me a necklace, too, of the beads they carve from shells, for she said she had no daughter of her own to pet until the woods sehis one, whom she was thankful to the English fiving away.
There was no end of the kindness of this woman to me and I lived in her with her, for she had no husband, since she was, as it were the midwife of the tribe and all her time taken up with seeing to women in their labour. And it was to make potions to ease the labour pains and the pains of the women in their courses that she ig herbs in the woods when I first saw her.
How do they live, these so-called demi-devils? The men among them have an easy life, spend all their time in leisure and idleness, except when they are hunting hting their enemies, since all their tribes are stantly at war with one another, and with the English, too; and the werowance, as they call him, he is not the chief, or ruler of the village, although the English do say that he is so, but, rather, he is the man who goes the first in battle, so he is only more ceous a man than the English generals who direct their soldiers from the back.
As for me, I stayed with my Indian mother in her hut and learned from her Indian manners, such as sitting on my knees on the ground to my meat that read on a mat before me because they have no furniture. I learned how to cure and dress robes out of buckskin, beaver and other skins, and to embroider them with shell aher. I had a housewife with me in my apron pocket and my mother was very pleased with the steel needles, likewise with the tinder-box, which she was glad to get, while my carving-knife she thought a wonderfully vehing, they having no notion of w metal although the women make good pots out of the river clay and bake them in an open fire very cleverly while you never see a beard on any man, sihey trive to shave themselves all over quite close with razors of stone.
And I should say that one or two guns they did have, for a little while before I arrived amohere came a San, sing guns and liquor iurn for dressed robes and, as for the effects of the liquor, I shall say nowt about it except it sends em mad, but, as for the guns, they soon learo use them.
The harvest ing on, they gathered up their , a very poor, small sort of , to my way of thinking, the heads just that much bigger than my thumb, and we dug holes in the ground six or seve deep and what of the we did we dried and stored away uhe earth. But the digging was a great labour for they have no shovels or spades except what they steal from the English so we made shift with sticks or the shoulder-bones of deer. And if I have one quarrel with my tribe, it is that the men will have nothing to do with this agriculture, although it is heavy work, but go fishing in the creek or chase deer age in dances and such silly performances as they say will make the grow.
But my mother said: "There is no harm in it and it keeps the men out of the way."
By the time the weather turned, I was rattling away in the Indian language as if Id been born to it, though not a word of Hebrew did it tain so I think my old Lancashire lady was mistaken that they are the Lost Tribe of Israel and, as to verting them to the true religion, I was so busy with ohing and ahat it never entered my head. As for my pale face, by the end of the harvest it was brown as any of theirs and my mother stained my light hair for me with some darkish dye so they grew aced to my presence among them and at six months end you would have thought she whom I called my "mother" was my own natural mother and I was Indian born and bred, except my blue eyes remained a marvel.
But for all the bonds of affe between us, I might still have thought of journeying on to Florida as the weather grew colder, such is the power of and habit, had I not cast my eye on a brave of that tribe who had no woman for himself and he cast his eye o never a word he says, it seems all aloends to do the right thing by me, so it was my mother said to me at last: "That Tall Hickory you know of would like you for his wife." Tall Hickory being what his name signified in English, and as on a kind of name amongst em as James or Matthew might be in Lancashire.
And now it es to it, I wept, for he was a fine man.
"How I be that good mans wife, mother, for I was a bad woman in my own try."
"A bad woman?" she says. "Whats this?"
So I told her what I did to earn my living on Cheapside; and how I was a thief by natural vocation. As for my wh, she was very much surprised to hear that English men would trouble to pay for such a thing as I had to sell, for the Indians exge it free or not at all, and, as for my virginity being gone, she laughs and says: "If you were not good, nobody would have had you." But she grieves over my thievery until at last she says to me: "Well, child, would you steal away a bowl or u or robe from out of my hut and keep it yourself and deny it to me?"
"How could I do that, mother," says I. "If I should need anything, I may use it and give it to you again as you do with our needles and the tinder-box and the knife. And so it is with such-a-one and such-a-one --" naming our neighbours. "And to tell the truth, there is nowt in all the village excites my old passion of avarice, while as for my dinner, if I , I may have a share in any cooking pot in the Indian try, for that is the . So her desire nor want make a thief of me, here."
"Then you are a good woman in spite of yourself among the Indians and so I think you will remain," she says. "Why not marry the young fellow?"
Now, certain men of the village, such as the general, and the priest, as I might call him, seeing he dealt with religion, had not one wife but three or four to till their fields for them and I did not like that. I would be the only one in my husbands lodge, a fancy of the old life that I could not lose. And she puzzles over that, although she herself was never any mans wife, having, so she tells me with a wink, not much liking for the sex and much fondness for her own.
"As for ourselves, we are too seemly a a folk for the matter of matrimony to e between a woman and her friends!" she says. "The more wives a man has, the better pany for them, the more ko dahe children on and the more they plant so the better they all live together."
But still I said, I would be his only wife or never marry him.
"Listen, my dear," she said. "Do you not love me?"
"Indeed I do," I says, "with all my heart."
"Then if your sweetheart should offer to marry us both, would you love me the less for it?"
But I ducked my head and forbore to ahat, for fear she should ask my beau to take her, too, along with me, since I was so struck with him I could not think that any woman, however set in her ways, would not have him if she got half the ce. Then she gives me a clout otocks and cries out: "Now, child, see what a wretched thing this jealousy is, that it set a daughter against her own mother!"
But she relents to see me cry for shame and says, she is too old and stubborn to think of marriage and, besides, my young man is so taken with me that he will marry me on my own terms in the English fashion. For they are taught to love their wives ahem have their way no matter how many of them they marry and, if I wahe toil of tilling a patch of with nowt but my own two hands, then he would not interfere with that.
We were married about the time they were planting the , which they celebrate with a good deal of singing and dang although it is we squaws who break our backs setting the seed. The season of the anniversary of my arrival iown passed, winter es again and by the spring I was well on the way ting him a little brave. It was marvellous to see the tenderness of my husbands bearing towards me when the sun grew hot and made me sweat, weary, heavy, peevish, so that I often swore I wished meself in England again; but he bore with all. Now, at this time, the general of our village held sel how all the tribes of this part of the territory should settle their differences and join together in a great army to drive the English off back to where they e from while some of the others said, they should, instead, make treaties with the English against those other tribes who were their natural enemies and so get muns from the English.
But I sent word by my husband -- the women did not go to the sels but were aced to let their husbands give their messages -- I sent word by him that it would take all the tribes of all the tio drive away the English, and then the English would only go away to e again in double numbers, so eager were they to "plant the y" with me and such poor devils as I had been. So I told them straight they must make a grand, warlike, well-armed federacy amongst all the Indian nations and rust a word the English said, for the English would all be thieves if they could, and I was living proof of it, who only left off thieving when there was nothing to steal.
But they took no notie, and could not agree about the manner in which, if they should wage it, the war should be waged, whether an atta Aown by night, creeping on all fours like bears with bows in their mouths; or pig off the Englishmen one by one when they went hunting or out in lonely places; or meeting em head on, like an army. Which they fancied best, because it was most honourable, but, to my way of thinking, putting the head in the beasts mouth. While some still held that the English were their friends because they were their enemies enemy. So they fell to squabbling amongst themselves and nothing came of all the talk which was a great sado me, for I was with child and so I wanted a quiet life.
I was scratg away with my poiick along the garden bean-row until the very mihe waters broke and I goes running into my mother and, an hour later, as I judge it, for they have no means of keepi time, she was washing the blood off my young son.
My young son we named what would be, in English, Little Shooting Star, and you may laugh at it, but it is a name fine men have carried. And he is strapped into his little board that he might ride on my ba his birchbark carriage and I leased with him as any woman might be. Which is how the fate my old Lancashire lady foresaw for me came to pass, because my boys father never sprang from the tribe of Shem, Ham nor Japhet, although his mother resembled more the Mary Magdalene, or repentant harlot, than Mary the Virgin, though the Minister does not hold with that stuff, being a dissenting man, and will not let me speak of it.
But it would e about that the little lads ust be of tears, not gold.
Now, the ?federacy among the Algonkians breaking up, the depredations of the English upon the villages towards the South grew week by week more severe but our fierce braves held them off a while. The generals of this region held a parley, as to whether all stay and defend our villages or else beat a retreat, that is, stir our stumps and pick up our traps and leave our fields and shift westwards a piece, to new pastures, after the harvest, which was in hand. But this latter they were loath to do, sio the West lay the Rechas, a very warlike tribe not easily crossed. And they sent out a arty to give the English a taste of their own medie, to start off with, but I was full of fear lest my husband not e back.
He paints his face up blad red so the babby cried to see and they do go out and all e back, with blood on their axes, and several scalps of yellow hair that he hangs on the ridgepole of the roof, besides plunder of copper kettles, bullets and gunpowder. Also, alas, rum.
Yet I must say, when I first saw those English topknots, I felt nowt but pleasure though their hair was of my colour; yet the Minister says I am a good girl and God will five me for the sins I itted among the Indians.
As funpowder, Tall Hickory, my husband, told me, when the English first give it to the general, years back, the English told him, with much secret merriment amongst themselves, how he should bury it, like seed , and watch the bullets e up. And the Indians held it as a grudge ever after, to have been teased like silly children, when the English would have starved dead if the Red Man had not taught em how to plant .
Their captive they brought back lashed to the powder barrel and taunted him, how they would set their torches to a slow fuse, left him there in the middle of the village and abused him in their drunkenness for they were devils when theyd got a bit of drink inside em, I must admit it.
"Now, my dear," says my husband, who was stone-cold sober because hed a mortal terror of the edge of my tongue. "I must ask you to talk to this fellow in your own language, that we might know if his fellow-trymen will at last remember certain pledges and treaties formerly made between us or do indeed mean to drive us into the arms of the Rechas, with whom we are on no friendly terms, so it will be the worse for us, trapped betweewo."
At first I would not do it because I felt some pity for this Englishman, they were very stern with their captives and made a cruel festival out of this one, what with the drink and all. Then I recall how I saw this fellow riding his high horse along the dock at Aowhe victs were unloaded in s from the holds of the ship and all pity left me.
When he hears my English, "Praise the Lord!" he cries, and tells me straightaway how I must give over my tribes to the whites in the name of God, the King of England, and a free pardon thrown in when he sees my brand. But I shows him the babby and he calls me all kind of foul o whore among the heathen, so I shoves a sharp sti his belly to teach him manners. He squawks at that but will say nothing of the soldiers or where they might be but only: that the damned seed shall be driven from the land. They took him off the barrel, for they did not want to waste good gunpowder on him, and hoist him up over the fire. Soon he was dead.
When I went through his pockets, they were stuffed full of and all the children e to play ducks and drakes with gold pieces on the river. But his gold watch I wound up and give my husband in remembrance of the one I robbed the alderman of.
"Whats this?" he says in his innoce. Just then it rang the hours of twelve, it being noon, and he screetches out, drops it, it breaks apart, the wheels and springs scatter on the ground, and my husband, poor, superstitious savage that he was for all he was the best man in the world, my husband fell a-shaking and a-trembling and said the watch was "bad medie" and boded ill.
So he went off and got drunk with the rest. I gh the papers in the gentlemans pockets and find out weve put ao the governor of all Virginia and I tells em so, full of misgiving at it, but they was all sone in liquor no seo be had out of any of em until they slept it off but just before sun-up day the soldiers came on horseback.
They burhe ripe fields a light to the stockade so it burned and our lodge burned when the powder went up so I saw the massacre bright as day. They put a bullet through my husbands head, he on his feet and all bewildered, I got him out of the lodge when I first heard the fire crackle but he was a big man, couldnt miss him. And the poor drunk, sleepy savages all mown down. I got the baby in my arms a and hid in the bird-scare in the field, which latform on legs with hide over it, and so escaped.
But the soldiers caught hold of my mother as she was running to the river with her hair on fire and she shouts to me, seeing me fleeing: "You, unkind daughter!" For she thought I was hastening to cast my lot in with the English, which was not so, by any means. Then they violated her, then they slit her throat. So all over quickly, by daybreak nowt left but ashes, corpses,>９9ｌib? the widow m her dead children, soldiers leaning on their guns well pleased with their nights work and the ceous manner in which they had revehe governor.
The babby bust out g. One of these brutes, hearing him, came beating among the scorched and pushes at the bird-scare, knocks it down so I fell out, flat on my back, the baby tumbles out of my arms and cracks his head open on a stone, sets up a terrible shrieking, even the hardest heart would have run directly to him. But this soldier puts his knee on my belly, unfastens his britches intending to rape me, hed he strength often to hold me down but all at once leaves off his horrid fumbling, amazed.
"Captain!" he says. "Look here! Heres a squaw with blue eyes, such as Ive never seen before!"
He takes a good handful of my hair and hales me to where the captain of these good soldiers is washing his bloody hands in a basin of water cool as you please while his men pick over the un and the robes for trophies of war. He asks me, what is my name and whether I speak English; then Dutch; then French; and tries me in Spanish but I will say nothing except, in the Algonkian language: "I am the widow of Tall Hickory." But he ot uand that.
They found out I was not indeed a woman of the Indian blood at last by a trick for one of em fetched my baby from where theyd left him bawling in the field and showed him his knife, making as if he would stick the sharp blade into my little one.
"Thou shalt not!" I cried out while the others held me back from him or I should have torn out his eyes with my bare hands. How they laughed, when the squaw with feathers in her hair shouted out in broad Lancashire. Then the captain sees my burned hand and calls me a "runaway" and says there will be a priy head over and above the bounty on the Indians. And teases me, how they will brand my cheek with "R" for "runaway" whes to Aown so I ot whore among the Indians no more, nor amongst nobody else. But all I want is the loan of his handkerchief, dipped in water, to wipe the cut on the babbys forehead and this hes kind enough to give me, at last.
When I got my babby bad put him to nurse, for he was hungry, then I went along with the soldiers, since I had no choice, my mother and my husband dead and, truth to tell, my spirit broken. And what squaws were left living, that I used to call "sister", trailed along behind us, for the soldiers wanted women and the women wanted bread and not one brave left living in that part of the New World that now you might call a "fair garden blasted of folk". And the river watering this earthly paradise running blood.
The squaws blamed me, how I had brought bad lu them and; cruelly repaid their kio me. But, as for me, my grief is mixed with fear over the memory of the overseer I had the ears off of, that all this will end in a downward drop, once I am back where the justice is.
We gets to a place with a few houses and they had just finished building a churd: "Here is a morsel plucked from Satan," says the ohat widowed me to the Minister, who tells me to thank God that I have been rescued from the savage ahe Good Lords fiveness for straying from His ways. Taking my cue from his, I fall to my knees, for I see that repentance is the fashion in these parts and the more of it I show, the better it will be for me. And when they ask my name, I give em the name of my old Lancashire lady, which is Mary, and stick by it, so I live on as if I were her ghost, and all her prophecies e true, except it turns out I was and I do think my half-breed child will bear the mark of , for the scar above his left eye never fades.
Our Lady of the Massacre
The Ministers wife e out of the kit with an old gown of hers and tells me to cover up my breasts, for shame, but the child cries and will not be pacified. Yet she is det, and?9９ｌib? the Minister, also, as their aow prove for they would not let the soldiers take me to Aown with them but offered the captain a good sum of moo leave me with them, for the sake of my i baby. The captain hums and haws, the Minister adds anuihe fine soldier pockets the gold and all ride off and the Minister would give my child some Bible name, Isaac or Ishmael or some suame. "Has a good enough name a?lready?" says I. But the Minister says: "Little Shooting Star is no name for a Christian," and a baptised Christian my boy must be if his soul may be admitted to the gregation of the blessed though the poor thing will never find his daddy there. And when shall these dead rise up and be avenged? But, as for me, I will not call him by the he Minister gave him; nor do I talk to him in any but the Indian language when nobody else is there.
After a while, the tale es how, two years or more before, t.９９lｉｂ.he Indians came by stealth to a plantation to the north, murdered an overseer and stole away a bonded servant girl. The gardener saw them drag her off by her yellow hair. I think to meself, how the gardener must have settled a score on his own at, good lu, and if they choose to think I was forced into captivity, then they have my leave to do so, if it makes them happy, as long as they leave me be. Whic..h, because the Minister has a powerful desire to save my soul, and his wife fond of the little one, having none of her own, they do, for theyve paid out good moo keep us from the law. And dont I earn my keep, do all the rough work, carry water, hew wood.
So I scrubbed the Ministers floor, cooked the dinner, washed the clothes and for all the Minister swears theyve e to build the City of God in the New World, I was the same skivvy as Id been in Lancashire and no openings for a whore in the unity of the Saints, either, if I could have found in my heart the least desire to take up my old trade again. But that I could not; the Indians had damned me food woman ond for all.
By and by the missus es to me and says: "You are still a young woman, Mary, and Jabez Mather says he will have you for a wife since his own died of the flux but he will not take the child so I shall keep him." But she will never have my little lad for her son, nor will I have Jabez Mather for my husband, nor any man living, but sit and weep by the waters of Babylon.
The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe-1
Imagine Poe in the Republic! when he possesses none of its virtues; no Spartan, he. Each time he tilts the jug to greet the austere m, his sober friends relutly cur: "No man is safe who drinks before breakfast." Where is the black star of melancholy? Elsewhere; not here. Here it is always m; stern, democratic light scrubs apparitions off the streets down which his dangerous feet must go.
Perhaps. . . perhaps the black star of melancholy was hiding in the dark at the bottom of the jug all the time. . . it might be the whole thing is a little secret between the jug and himself. . .
He turns back to go and look; and the pitiless light of on day hits him full in the face like a blow from the eye of God. Struck, he reels. Where he hide, where there are no shadows? They split the Republi two, they halved the apple of knowledge, white light strikes the top half and leaves the rest in shadow; up here, up north, in the levelling latitudes, a man must make his own penumbra if he wants cealment because the massive, heroic light of the Republic admits of no ambiguities. Either you are a saint; or a stranger. He is a stranger, here, a gentleman up from Virginia somewhat down on his luck, and, alas, he may not ihe Prince of Darkness (always a perfect gentleman) in his cause since, of the absolute night which is the antithesis to these days of rectitude, there is no aristocracy.
Poe staggers uhe weight of the Declaration of Independence. People think he is drunk.
He is drunk.
The prin exile lurches through the new-found land.
So you say he overacts? Very well; he overacts. There is a past history of histrioni his family. His mother was, as they say, born in a trunk, grease-paint in her bloodstream, and made her first appearan any stage in her ninth summer in a hiss-the-villain melodrama entitled Mysteries of the Castle. On she skipped to sing a ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy.
It was the evening of the eighteenth tury.
At this hour, this very hour, far away in Paris, France, in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille, old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, onto the prison floor. . . aaaagh! He seeds dragoh. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swarm of fully-armed, mad-eyed homunculi. Everything is about to succumb to delirium.
Heedless of all this, Poes future mother skipped on to a stage in the fresh-hatched Ameri republic to sing an old-world ballad clad in the pretty rags of a ballet gypsy. Her dancers grace, piping treble, dark curls, rosy cheeks -- cute kid! And eyes with something i, something appealing ihat struck directly to the heart so that the smoky auditorium broke out in raucous seal cheers for her and clapped its leather palms together with a will. A star was born that night in the rude firmament of fit-ups and dle-footlights, but she was to be a shooting star; she flickered briefly in the void, she tihe iable trajectory of the meteor, downward. She hit the boards and trod them.
But, well after puberty, she was still able, thanks to her low stature and slim build, to tio personate children, clever little ducks and prattlers of both sexes. Yet she was versatility personified; she could do you Ophelia, too.
She had a low, melodious voice of singular sweetness, an excellent thing in a woman. When crazed Ophelia handed round the rosemary and rue and sang: "He is dead and gone, lady," not a dry eye in the house, I assure you. She also tried her hand at Juliet and Cordelia and, if necessary, could persohe merriest soubrette; even when racked by the nauseas of her pregnancies, still she would smile, would smile and oh! the dazzling dour of her teeth!
Out popped her firstborn, Henry; her sed, Edgar, came jostling after to share her kh her scripts and suckle at her bosom while she learned her lines, yet she was always word-perfect even when she played two parts in the one night, Ophelia or Juliet and then, say, Little Pickle, the cute kid ierpiece, for the audiences of those days refused to leave the theatre after a tragedy uhe players ged es and came back to give them a little somethira to cheer them up again.
Little Pickle was a trousers role. She ran back to the green-room and undid the top buttons of her waistcoat to let out a sore, milky breast to pacify little Edgar who, wakened by the hoots and catcalls that had greeted her too voluptuous imitation of a boy, likewise howled and screamed.
A mug of porter or a bottle of whisky stood on the dressing-table all the time. She dipped a plug of cotton in whisky and gave it to Edgar to suck when he would not st.
The father of her children was a bad actor and only ever carried a spear in the many panies in which she wor?ked. He often stayed behind in the green-room to look after the little ones. David Poe tipped a tumbler of gin to Edgars lips to keep him quiet. The red-eyed Angel of Intemperance hopped out of the bottle of ardent spirits and snuggled down in little Edgars longclothes. Meanwhile, on stage, her final child, in utero, stitched its flesh and boogether as best it could uhe corset that preserved the theatrical illusion of Mrs Elizabeth Poes eighteen-inch waist until the eleventh hour, the tenth month.
Applause rocked round the wooden O. Loving mother that she was -- for we have no reason to believe that she was not -- Mrs Poe exited the painted se to cram her jewels on her knee while tired tears ran rivers through her rouge and splashed upon their peaky faces. The monotonous clamour of their parents argumehem at last to sleep but the unborn one in the womb pressed its transparent hands over its vestigial ears in terror.
(To be born at all might be the worst thing.)
However, born at last this last child was, one July afternoon in a cheap theatrical b-house in New York City after many hours on a rented bed while flies buzzed at the windowpanes. Edgar and Henry, on a pallet on the floor, held hands. The midwife had to use a pair of blunt iron tongs to scoop out the relut wee thing; the sheet was tented up over Mrs Poes lower half for modesty so the toddlers saw nothing except the midwife brandishing her dreadful instrument and then they heard the shrill cry of the new-born in the exhausted silence, like the sound of the blade of a skate on ice, and something bloody as a fresh-pulled tooth twitched between the midwifes pincers.
It was a girl.
David Poe spent his wifes fi in a nearby tavering the babys head. When he came bad saw the mess he vomited.
Then, before his sons bewildered eyes, their father began to grow insubstantial. He unbecame. All at once he lost his outlines and began to waver on the air. It was twilit evening. Mama slept on the bed with a fresh mauve bud of flesh in a basket on the chair beside her. The air shuddered with the beginning of absence.
He said not one word to his boys but went on evaporating until he melted away, leaving behind him in the room as proof he had been there only a puddle of puke on the splintered floorboards.
As soon as the deserted wife got out of bed, she posted down tinia with her howling brats because she was booked for a tour of the South and she had no money put away so all the babies got to eat was her sweat. She dragged them with her in a trunk to Charleston; to Norfolk; then back to Rid.
Down there, it is the foetid height of summer.
Stripped to her chemise in the airless dressing-room, she milks her sore breast into a glass; this latest baby must be weaned before its mother dies.
She coughed. She slapped more, yet me on her now haggard cheekbones. "My children! what will bee of my c?９９lｉｂ?hildren?" Her eyes glittered and soon acquired a febrile brilliahat was not of this world. Soon she needed ne at all; red spots brighter than rouge appeared of their own accord on her cheeks while veins as blue as those in Stilton cheese but muscular, palpitating, promi, lithe, stood out of her forehead. In Little Pickles vest and breeches it was not now possible for her to create the least suspension of disbelief and something desperate, something fatal in her distracted playing both fasated and appalled the witnesses, who could have thought they saw the liviures of death itself upon her face. Her mirror, the actresss friend, the magic mirror in which she sees whom she has bee, no longer aowledged any but a deaths head.
The moist, sullen, Southern winter signed her quietus. She put on Ophelias madwomans nightgown for her farewell.
When she summoned him, the spectral horseman came. Edgar looked out of the window and saw him. The soundless hooves of black-plumed horses struck sparks from the stones in the road outside. "Father!" said Edgar; he thought their father must have restituted himself at this last extremity in order to transport them all to a better place but, when he looked more closely, by the light of a gibbous moon, he saw the sockets of 99liｂ.the ans eyes were full of worms.
They told her children that now she could e back to take no curtain-calls no matter how fiercely all applauded the manner of her going. Lovers of the theatre plied her hearse with bouquets: "And from her pure and uncorrupted flesh May violets spring." (Not a dry eye in the house.) The three orphaned infants were dispersed into the bosoms of charitable protectors. Each gave the clay-cold cheek a final kiss; theoo kissed and parted, Edgar from Henry, Henry from the tiny one who did not move or cry but lay still a her eyes tight shut. When shall these three meet again? The church bell tolled: never never never never never.
Kind Mr Allan of Virginia, Edgars own particular beor, who would buy his bread, henceforward, took his charges little hand and led him from the funeral. Edgar parted his name in the middle to make room for Mr Allan i. Edgar was then three years old. Mr Allan ushered him into Southern affluence, down there; but do not think his mother left Edgar empty handed, although the dead actress was able to leave him only what could not be taken away from him, to wit, a few tattered memories.
TESTAMENT OF MRS ELIZABETH POE
Item: nourishment. A tit sucked in a green-room, the dug snatched away from the toothless lips as soon as her cue came, so that, of nourishment, he would retain only the memory of hunger and thirst endlessly unsatisified.
Item: transformation. This is a more ambivalent reliething like this. . . Edgar would lie in prop-baskets on heaps of artificial finery and watch her while she painted her face. The dles made a profaar of the mirror in which her vague face swam like a magic fish. If you caught hold of it, it would make your dreams e true but Mama slithered through all the s which desire set out to catch her.
She stuck glass jewels in her ears, pinned back her nut-brown hair and tied a muslin bandage round her head, looking like a corpse for a mihen ohe yellow wig. Now you see her, now you dont; bruurns blonde in the wink of an eye.
Mama turns round to show how she has ged into the lovely lady he glimpsed in the mirror.
"Dont touch me, youll mess me."
And vanishes in a susurration of taffeta.
Item: that women possess within them a cry, a thing that o be extracted. . . but this is only the dimmest of memories and will reassert itself in vague shapes of uionable dread only at the prospect of al e.
Item: the awareness of mortality. For, as soon as her last child was born, if not before, she started to rehearse in private the long part of dying; once she began to cough she had no option.
Item: a face, the perfect face of a tragic actor, his face, white skin stretched tight over fine, white bones in a final state of wonderfully lucid emaciation.
The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe-2
Ignited by the tossed butt of a still-smouldering cigar that lodged in the cracks of the uneven floorboards, the theatre at Rid where Mrs Poe had made her last appearance buro the ground three weeks after her death. Ashes. Although Mr Allan told Edgar how all of his mother that was mortal had been buried in her coffin, Edgar khe somebody elses she so frequently became lived in her dressing-table mirror and were not strained by the physical laws that made her body rot. But now the mirror, too, was gone; and all the lovely and untouchable, volatile, unreal mothers went up together in a puff of smoke on a pyre of props and painted sery.
The sparks from this flagration rose high in the air, where they lodged in the sky to bee a stellation of stars whily Edgar saw and then only oain still nights of summer, those hot, rich, blue, mellow nights the slaves brought with them from Africa, weather that ferments the music of exile, weather of heartbreak and fever. (Oh, those voluptuous nights, like something forbidden!) High in the sky these invisible stars marked the points of a face folded in sorrow.
NATURE OF THE THEATRICAL ILLUSION; everything you see is false.
sider the theatrical illusion with special refereo this impressionable child, who was exposed to it at an age when there is no reason for anything to be real.
He must often have toddled on to the stage wheheatre was empty and the curtains down so all was like a parlour prepared for a séance, waiting for the moment when the eyes of the observers make the mystery.
Here he will find a painted backdrop of, say, an antique castle -- a castle! such as they dont build here; a Gothic castle all plete with owls and ivy. The flies are painted with segments of trees, massy oaks or something like that, all in two dimensions. Ar9９lib.tificial shadows fall in all the wrong places. Nothing is what it seems. You knock against a gilded throne or horrid rack that looks perfectly solid, thick, immovable, and you kick it sideways, it turns out to be made of papier maché, it is as light as air -- a child, you yourself, could pick it up and carry it off with you and sit in it and be a king or lie in it and be in pain.
A creaking, an ominous rattling scares the little wits out of you; when you jump round to see what is going on behind your back, why, the very castle is in mid-air! Heave-ho and up she rises, amid the inarticulate cries and muttered oaths of the stagehands, and down es Juliets tomb or Ophelias sepulchre, and a super scuttles in, clutg Yorricks skull.
The foul-mouthed whores who dandle you on their pillos and tip mugs of sour painst your lips now gregate in the wings, where they have turned into nuns or something. On the invisible side of the plush curtain that cuts you off from the beery, importuobacco-stained multitude that has paid its pennies on the nail to watch these transdent rituals now e the thumps, bangs and clatter that make the presence of their expectatio. A stagehand swoops down to scoop you up and carry you off, protesting, to where Henry, like a good boy, is already deep in his picture book and there is a poke of dy for you and the er of a handkerchief dipped in moonshine and Mama in and train presses her rouged lips softly on your forehead before she goes down before the mob.
On his brow her rouged lips left the mark of .
Having, at an impressionable age, seen with his owhe nature of the mystery of the castle -- that all its horrors are so much painted cardboard ahey terrify you -- he saw another mystery and made less sense of it.
Now and then, as a great treat, if he kept quiet as a mouse, because he begged and pleaded so, he was allowed to stay in the wings and watch; the round-eyed baby sahelia could, if necessary, die twiightly. All her burials were premature.
A couple of brawny supers carried Mama on stage in Act Four, ed in a shroud, tipped her into the cellarage amidst displays of grief from all ed but up she would pop at curtain-call having shaken the dust off her graveclothes and touched up her eye make-up, to curtsy with the rest of the resurrected immortals, all of whom, even Prince Hamlet himself, turned out, in the end, to be just as un-dead as she.
How could he, then, truly believe she would not e again, although, in the black suit that Mr Allan provided for him out of charity, he toddled behind her coffin to the cemetery? Surely, one fine day, the spectral an would return again, climb down from his box, throw open the carriage door and out she would step wearing the white nightdress in which he had last seen her, although he hoped this garment had been laundered ierim since he last saw it all bloody from a haeme.
Then a transparent stellation in the night sky would blink out; the scattered atoms would reassemble themselves to the entire and perfect Mama and he would run directly to her arms.
It is the mid-m of the eenth tury. He grows up uhe black stars of the slave states. He flinches from that part of women the sheet hid. He bees a man.
As soon as he bees a man, affluence departs from Edgar. The ９9ｌiｂ? and pocketbook that Mr Allan opeo the child now pull themselves together to expel. Edgar shakes the dust of the sweet South off his heels. He hies north, up here, to seek his fortune in the places where the light does not permit that chiaroscuro he loves; now Edgar Poe must live by his disordered wits.
The dug was snatched from the milky mouth and tucked away ihe bodice; the mirror no longer reflected Mama but, instead, a perfect stranger. He offered her his hand; smiling a tranced smile, she stepped out of the frame.
"My darling, my sister, my life and my bride!"
He was not put out by the tender years of this young girl whom he soon married; was she not just Juliets age, just thirteen summers?
The magnifit tresses f great shadowed eaves above her high forehead were the raven tint of nevermore, black as his suits the seams of which his devoted mother-in-law painted with ink so that they would not advertise to the world the signs of wear and, nowadays, he always wore a suit of sables, dressed in readiness for the funeral in a black coat buttoned up to the stod he never betrayed his absolute m by so much as one flash of white shirtfront. Sometimes, when his wifes mother was not there to wash and starch his linen, he eised on laundry bills and wore no shirt at all.
His long hair brushes the collar of this coat, from which poverty has worn off the nap. How sad his eyes are; there is too much of sorrow in his infrequent smile to make you happy when he smiles at you and so much of bitter gall, also, that you might mistake his smile frimace rue except when he smiles at his young wife with her forehead like a tombstohen he will smile and smile with as much posthumous tenderness as if he saw already: Dearly beloved wife of. . . carved above her eyebrows.
For her skin was white as marble and she was called -- would you believe! -- "Virginia", a hat suited his expatriates nostalgia and also her dition, for the childbride would remain a virgin until the day she died.
Imagihe sinless children lying iogether! The pity of it!
For did she not e to him stiffly armoured in taboos -- taboos against the violation of children; taboos against the violation of the dead -- for, not to put too fine a point on it, didnt she always look like a walking corpse? But such a pretty, pretty corpse!
And, besides, isnt an undemanding, eic, decorative corpse the perfect wife fentleman in reduced circumstances, upon whom the four walls of paranoia are always about to verge?
Virginia Clemm. In the dialect of northern England, to be "clemmed" is to be very cold. "Im fair clemmed." Virginia Clemm.
She brought with her a hardy, durable, industrious mother of her own, to and cook and keep ats for them and to outlive them, and to outlive them both.
Virginia was not very clever; she was by no means a sad case of arrested development, like his real, lost sister, whose life passed in a dream of non-being in her adopted home, the vegetable life of one who always deed to participate, a bud that never opened. (A doom lay upohe brother, Henry, soon died.) But the sloassed and Virginia stayed as she had been at thirteen, a simple little thing whose sweet disposition was his only fort and who never ceased to lisp, even whearted to rehearse the long part of dying.
She was light on her feet as a revenant. You would have thought she never bent a stem of grass as she passed across their little garden. When she spoke, when she sang, how sweet her voice was; she kept her harp in their cottage parlour, which her mother swept and polished until all was like a new pin. A few guests gathered there to partake of the Poes modest hospitality. There was his brilliant versation though his women saw to it that only tea was served, since all knew his dreadful weakness for liquor, but Virginia poured out with so much simple grace that everyone was charmed.
They begged her to take her seat at her harp and apany herself in an Old World ballad or two. Eddy nodded gladly: "yes", and she lightly struck the strings with white hands of which the long, thin fingers were so fine and waxen that you would have thought you could have set light to the tips to make of her hand the flaming Hand of Glory that casts all the inhabitants of the house, except the magi himself, into a profound ah-like sleep.
She sings:
Cold blows the wind, tonight, my love,
And a few drops of rain.
With a taper made from a manuscript folded into a flute, he slyly takes a light from the fire.
I never had but orue love
In cold earth she was lain.
He sets light to her fingers, oer the other.
A twelve month and a day being gone
The dead began to speak.
Eyes close. Her pupils tain in each a flame.
Who is that sitting on my grave
Who will not let me sleep?
All sleep. Her eyes go out. She sleeps.
He rearrahe macabre delabra so that the light from her glorious hand will fall between her legs and then he busily turns back her petticoats; the mortal dles shine. Do not think it is not love that moves him; only love moves him.
He feels no fear.
An expression of low ing crosses his face. Taking from his back pocket a pair of enormous pliers, he now, one by one, one by one by oracts the sharp teeth just as the midwife did.
All silent, all still.
Yet, even as he held aloft the last fierce e in triumph above her prostrate and insensible form in the vi he had at last exorcised the demons from desire, his face turned ashen and sear and he was overe with the most desolating anguish to hear the rumbling of the wheels outside. Unbidden, the an came; the grisly emissary of her highborn kinsman shouted imperiously: "Overture and beginners, please!" She popped the plug of spiritous lineween his lips; she swept off with a hiss of silk.
The sleepers woke and told him he was drunk; but his Virginia breathed no more!
After a breakfast of red-eye, as he was making his toilet before the mirror, he suddenly thought he would shave off his moustache in order to bee a different man so that the ghosts who had persistently plagued him since his wifes death would no longer reise him and would leave him alone. But, when he was -shaven, a black star rose in the mirror and he saw that his long hair and face folded in sorrow had taken on such a marked resemblao that of his loved and lost ohat he was struck like a stock or stone, with the cut-throat razor in his hand.
And, as he tinued, fasated, appalled, to stare in the reflective glass at those features that were his own a not his own, the bony casket of his skull began to agitate itself as if he had succumbed to a tremendous attack of the shakes.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
He was shaking like a backcloth about to be whisked off into oblivion.
Lights! he called out.
Now he wavered; horrors! He was starting to dissolve!
Lights! more lights! he cried, like the hero of a Jacobean tragedy when the murdering begins, for the black star was engulfing him.
Ohe laser light on the Republic blasts him.
His dust blows away on the wind.
Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Nigh
Call me the Golden Herm.
My mother bore me in the Southern wild but, "she, being mortal, of that boy did die," as my Aunt Titania says, though "boy" in the circumstances is pushing it, a bit, shes s me, there, shes rendering me unambiguous in order to get the casting director out of a tight spot. For "boy" is correct, as far as it goes, but insuffit. Nor is the sweet South in the least wild, oh, dear, no! It is the lovely land where the lemon trees grow, multiplied far beyond the utmost reaches of your stultified Europotric imaginations. Child of the sun am I, and of the breezes, juicy as mahat mythopoeically caress the Coast of andel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian shore where everything is bright and precise as lacquer.
My Aunt Titania. Not, I should assure you, my natural aunt, no blood bond, no knot of the umbilical in the e, but my mothers best friend, to whom, before she departed, she entrusted me, and, therefore, always called by me "auntie".
Titania, she, the great fat, showy, pink and blohing, the Memsahib, I call her, Au-tit-tit-ania (for her tits are the things you notice first, size of barrage balloons), Tit-tit-tit-omania boxed me up in a trunk she bought from the Army and Navy Stores, labelled it "Wanted on Voyage" (oh, yes, indeed!) and shipped me here.
Here! to -- Atishoo! -- catch my death of cold in this dripping bastard wood. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain!
"Flaming June", the sarcastic fairies mutter, looking glum, as well they might, poor dears, their little wings all sodden and plastered to their backs, so water-logged they hardly take off and no sooner airborhan they founder in the pelting downpour, crash-land among the plashy bra furls amid much piteous squeaking. "Never such weather," plain the fairies, amid the brakes of roses putting on -- I must admit -- a brave if pastel-coloured floral show amidst the inclemency of the weather, and the flat dishes of the pale wild roses spill over with the raindrops that have collected upon them as the bushes shudder in the reverberations of dozens and dozens of teeny tiny sneezes, for no pla their weeny anatomies to store a handkerchief and all the fairies have got shog colds as well as I.
Nothing in my princely, exquisite, peacock-jewelled heredity prepared me for the dank, grey, English midsummer. A midsummer nightmare, I call it. The whirling winds have wrehe limbs off even the hugest oaks and brought down altogether the more tottery elms so that they sprawl like collapsed drunks athwart dishevelled fairy rings. Thunder, lightning, and, at night, the blazing stars whizz down and bomb the wood. . . nothing temperate about your temperate climate, dear, I snap at Aunt Titania, but she blames it all on Uncle Oberon, whose huff expresses itself in thunder and he makes it rain when he abuses himself, which it would seem he must do almost all the time, thinking of me, the while, no doubt. Of ME!
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath
Because that she, as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a geling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child!
"Boy" again, see; which isnt the half of it. Misinformation. The patriarchal version. No king had nothing to do with it; it was all between my mother and my auntie, wasnt it.
Besides, is a child to be stolen? iven? Or taken? Or sold in bondage, dammit? Are these blonde English fairies the agents of proto-ialism?
To all this, in order to preserve my plicated iy, I present a fa?ade of passive opposition. I am here. I am.
I am Herm, short for hermaphrodite verus, ois, one ovary, half of each but all plete and more, much more, than the sum of my parts. This elegantly retractable appendage, here. . . is not the tribades well-developed clit, but the veritable reproductive erectile tissue, while the velvet-lipped and deliciously closable aperture below it is, I assure you, a viable avenue of the ender. So there.
Take a look. Im not shy. Impressive, huh?
And I am called the Golden Herm, for I am gold all over; when I was boriny, playful cherubs filled their cheeks and lungs and blew, blew the papery sheets of beaten gold all over my infant limbs, to which they stud g. See me shine!
And here I stand, uhe dripping trees, in the long, rank, soaking grass among draggletail dog-daisies and the branched delabras of the buttercups from whom the gusty rain has knocked off all the petals, leaving their warty green heads bald. And the bloody es bill. And the stingiles, those Puese men-o-war of the woodland, who gave me so many nasty shocks when I first met them. And pease-blossom and mustard-seed and innumerable unknown-to-me weeds, the dreary, washed-out, pinks, yellows and Cambridge blues of them. B. In the underpinnings of the trees, all soggy and floral as William Morris aper in an abandoned house, I, in order to retain my equilibrium and psychic balance, meditate in the yogic posture known as The Tree, that is, on one leg.
Bearer of both arrow and target, wound and bow, spoon and per, in my left hand I hold a lotus, looking a bit the worse for wear by now. My snake coils round my other arm.
I am golden, stark naked and bi-partite.
On my golden face, a fixed, archaic grin. Except when --
Atishoo!
Damn octal on cold virus.
Atishoo.
The Golden Herm stood in the green wood.
This wood is, of course, nowhere near Athens; the script is a positive maze of false leads. The wood is really located somewhere in the English midlands, possibly near Bletchley, where the great deg mae was sited. Corre: this wood was located in the English midlands until oak, ash and thorn were chopped down to make room for a motorway a few years ago. However, sihe wood existed only as a structure of the imagination, in the first place, it will remain, in the sed place, as a green, decorative margin to the eternity the poet promised for himself. The English poet; his is, essentially, an English wood. It is the English wood.
The English wood is nothing like the dark, neantic forest in which the Northern European imagination begins and ends, where its dead and the witches live, and Baba-yaga stalks about in her house with chis feet looking for children in order to eat them. No. There is a qualitative, not a quantitative, differeween this wood and that forest. The difference does just because a wood tains fewer trees than a forest and covers less ground. That is just one of the causes of the differend does not explain the effects of the difference.
For example, an English wood, however marvellous, however metamorphic, ot, by definitiorackless, although it might well be formidably labyrinthine. Yet there is always a way out of a maze, and, even if you ot find it for a while, you know that it is there. A maze is a struct of the human mind, and not u; lost in the wood, this analogy will always sole. But to be lost in the forest is to be lost to this world, to be abandoned by the light, to lose yourself utterly with no guarantee you will either find yourself or else be found, to be itted against your will -- or, worse, of your own desire -- to a perpetual absence; from humanity, aential catastrophe, for the forest is as infinitely boundless as the huma.
But the wood is finite, a closure; you purposely mislay your way in the wood, for the sake of the pleasure of roving, the temporary fusion of dire is iure of a holiday from which you will e home refreshed, with your pockets full of nuts, your hands full of wildflowers and the cast feather of a bird in your cap. That forest is hauhis wood is ented.
The very perils of the wood, so many audio-visual aids to a pleasurable titillation of mild fear; the swift rattle of an asding pheasant, velvet thud of an owl, red glide of the fox -- these may all "give you a fright", but, here, her hobgoblin nor foul fiend daunt your spirit because the English lobs and hobs refleothing more than a secular faith in the absence of harm in nature, part of the credit sheet of a temperate climate. (Here that, Herm? No tigers burn bright, here; no scaly pythons, no armoured scorpions.) Sihe last English wolf was killed, there is nothing savage among the trees to terrify you. All is mellow in the filtered light, where Robin Wood, the fertility spirit, lurks in the green shade; this wood is kind to lovers.
Indeed, you might call the wood the on garden of the village, a garden almost as iionally wild as one of Bas "natural wildernesses", where every toad carries a jewel in its head and all the flowers have names, nothing is unknown -- this kind of wilderness is not an otherness.
And always something to eat! Mother Natures greengrocery store; sorrel for soup, mushrooms, dandelion and chickweed -- theres your salad, mint and thyme for seasoning, wild strawberries and blackberries and, iumn, a plenitude of nuts. Nebuezzar, in an English wood, need not have fined his appetite to grass.
The English wood offers us a glimpse of a green, unfallen world a little closer to Paradise than we are.
Such is the English wood in which we see the familiar fairies, the blundering fiahe rude meicals. This is the true Shakespearian wood -- but it is not the wood of Shakespeares time, which did not know itself to be Shakespearian, and therefore felt o keep up appearances. No. The wood we have just described is that of eenth-tury nostalgia, which disied the wood, sing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it. Or, rather, denaturing, castrating these beings until they came to look just as they do in those photographs of fairy folk that so enraptured Doyle. It is Mendelssohns wood.
"Ehese ented woods. . ." who could resist such a magical invitation?
However, as it turns out, the Victorians did not leave the woods in quite the state they might have wished to find them.
The Puck was obsessively fasated by the exotic visitor. In some respects, it was the attra of opposites, for, whereas the Golden Herm was sm-o-o-o-th, the Puck was hairy. On these chill nights of June, Puside his hairy pelt was the only o warm at all. Hairy. Shaggy. Especially about the thighs. (And, hm, on the palms of his hands.)
Shaggy as a Shetland pony when naked and sometimes goes on all fours. When he goes on all fours, he whinnies; or else he barks.
He is the lub, the lubber fiend, and sometimes he plays at being the nut-brown house-sprite for whom a bowl of milk is left outside the door, although, if you want to be rid of him, you must leave him a pair of trousers; he thinks a gift of trousers is an insult to his sex, of which he is most proud. ing in his luxuriant pubic curls, that gleam with the deep-fried gloss of the wos of Grinling Gibbons, see his testicles, wrinkled ripe as medlars.
Puck loves hokey-pokey and peek-a-boo. He has relations all over the place -- in Id, the puki; the Devonshire pixy; the spook of the Low tries are all his of kin and not one of them is up to any good. That Puck!
The tender little exiguities that cluster round the Queen of the Fairies do not like to play with the Puck because he is sh and rips their painted wings in games of tag and pulls the phantasmal legs off the grey gnats that draw Titanias wee coach through the air, kisses the girls and makes them cry, creeps ..up and swings between the puce, ithyphallic foxglove spires above Titanias bed so the raindrops fall and scatter in a dreng shower and up she wakes. Spiteful!
Puck is no more polymorphously perverse than all the rest of these sub-microscopic particles, his peers, yet there is something particularly rancid and offensive about his buggery and his undinism and his frotteurism and his scopophilia and his -- indeed, my very paper would blush, go pink as an invoice, should I write down upon it some of the things Puck gets up to down in the reeds by the river, as he is distantly related to the great bad god Pan and, when in the mood, behaves in a manner unon in an English wood, although familiar in the English public school.
Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Nigh
By the Pucks phallic orientation, you know him for a creature of King Oberons.
Hairy Puck fell in love with Golden Herm and often came to frolic round the lovely living statue in the moonlit glade, although he could not, happily for the Herm, get near enough to touch because Titania forethoughtfully had thrown a magical cordon sanitaire around her lovely adoptive, so that s/he was, as it were, in an invisible glass case, such as s/he might find herself in, some turies later, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Against this transparent, intangible barrier, the Puck often flatteill further his already snub nose.
The Herm removed his/her left foot from its snug in her/his crotd placed it on the ground. With one single, fluent, gracile movement of transition, s/he shifted on to the . The lotus and the snake, oher arm, stayed where they were.
The Puck, pressed tight against Titanias magic, sighed heavily, stepped back a few paces and begaically to play with himself. Have you seen fairy sperm? We mortals call it, cuckoo spit.
And no passing, clayey mortal, tramping through the wood o, heavy feet, scattering the fairies who twitter like bats in their fright, just as such a mortal could never hear them, so he would never spot the unafraid Herm, stig stock-still as a trance.
And if you did ce to spy him/her, you would think the little yellow idol was a talisman dropped from a gypsy pocket, perhaps, or a charm fallen off a girls bracelet, or else the gift from inside a very expensive cracker.
Yet, if you picked up the beautiful objed held it on the palm of your hand, you would feel how warm it was, as if somebody had been holding it tight before you came and only just put it down.
And, if you watched long enough, you would see the golden sequins of the eyelids move.
At which a wind of strangeness would rise and blow away the wood and all within it.
Just as your shadow grow big and then shrink to almost nothing, and then swell up, again, so these shadows, these insubstantial bubbles of the earth, these "beings" to whom the verb, "to be", may not be properly applied, since, in our sehey are not. They ot be; they ot cast their own shadows, for who has seen the shadow of a shadow? Their existences are necessarily moot -- do you believe in fairies? Their lives lead always just teasingly almost out of the ers of the eyes of their observers, so it is possible they were only, all the time, a trick of the light. . . such half-being, with such a lack of public aowledgement, is not ducive to any kind of visual sistency among them. So they may take what shapes they please.
The Puck turn himself into anything he likes: a three-legged stool, in order to.. perpetrate the celebrated trick ("Then slip I from her bum, down topples she") so beloved in the lower forms of grammar schools when the play is read aloud round the class because it is suitable for children because it is about fairies; a baby Fiat; a grand piano; anything!
Except the lover of the Golden Herm.
In his spare moments, when he was not off about his Masters various busihe Puck, wistfully lingering outside the Herms magic circle like an ur outside a dy shop, cluded that, in order to take full advantage of the sexual facilities offered him by the Herm, should the barrier between them ever be removed -- and, unlikely as this eventuality might be, the Pucks motto was "Be Prepared"! -- if there was to be intercourse between himself and the Golden Herm, then the Herms partner would require a similar set of equipment to the Herm in order to effect maximally satisfactory gress.
Then the Puck further cluded that the equipment of the Herms hypothetical partner would need, however, to be attached in reversed order to that of the Herm, in order to procure a perfect fit and no fumbling; the Puck, a stant inquisitive spy on mortal couples e to make the beast with two backs in what they mistakenly believed to be privacy, had noticed there is a vexed question of handedness about caresses, so that all right-handed lovers truly require left-handed lovers during the prelimio the act, and Mother Nature, when she cast the human mould, took no at of foreplay, which alone distinguishes us from the beasts when we are beily.
Try, try as he might, try and try again, the Puck could not get it quite right, although, after strenuous effort, he at last succeeded in turning himself into a perfect simulacrum of the Herm and would, at odd moments, adopt the Herms form and posture and stand fag him in the wood, a living mirror of the living statue, except for the fierce ere the satyromaniac Puck could not subdue when in the presence of his love.
The Herm tio smile inscrutably, except when he sneezed.
But all of them grow BIG! then shrink down to. . . the size of dots, of less than dots, again. Every last one of them is of such elastic -- sincorporeal -- substance. sider the Queen of the Fairies.
Her very itania, bears wito her dest from the giant race of the Titans; and "desd" might seem apt enough, at first, to describe the desion when she mas herself under her alias, Mab, or, in Wales, Mabh, and rules over the other diminutives, herself the size of the solitaire in an e ring, as infinitely little as her forebears were infinitely large.
"Now, I do call my horned master, the Horn of Plenty, but as for my missus --" said the Puck, in his inimitable Worcestershire drawl.
Like a Japaer-flower dropped in a glass of water, Titania grows. . .
In the dewy wood tinselled with bewildering moonlight, the bumbling, tumbling babies of the fairy crèche trip over the hem of her dress, which is no more nor less than the margin of the wood itself; they stumble iangled grass as they play with the eys, the quick brown fox-cubs, the russet fieldmid the wee scraps of grey voles, bli Mole and striped Brock with his questing snout -- all the denizens of the woodland are her embrs, and the birds flutter round her head, settle on her shoulders and make their s in her great abundance of disordered hair, in which are plaited poppies and the ears of wheat.
The arrival of the Queen is announced by no fanfare of trumpets but the ash-soft lullaby of wood doves and the liquid coloratura blackbird. Moonlight falls like milk upon her naked breasts.
She is like a double bed; or, a table laid for a wedding breakfast; or, a fertility ic.
In her eyes are babies. When she looks at you, you helplessly reduplicate. Her eyes provoke engendering.
Corre: used to provoke.
But not this year. Frosts have blasted the fruit blossom, rain has rotted all the sarland is not gold but greenish and phosphorest with blight. The acres of the rye have been invaded with ergot and, this year, eating bread will make you mad. The floods broke down the Bridge of Ware. The beasts refuse to couple; the cow rejects the bull and the bull keeps himself to himself. Even the goats, hitherto synonymous with lechery, prefer to curl up with a good book. The very worms no litate the humus with their undulating and plex embraces. In the wood, a chaste, ventual calm reigns over everything, as if the foul weather had put everybody off.
The wonderful giantess maed herself with an owl on her shoulder and an apron-full of roses and of babies so rosy the children could scarcely be distinguished from the flowers. She picked up her defunct friends child, the Herm. The Herm stood on one leg on the palm of Titanias hand and smiled the inscrutable, if manic, smile of the figures in Hiic sculpture.
"My husband shall not have you!" cried Titania. "He shant! I shall keep you!"
At that, thunder crashed, the heavens, which, for a brief moment, had sealed themselves up, now reopened again with redoubled fury, and all the drenched babies in Titanias pinafore coughed and she worms in the rosebuds woke up at the clamour and began to gnaw.
But the Queen stowed the tiny Herm safe away between her breasts as if s/he were a locket and herself diminished until she was a suitable size to enjoy her niece or nephew or nephew/niece à choix in the obscurity of an a-cup.
"But she ot put horns on her husband, for he is antlered, already," opihe Puck, ging bato himself and skipping across the glade to the heels of his master. For no roe-buow raises his head behind that gorse bush to watch these goings on; Oberon is antlered like a ten-point stag.
Among the props of the Globe Theatre, along with the thunder-making mae and the bearskins, is listed a "robe for to go invisible". By his coat, you uand that Oberon is to remain unseen as he broods magisterial but impotent above the scarcely disible quiverings among last years oak leaves that ceal his wife and the golden bone of tention that has e between the elemental lovers.
High ihick of a dripping hedge of honeysuckle, a wee creature was extrag a tritoniuminous, luxuriantly perfumed melody from the pan-pipes of the wild woodbihe tune broke off as the player vulsed with ugly coughing. He gobbed phlegm, that flew through the air until its trajectory was interrupted by a cowslip, to whose freckled ear the translut pustule g. The infinitesimal then took up his tootling again.
The Herms golden skin is made of beaten gold but the flesh beh it has been marinated in: black pepper, red chilli, yellow turmeric, cloves, coriander, , fenugreek, ginger, mautmeg, allspice, khuskhus, garlic, tamarind, ut, dlenut, lemon grass, galangal and now and then you get -- phew! -- a whiff of asafoetida. Hot stuff! Were the Herm to be served piled up on a lordly platter and garnished with shreds of its own outer g, s/he would then resemble that royal dish, moglai biriani, which is decorated wit.９９lｉb?h edible gold shavings in order, so they say, to aid digestion. Nothing so deliciously aromatic as the Herm has ever beeed before in Englands green and pleasant land, still lab as it is at this point in time us unrelieved late medieval diet of boiled cabbage. The Herm is hot and sweet as if drenched in sun and honey, but Oberon is the colour of ashes.
The Puck, tormented for lack of the Herm, pulled up a mandrake and sunk his prodigious tool in the cleft of the relut root, which shrieked mournfully but to no avail as old shaggylugs had his way with it.
Distemperate weather! Its raining, its p; the earth is ira from itself, the withering buds tumble out of the Queens apron and rot on the mulch, for Oberon has put a stop to reprodu. But still Titania hugs the Herm to her shrivelling bosoms and will not let her husband have the wee thing, not even for one minute. Did she not give a sacred promise to a friend?
What does the Herm want?
The Herm wants to know what "want" means.
"I am unfamiliar with the cept of desire. I am the unique and perfect, paradigmatic Hermaphrodite, provoking on all sides desire yet myself transdent, the unmoved mover, the still eye of the tempest, exemplary and self-suffit, the beginning and the end."
Titania, despairing of the Herms male aspect, ied a tentative forefinger in the female orifice. The Herm felt bored.
Oberon watched the oak leaves shiver and said nothing, for he was choked with balked longing for the golden, half and halfy thing with its salivatory perfume. He took off his invisible disguise and made himself gigantid bulked up in the night sky over the wood, arms akimbo, blotting out the moon, naked but for his buskins and his great codpiece. The mossy antlers on his forehead arent the half of it, he wears a ade out of yellowish vertebrae of uionable mammals, down from beh which his black hair drops straight as light. Since he is in his malign aspect, he has put on, furthermore, a necklace of suggestively little skulls, which might be those of the babies he has plucked from human cradles -- do not fet, in German, they call him Erl-King.
His face, breast and thighs he has daubed with charcoal; Oberon, lord of night and silence, of the grave silence of endless night, Lord of Plutonic dark. His hair, long, it never saw scissors; but he has this peculiarity?? -- no hair at all oher chop or , nor his shins, her, but all his face bald as an egg except for the eyebrows, that meet in the middle.
Indeed, who in their right minds would trust a child to this man?
When Oberon cheers up a bit, he lets the sun e out and then hell hang little silver bells along his codpied they go jingle jangle jingle when he walks up and down and round about, the pretty king sounds suspended wriggling in the air like homunculi wherever he has passed.
And if he is not a creature of the dream, then surely you have fotten your dreams.
The Puck, too, yearning and thwarted as he was, found himself helplessly turning himself into the thing he longed for, and, uhe faintly twitg oak leaves, became yellow, metallic, double-sexed aravagantly precious-looking. There the Puck stood on ohe living image of the Herm, and glittered.
Oberon saw him.
Oberon stooped doicked up the Pud stood him, a simulated Yogic tree, on his palm. A misty look came into Oberons eyes. The Puew he had no option but to gh with it.
Atishoo!
Titania tenderly wiped the Herms h the edge of her petticoat, on which the flowers are all drooping, shedding embroidery stitches, the fruits are kering and spotting and ing undone for, if Oberon is the Horn of Plenty, then Titania is the Cauldron of Geion and, unless he gives her a stir, now and then, with his great pot stick, the cauldron will go off the boil.
Lie close and sleep, said Titania to the Herm. My fays shall lullaby you as we cuddle up on my mattress of dandelion down.
The draggled fairies obediently started in on a chorus of: "Ye spotted snakes with double tongue," but were all so afflicted by coughing and sneezing and rawness of the throat and rheumy eyes and gasping for breath and all the other symptoms of rampant influenza that their hoarse voices petered out before they reached the bit about the s and after that the only sound iire wood was the pit-pattering of the rain on the leaves.
The orchestra has laid down its instruments. The curtain rises. The play begins.
Peter and the Wolf-1
At length the grandeur of the mountains bees monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there. Above a certain line, no trees grow. Shadows of clouds move across the bare alps as freely as the clouds themselves move across the sky.
A girl from a village on the lower slopes left her widowed mother to marry a man who lived up in the empty places. Soon she regnant. In October, there was a severe storm. The old woman knew her daughter was near her time and waited for a message but none arrived. After the storm passed, the old woma up to see for herself, taking her grown son with her because she was afraid.
From a long way off, they saw no smoke rising from the ey. Solitude yawned round them. The open door banged backwards and forwards on its hinges. Solitude engulfed them. There were traces of wolf-dung on the floor so they knew wolves had been in the house but left the corpse of the young mother alohough of her baby nothing was left except some mess that showed it had been born. Nor was there a trace of the son-in-law but a gnawed foot in a boot.
They ed the dead in a quilt and took it home with them. Now it was late. The howling of the wolves mutilated the approag silence of the night.
Winter came with icy blasts, when everyoays indoors and stokes the fire. The old womans son married the blacksmiths daughter and she moved in with them. The snow melted and it ring. By the Christmas, there was a boung grandson. Time passed. More children came.
When the eldest grandsoer, reached his seventh summer, he was old enough to go up the mountain with his father, as the men did every year, to let the goats feed on the young grass. There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advang silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock. Then another wolf, bbr>?９９ｌｉｂ?following the first one.
If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have ied them so closely, their plush, grey pelts, of which the hairs are tipped with white, giving them a ghostly look, as if they were on the point of dissolving at the edges; their sprightly, plumey tails; their acute, inquisitive masks.
Theer saw that the third wolf rodigy, a marvel, a naked one, going on all fours, as they did, but hairless as regards the body although hair grew around its head.
The sight of this bald wolf so fasated him that he would have lost his flock, perhaps himself beeen aainly beeen to the bone fligence had not the goats themselves raised their heads, snuffed danger and run off, bleating and whinnying, so that the men came, firing guns, making hullabaloo, sg the wolves away.
His father was too angry to listen to eter said. He cuffed Peter round the head a him home. His mother was feeding this years baby. His grandmother sat at the table, shelling peas into a pot.
"There was a little girl with the wolves, granny," said Peter. Why was he so sure it had been a little girl? Perhaps because her hair was so long, so long and lively. "A little girl about my age, from her size," he said.
His grandmother threw a flat pod out of the door so the chis could peck it up.
"I saw a little girl with the wolves," he said.
His grandmother tipped water into the pot, got up from the table and hung the pot of peas on the hook over the fire. There wasnt time, that night, but m, very early, she herself took the boy back up the mountain.
"Tell your father what you told me."
They went to lo.９９ｌｉb.ok at the wolves tracks. On a bit of dampish ground they found a print, not like that of a dogs pad, much less like that of a childs footprint, yet Peter worried and puzzled over it until he made sense of it.
"She was running on all fours with her arse stuck up in the air. . . therefore. . . shed put all her weight on the ball of her foot, wouldnt she? And splay out her toes, see. . . like that."
He went barefoot in summer, like all the village children; he ied the ball of his own foot in the print, to show his father what kind of mark he would have made if he, too, always ran on all fours.
"No use for a heel, if you run that way. So she doesnt have a heelprint. Stands to reason."
At last his father made a slow aowledgement of Peters powers of dedu, giving the child a veiled glance of disquiet. It was a clever child.
They soon found her. She was asleep. Her spine had grown so supple she could curl into a perfect C. She woke up when she heard them and ran, but somebody caught her with a sliding the end of a rope; the noose over her head jerked tight and she fell to the ground with her eyes popping and rolling. A big, grey, angry bitch appeared out of nowhere but Peters father blasted it to bits with his shotgun. The girl would have choked if the old woman hadnt taken her head on her lap and pulled the knot loose. The girl bit the grandmothers hand.
The girl scratched and fought until the men tied her wrists and aogether with twine and slung her from a pole to carry her back to the village. Then she went limp. She didnt scream 藏书网or shout, she dido be able to, she made only a few dull, guttural sounds in the back of her throat, and, though she did not seem to know how to cry, water trickled out of the ers of her eyes.
How burned she was by the weather! Bright brown all over; and how filthy she was! Caked with mud and dirt. And every inch of her chestnut hide was scored and scabbed with dozens of scars of sharp abrasions of rod thorn. Her hair dragged on the ground as they carried her along; it was stuck with burrs and it was so dirty you could not see what colour it might be. She was dreadfully verminous. She stank. She was so thin that all her ribs stuck out. The fine, plump, potato-fed boy was far bigger than she, although she was a year or so older.
Solemn with curiosity, he trotted behind her. Granny stumped alongside with her bitten hand ed up in her apron. Ohe girl was dumped on the earth floor of her grandmothers house, the boy secretly poked at her left buttock with his forefinger, out of curiosity, to see what she felt like. She felt warm but hard. She did not so much as twitch wheouched her. She had given up the struggle; she lay trussed on the floor and preteo be dead.
Grannys house had the one large room which, in wihey shared with the goats. As soon as it caught a whiff of her, the big tabby mouser hissed like a pricked balloon and bounded up the ladder that went to the hayloft above. Soup smoked on the fire and the table was laid. It was now about supper-time but still quite light; night es late on the summer mountain.
"Untie her," said the grandmother.
Her son wasnt willing at first but the old woman would not be denied, so he got the breadknife and cut the rope round the girls ankles. All she did was kick, but whe the rope round her wrists, it was if he had let a fiend loose. The onlookers ran out of the door, the rest of the family ran for the ladder to the hayloft but Granny aer both ran to the door, to shoot the bolt, so she could not get out.
The trapped one knocked round the room. Bang -- over went the table. Crash, tinkle -- the supper dishes smashed. Bang, crash tinkle -- the dresser fell forward upon the hard white shale of crockery it shed in falling. Over went the meal barrel and she coughed, she sneezed like a child sneezes, no different, and then she bounced around on fear-stiffened legs in a white cloud until the flour settled ohing like a magic powder that made everything strange. Her first frenzy over, she squatted a moment, questing with her long nose and then began to make little rushing sorties, now here, now there, snapping and yelping and tossing her bewildered head.
She never rose up on two legs; she crouched, all the time, on her hands and tiptoes, yet it was not quite like croug, for you could see how all fours came naturally to her as though she had made a different pact with gravity than we have, and you could see, too, how strong the muscles ihighs had grown on the mountain, how taut the twanging arches of her feet, and that indeed, she only used her heels whe ba her haunches. She growled; now and then she coughed out those intolerable, thick grunts of distress. All you could see of her rolling eyes were the whites, which were the bluish, glaring white of snow.
Several times, her bowels opened, apparently involuntarily. The kit smelled like a privy yet even her excrement was different to ours, the refuse of raw, strange, unguessable, wicked feeding, shit of a wolf.
Oh, horror!
She bumped into the hearth, knocked over the pan hanging from the hook and the spilled tents put out the fire. Hot soup scalded her fs. Shock of pain. Squatting on her hindquarters, holding the hurt paw dangling piteously from its wrist before her, she howled, in high, sobbing arcs.
Even the old woman, who had tracted with herself to love the child of her dead daughter, was frightened when she heard the girl howl.
Peters heart gave a hop, a skip, so that he had a sensation of falling; he was not scious of his own fear because he could not take his eyes off the sight of the crevice of her girl-childs sex, that erfectly visible to him as she sat there square on the base of her spihe night was now as dark as, at this season, it would go -- which is to say, not very dark; a white thread of moon hung in the blond sky at the top of the ey so that it was her dark nht indoors yet the boy could see her intimacy clearly, as if by its own phosphoresce. It exercised an absolute fasation upon him.
Peter and the Wolf-2
Her lips opened up as she howled so that she offered him, without her own iion or volition, a view of a set of ese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret pla which destinatioually receded before him, his first, devastating, vertiginous intimation of infinity.
She howled.
A on howling until, from the mountain, first singly, then in a plex polyphony, answered at last voices in the same language. She tio howl, though now with a less tragic resonance. Soon it was impossible for the octs of the house to deny to themselves that the wolves were desded on the village in a pack.
Then she was soled, sank down, laid her head on her forepaws so that her hair trailed in the cooling soup, and so closed up her forbidden book without the least notion she had ever ope or that it was banned. Her heavy eyelids closed on her brown, bloodshot eyes. The household gun hung on a nail over the fireplace where Peters father had put it when he came in but when the ma his foot o of the ladder in order to e down for his on, the girl jumped up, snarling and showing her long yellow es.
The howling outside was now mixed with the agitated dismay of the domestic beasts. All the other villagers were well locked up at home. The wolves were at the door.
The boy took hold of his grandmothers uninjured hand. First the old woman would not budge but he gave her a good tug and she came to herself. The girl raised her head suspiciously but let them by. The boy pushed his grandmother up the ladder in front of him and drew it up behind them. He was full of nervous dread. He would have given anything to turn time back, so that he might have run, shouting a warning, when he first caught sight of the wolves, and never seehe door shook as the wolves outside jumped up at it and the screws that held the socket of the bolt to the frame cracked, squeaked and started to give. The girl jumped up, at that, and began to make excited little sallies bad forth in front of the door. The screws tore out of the frame quite soon. The pack tumbled over one ao get inside.
Dissoerror. The clamour within the house was that of all the winds of wirapped in a box. That which they feared most, outside, was now indoors with them. The baby in to read.
The boy became very pious, so much so that his family were startled and impressed. The younger children teased him and called him "Saier" but that did not stop him sneaking off to church to pray whenever he had a spare moment. I, he fasted to the bone. On Good Friday, he lashed himself. It was as if he blamed himself for the death of the old lady, as if he believed he had brought into the house the fatal iion that had taken her out of it. He was ed by an imperious passion for ato. Eaight, he pored over his book by the flimsy dlelight, looking for a clue to grace, until his mother shooed him off to sleep.
But, as if to spite the four evas he nightly io protect his bed, the nightmare regularly disordered his sleeps. He tossed and turned on the rustling straw pallet he shared with two little ones.
Delighted with Peters precocious intelligehe priest started to teach him Latier visited the priest as his duties with the herd permitted. When he was fourteen, the priest told his parents that Peter should now go to the seminary iown in the valley where the boy would learn to bee a priest himself. Ri sons, they spared oo God, since his books and his praying made him a strao them. After the goats came down from the high pasture for the winter, Peter set off. It was October.
At the end of his first days travel, he reached a river that ran from the mountain into the valley. The nights were already chilly; he lit himself a fire, prayed, ate bread and cheese his mother had packed for him and slept as well as he could. In spite of his eagero pluo the white world of penand devotion that awaited him, he was anxious and troubled for reasons he could not explain to himself.
In the first light, the light that no more than clarifies darkne..ss like egg shells dropped in cloudy liquid, he went down to the river to drink and to wash his face. It was so still he could have been the ohing living.
Her forearms, her loins and her legs were thick with hair and the hair on her head hung round her fa such a way that you could hardly make out her features. She crouched oher side of the river. She was lapping up water so full of mauve light that it looked as if she were drinking up the dawn as fast as it appeared yet all the same the air grew pale while he was looking at her. Solitude and silence; all still.
She could never have aowledged that the refle beh her in the river was that of herself. She did not know she had a face; she had never known she had a fad so her face itself was the mirror of a different kind of scioushan ours is, just as her nakedness, without innoce or display, was that of our first parents, before the Fall. She was hairy as Magdalen in the wilderness a repentance was not within her prehension.
Language crumbled into dust uhe weight of her speechlessness. A pair of cubs rolled out of the bushes, cuffing one another. She did not pay them any heed.
The boy began to tremble and shake. His skin prickled. He felt he had been made of snow and now might melt. He mumbled something, or sobbed.
She cocked her head at the vague, river-washed sound and the cubs heard it, too, left off tumbling and ran to burrow their scared heads in her side. But she decided, after a moment, there was no danger and lowered her muzzle, again, to the surface of the water that took hold of her hair and spread it out around her head.
When she finished her drink, she backed a few paces, shaking her wet pelt. The little cubs fasteheir mouths on her dangling breasts.
Peter could not help it, he burst out g. He had not cried since his grandmothers funeral. Tears rolled down his fad splashed on the grass. He blundered forward a few steps into the river with his arms held open, intending to cross over to the other side to join her in her marvellous and private grace, impelled by the access of an almost visionary ecstasy. But his cousin toht at the sudden movement, wrenched her teats away from the cubs and ran off. The squeaking cubs scampered behind. She ran on hands a as if that were the only way to run towards the high ground, into the bright maze of the unpleted dawn.
When the boy recovered himself, he dried his tears on his sleeve, took off his soaked boots and dried his feet and legs oail of his shirt. Thee something from his pack, he scarcely knew what, and tinued on the way to the town; but what would he do at the seminary, now? For now he khere was nothing to be afraid of.
He experiehe vertigo of freedom.
He carried his boots slung over his shoulder by the laces. They were a great burden. He debated with himself whether or not to throw them away but, when he came to a paved road, he had to put them on, although they were still damp.
The birds woke up and sang. The cool, rational sun surprised him; m had broken on his exhilaration and the mountain now lay behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw, how, with distahe mountain began to acquire a flat, two-dimensional look. It was already turning into a picture of itself, into the postcard hastily bought as a souvenir of childhood at a railway station or a border post, the neer cutting, the snapshot he would show in straowns, straies, other tries he could not, at this moment, imagine, whose names he did not yet know, places where he would say, in strange languages, "That was where I spent my childhood. Imagine!"
He turned and stared at the mountain for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years but he had never seen it before as it might look to someone who had not known it as almost a part of the self, so, for the first time, he saw the primitive, vast, magnifit, barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain. As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into so much sery, into the wonderful backcloth for an old try tale, tale of a child suckled by wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman藏书网.
Theerminedly set his face towards the town and tramped onwards, into a different story.
"If I look back again," he thought with a last gasp of superstitious terror, "I shall turn into a pillar of salt."
The Kitchen Child-1
"Born in a trunk", they say when a theatrical sups grease-paint with mothers milk, and if there be a ary equivalent of the phrase then surely I merit it, for was I not ceived the while a soufflé rose? A lobster soufflé, very choice, twenty-five minutes in a medium oven.
And the very first soufflé that ever in her life as e mam was called upon to make, ordered up by some French duc, house guest of Sir and Madam, me mam pleased as pun?9９ｌiｂ.ch to fix it for him since few if any fins becs pecked their way to our house, not even during the two weeks of the Great Grouse Shoot when nobs rolled up in droves to score the feathered booty of the skies. Especially not then. Palates like shoe leather. "Pearls before swine," my mother would have said as she relutly sent the four and twenty courses of her Art up to the dining room, except that pigs would have exhibited mourmandise. I tell you, the English try house, yes! thats the place frub; but, only when Sir and Madam are pas chez lui. It is the staff who keep up the standards.
For Madam would touothing but oysters and grapes ohree times a day, due to the refi of her sensibility, while Sir fasted until a devilled bo sundown, his tongue having been burned out by curry when he was g a bit of Poonah. (I re those Indians hotted up his fodder out of spite. Oh, the cooks vengeance, when it strikes -- terrible!) And as for the Shooters of Grouse, all they wanted was sandwiches for hors doeuvres, sandwiches for entrées, followed by sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, and their hip flasks kept replenished, oh, yes, wash it down with the amber fluid and who tell how it tastes?
So me mam took great pains with the stru of this, her very first lobster soufflé, sending the boy who ground knives off on his bike to the sea, miles, for the beast itself and then the boiling of it alive, how it e squeaking piteously crawling out of the pot etc. etc. ete mam all a-flutter before she so much as separated the eggs.
Then, just as she bent over the rao stir the flour into the butter, a pair of hands clasped tight around her waist. Thinking, at first, it was but kit horseplay, she twitched her ample hips to put him off as she slid the egg yolks into the roux. But as she mixed in the lobster meat, diced up, all nice, she felt those hands stray higher.
That was when too much in. She always regretted that.
And as she was folding ioppling tents of the bowl of beaten egg-white, God knows what it was he got up to but so much so she flings all into the white dish with abandon and:
"To hell with it!"
Into the ovehe soufflé; the oven door slams shut.
I draw a veil.
"But, mam!" I often begged her. "Who was that man?"
"Lawks a mercy, child," says she. "I hought to ask. I were that worried the I give the oven door would bring the soufflé down."
But, no. The soufflé went up like a montgolfier and, as soon as its golden head knocked imperiously against the oven door, she bust through the veil I have discreetly drawhis se of passion and emerged, smoothing her apron, in order to extract the exemplary dish amidst oohs and aahs and of the assembled kit staff, some forty-five in number.
But not quite exemplary. The et her mat the eater. The housekeeper brings his plate herself, slaps it down. "He said: "Trop de ne," and scraped it off his plate into the fire," she announces with a gratified smirk. She is a model of refi and always very particular about her aspirates. She hiccups. She even says the "h" in "hic".
My mother weeps for shame.
"What we need here is a gtial -- hic -- chef to improve le ton," mehe housekeeper, tossing me mam a killing look as she sweeps out the door for me mam is a simple Yorkshire lass for all she has magi her fingers but no room for two queens in this hive, the housekeeper hates her. And the housekeeper is pricked perpetually by the fancy for the importation of a Carême or a Soyer with moustaches like hatracks to bouche her and milly filly her as is all the rage.
"For isnt it Alberlin, chef to the dear Devonshires; and Crépin, at the Duchess of Sutherlands. Then theres Labalme, with the Duke of Beauforts household, dono. . . and the Queen, bless her, has her Ménager. . . while were stuck with that fat cow who t speak nothing but broad Yorkshire, never out of her carpet slippers. . ."
ceived upon a kit table, born upon a kit floor; no bells rang to wele but, far more aptly, my arrival heralded by a bang! bang! bang! on every skillet in the place, a veritable fusillade of copper-bottom kit tympani; and the merry clatter of ladle against dish-cover; and the very turnspit dogs all went: "Bo!"
It being, as you might yourself pute, a good three months off October, Sir and Madam being in London the housekeeper maintains a fiyle all by herself, sitting in her parlour partaking of the best Bohea from a Meissen cup, to which she adds a judicious touch of rum from the locked bottles to which shes fed a key in her ample leisure. The housekeepers little skivvy, that she keeps to fetch, carry and lick boot, just topping the tea-cup up with old Jamaica, all hell breaks loose below stairs as if a ese orchestra started up its woodblocks and xylophones, crash, .
"What oh are the -- hick -- lower ordures up to?" elocutes the housekeeper in ladylike and dulcet tones, giving the ear of the skivvy a quick but vicious tug to jerk the gossip out of her.
"Oh, madamissima!" quavers the poor little skivvyette. "Tis nobbut the cooks babby!"
"The cooks baby?!?"
Due to my mothers corpulence, which is immense, shes round as the "o" in "obese", and the great loyalty and affe towards her of all the kit staff, the housekeeper knew nothing of my immi, amid her waxing wroth, also glad to hear it, since she thought she spied a way to relieve my mother of her post due to this unsolicited arrival and then nag Sir and Madam to get in some ming and pomaded gent to chaudfroid and gêlée and butter up. Below stairs she desds forthwith, a stately yet oo stable progress due to the rum with a dash of tea she sips all day, the skivvy running in front of her to throw wide the door.
What a spectacle greets her! Raphael might have sketched it, had he been in Yorkshire at the time. My mother, wreathed in smiles, enthroned on a sack of spuds with, at her breast, her babe, all ly swaddled in a new-boiled pudding cloth and the e brigade arranged around her in attitudes of adoration, each brandishing a utensil and giving out there with that merry rattle of the ladles, yours trulys first lullaby.
Alas, my cradle song sooers out in the odd thwad tinkle as the housekeeper cast her coldest eye.
"Whats -- hic -- this?"
"A bonny boy!" e mam, planting a smag kiss oender forehead pressed against her pillowing bosom.
"Out of the house for this!" cries the housekeeper. "Hic," she adds.
But what a g and clamour she unleashes with that demand; as if shed let off a bomb in a hardware store, for all present (except my mother and myself) attack their improvised instruments with renewed vigour, ting in unison:
"The kit child! The kit child! You t turn out the kit child!"
And that was the truth of the matter; who else could I claim as my progenitor if not the greedy place itself, that, if it did not make me, all the same, it caused me to be made? Not one scullery maid nor the littlest vegetable boy could remember who or what it was which visited my mother that soufflé m, every hand i called to cut sandwiches, but some fat shape seemed to have hauhe place, drawn to the kit as a ghost to the dark; had not that gourmet due kept a gourmet valet? Yet his outlines melt like aspi the heat from the range.
"The kit child!"
The kitch.９9liｂ?en brigade made such a din that the housekeeper retreated to revive herself with aot of rum in her private parlour, for, faced with a mutiny amongst the pans, she discovered little valour in her spirit ao sulk ient.
The first toys I played with were ders, egg whisks and sau lids. I took my baths in the big tureen in which the turtle soup was served. They gave up salmon until I could toddle because, as for my crib, what else but the copper salmole? And this kettle was stowed high on the mantelshelf so I could shere snug and 藏书网warm out of harms way, soothed by the delicious odours and appetising sounds of the preparation of nourishment, and there I y way through babyhood above that kit as if I were its household deity high in my tiny shrine.
And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kit? Those vaults of soot-darkeone far above me, where the hams and strings of onions and bunches of dried herbs dangle, looking somewhat like the regimental bahat unfurl above the aisles of old churches. The cool, eg flags scrubbed spotless twice a day by votive persons on their khe scleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, an altar, before which my mother bowed iual homage, a fringe of son her upper lip and fire glowing in her cheeks.
At three years old she gave me flour and lard and straightaway I ied shortcrust. I being too little to mahe pin, she hoists me on her shoulders to watch her as she rolls out the dough upon the marble slab, thes me to stamp out the tartlets for myself, tears of joy at my precocity trig down her cheeks, lets me dollop on the damson jam and lick the spoon for my reward. By three and a half, Ive progressed th puff and, after that, no holding me. She perches me on a tall stool so I reach to stir the sauce, s me in her pinny that goes round and round and rouhrice, tucks it in at the waist else I trip over it head first into my own Hollandaise. So I bee her acolyte.
The Kitchen Child-2
Reading and w>９9lib?riting e to me easy. I learn my letters as follows: A for asparagus, asperges au beurre fohough never, for my mothers sake, with a sauce batarde); B for boeuf, baron of, roasted mostly, with a pouding Yorkshire patriotically sputtering away beh it in the dripping pan; C for carrots, carrottes, choufleur, camembert and so ht down to Zabaglione, although I often wonder what use the X might be, si figures in no cooks alphabet.
And I stick as close to that kit as the cro?te to a paté or the mayono an oeuf. First, I stand on that stool to my saus; then on an upturned bucket; then on my own two feet. Time passes.
Life in this remote mansion flows by a tranquil stream, only vulsing into turbulence a year and then for two weeks only, but that fuss enough, the Grouse Shoot, when they all e from town to set us by the ears.
Although Sir and Madam believe their visit to be the very and unique reason for the existences of ead every one of us, the yearly climacteric of our beings, when their staff, who, as far as they are ed, sleep out a hibernation the rest of the year, now spring to life like Sleepiy when her priurns up, in truth, we get on so well without them during the other eleven and a half months that the arrival of Themselves is a iterruption of our routine. We sweat out the fht of their preseh as ill a grace as gentlefolk forced by reduced circumstao take paying guests into their home, and as for haute cuisine, fet it; sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, all they want is sandwiches.
And never again, ever again, a special request for a soufflé, lobster or otherwise. Me mam always a touch broody e the Grouse Shoot, moody, distracted, and, even though no order came, heless, every year, she would prepare her lobster soufflé all the same, send the grinding boy off for the lobster, boil it alive, beat the eggs, make the panada etc. etc. etc., as if the doing of the thing were a magic ritual that would raise up out of the past the great question mark from whose loins her son had sprung so that, perhaps, she could get a good look at his face, this time. Or, perhaps, there was some other reason. But she never said either way. In due course, she could struct the airiest, most savoury soufflé that ever lobster graced; but nobody arrived to eat it and none of the kit had the heart. So, fifteen times in all, the chis got that soufflé.
Until, one fiober day, the mist rising over the moors like the steam off a é, the grouse taking last hearty meals like ned men, my mothers vigil was at last rewarded. The house party arrives and as it does we hear the faint, nostalgic wail of an accordion as a closed barouche es bounding up the drive all festooned with the lys de France.
Hearing the news, my mother shakes, es over queer, has to have a sit down on the marble pastry slab whilst I, oh, I prepare to meet my maker, having arrived at the age when a boy most broods about his father.
But whats this? Who trots into the kit to pick up the chest of ice the duc ordered for the bottles he brought with him but a beardless boy of his own age or less! And though my mother tries to quizz him on the whereabouts of some other hypothetical valet who, once upon a time, might possibly have made her hand tremble so she lost trol of the ne, he claims he ot uand her Yorkshire brogue, he shakes his head, he mimes inprehension. Then, for the third time in all her life, my mother wept.
First, she wept for shame because shed spoiled a dish. , she wept for joy, to ..see her son mould the dough. And now she weeps for absence.
But still she sends the grinding boy off for a lobster, for she must and will prepare her autumn ritual, if only as a wake for hope or as the funeral baked meats. And, taking matters into my own hands, I use the quickest method, the dumb waiter, above stairs to make a personal inquiry of this duc as to where his staff might be.
The duc, relaxing before dinner, popping a cork or two, is ed up in a velvet quilted smoking jacket much like the coats they put on very well-bred dogs, warming his slippered (Morocco) feet before the blazing fire and singing songs to himself in his native language. And I never saw a fatter man; hed have given my mother a stone or two and not felt the loss. Round as the "o" in "rotund". If hes taken aback by the apparition of this young chef out of the panelling, hes too much of a gent to show it by a jump or start, asks, what he do for me? nice as you like and, in my best ary French, my petit poi de fran?aise, I stammer out:
"The valet de chambre who apanied you (garhose many years past of your last visit --"
"Ah! Jean-Jacques!" he readily curs. "Le pauvre," he adds.
He squints lugubriously down his museau.
"Une crise de foie. Hélas, il est mort."
I blanche like an endive. He, being a perfect gentleman, offers me a restorative snifter of his bubbly, brought as it has been all the way from his own cellars, he dont trust Sirs ied tastes, and I feel it put hairs on my chest as it goes eructating down. Primed by another bottle, in which the duc joih that easy democratic affability which is the mark of all true aristocrats, I give him an at of what I take to be the circumstany ception, how his defunct valet wooed and won my mother in the course of the cooking of a lobster soufflé.
"I well remember that soufflé," says the duc. "Best I ever eat. Sent my pliments to the chef by way of the cierge, only added the advice of a truly exigeant gourmet to go easy on the ne, ime."
So that was the truth of it! The spiteful housekeeper relaying only half the message!
I thee the toug story, how, every Grouse Shoot after, my mother puts up a lobster soufflé in (I believe) remembrance of Jean-Jacques, and we share another bottle of bubbly in memory of the departed until the duc, exhibiting all the emotion of a tender sensibility, says through a manly tear:
"Tell you what, me lad, while your maman is once again fixing me up this famous lobster soufflé, I shall myself, as a tribute to my ex-valet, slip down --"
"Oh, sir!" I stammer. "You are too good!"
Forthwith I speed to the kit to find my mother just beginning the béchamel. Presently, as the butter melts like the heart of the duc melted when I told him her tale, the kit door steals open and in tippytoes Himself. Never a couple better matched for size, I must say. The kit battalion all turn their heads away, out of respect for this romantient, but I myself, the architect of it, ot forbear to peep.
He creeps up behind her, his index finger pressed to his lips to signify caution and silence, aends his arm, and, slowly, slowly, slowly, with infinite delicad tact, he lets his hand advehwart her flank. It might have been a fly alighting on her bum. She flicks a haunch, like a mare in the field, unmoved, shakes in the flour. The duc himself quivers a bit. An expression as of a baby in a sweetie shop traverses his somewhat Bourbonesque features. He is attempting to peer over her shoulder to see what she is up to with her batterie de cuisi his embonpois in the way.
Perhaps it is to shift her over a bit, or else a geribute to her large charms, but now, with immense if gigantic grace, he gooses her.
My mother fetches out a sigh, big enough to blow away the beaten egg-whites but, great artist that she is, her hand rembles, not once, as she folds in the yolks. And when the ducal hands stray higher -- not a mite of agitation stirs the spoon.
For it is, you uand, the time for seasoning. And in goes just suffit his time. Not a grain more. Huzzah! This soufflé will be -- I flourish the circle I have made with my thumb and forefinger, I simulate a kiss.
The egg-whites topple into the panada; the movements of her spoon are quid light as those of a bird caught in a trap. She upturns all into the soufflé dish.
He tweaks.
And then she cries: "To hell with it!" Departing from the script, my mother wields her wooden spoon like a club, brings it, smack! down onto the ducs head with siderable force. He drops on to the flags with a low moan.
"Take that," she bids his prone form. Then she smartly shuts the soufflé in the oven.
"How could you!" I cry.
"Would you have him spoil my soufflé? Wasnt it toud go, last time?"
The grinding boy and I get the duc up on the marble slab, slap his face, dab his temples with the oven cloth dipped in chilled chablis, at long last his eyelids flicker, he es to.
"Quelle femme," he murmurs.
My mother, croug over the raopwat hand, pays him no heed.
"She feared youd spoil the soufflé," I explain, overe with embarrassment.
"What dedication!"
The man seems awestruck. He stares at my mother as if he will never get enough of gazing at her. Bounding off the marble slab as sprightly as a man his size may, he hurls himself across the kit, falls on his k her feet.
"I beg you, I implore you --"
But my mother has eyes only for the oven.
"Here you are!" Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its argeligs over the e as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone fi. All present (some forty-seven in number -- the kit brigade with the addition of me, plus the duc) applaud and cheer.
The housekeeper is mad as fire when my moes off in the closed barouche to the ducs very al and French kit but she forts herself with the notion that now she persuade Sir and Madam to find her a spanking new chef such as Soyer or Carême to twirl their moustaches in her dire and gateau Saint-Honoré her on her birthday and indulge her in not infrequent babas au rhum. But -- I am the only child of my mothers kit and now I enter into my iance; besides, how the housekeeper plain? Am I not the you (Yorkshire born) French chef in all the land?
For am I not the ducs stepson?
The Fall River Axe Murders-1
Lizzie Borden with an axe
Gave her father forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her mother forty-one.
Childrens rhyme
Early in the m of the fourth of August, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts.
Hot, hot, hot. . . very early in the m, before the factory whistle, but, even at this hour, everything shimmers and quivers uhe attack of white, furious sun already high iill air.
Its inhabitants have never e to terms with these hot, humid summers -- for it is the humidity more than the heat that makes them intolerable; the weather gs like a low fever you ot shake off. The Indians who lived here first had the seo take off their buckskins when hot weather came and sit up to their necks in ponds; not so the desdants of the industrious, self-mortifying saints who imported the Protestahic wholesale into a try intended for the siesta and are proud, proud! of flying in the face of nature. In most latitudes with summers like these, everything slows down, then. You stay all day in penumbra behind drawn blinds and closed shutters; you wear clothes loose enough to make your own breeze to cool yourself when you infrequently move. But the ultimate decade of the last tury finds us at the high point of hard work, here; all will soon be bustle, men will go out into the furnace of the m well ed up in flannel underclothes, linen shirts, vests and coats and trousers of sturdy wooll..en cloth, and they garrotte themselves with ies, too, they think it is so virtuous to be unfortable.
And today it is the middle of a heat wave; so early in the m and the mercury has touched the middle eighties, already, and shows no sign of slowing down its headlong ast.
As far as clothes were ed, women only appeared to get off more lightly. On this m, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock -- but, uhat, went a long, starched cottoicoat; another short, starched cottoicoat; long drawers; woollen stogs; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly. She also strapped a heavy linen napkiween her legs because she was menstruating.
In all these clothes, out of sorts and nauseous as she was, in this dementi, her belly in a vice, she will heat up a flat-iron on a stove and press handkerchiefs with the heated iron until it is time for her to go down to the cellar woodpile to collect the hatchet with which our imagination -- "Lizzie Borden with an axe" -- always equips her, just as we always visualise St Catherine rolling along her wheel, the emblem of her passion.
Soon, in just as many clothes at Miss Lizzie wears, if less fine, Bridget, the servant gir?l, will slop kerosene on a sheet of last nights neer crumpled with a stick or two of kindling. When the fire settles down, she will cook breakfast; the fire will keep her suffog pany as she washes up afterwards.
In a serge suit, one look at which would be enough t you out in prickly heat, Old Borden will perambulate the perspiring town, truffling for money like a pig until he will return home mid-m to keep a pressing appoi with destiny.
But nobody here is up and about, yet; it is still early m, before the factory whistle, the perfect stillness of hot weather, a sky already white, the shadowless light of New England like blows from the eye of God, and the sea, white, and the river, white.
If we have largely fotten the physical disforts of the itg, oppressive garments of the past and the corrosive effects of perpetual physical disfort on the hen we have mercifully fotten, too, the smells of the past, the domestic odours -- ill-washed flesh; infrequently ged underwear; chamber-pots; slop-pails; iely plumbed privies; rotting food; unatteeeth; and the streets are no fresher than indoors, the om acridity of horse piss and dung, drains, sudden stench of old death from butchers shops, the amniotic horror of the fishmonger.
You would drench your handkerchief with cologne and press it to your nose. You would splash yourself with parma violet so that the reek of fleshly decay you always carried with you was overlaid by that of the embalming parlour. You would abhor the air you breathed.
Five living creatures are asleep in a house on Sed Street, Fall River. They prise two old men and three women. The first old man owns all the women by either marriage, birth or tract. His house is narrow as a coffin and that was how he made his fortune -- he used to be an uaker but he has retly branched out in several dires and all his branches bear fruit of the most fiscally gratifying kind.
But you would hink, to look at his house, that he is a successful and a prosperous man. His house is cramped, fortless, small and mean -- "uious", you might say, if you were his sycophant -- while Sed Street itself saw better days some time ago. The Borden house -- see "Andrew J. Borden" in flowing script on the brass plate o the door -- stands by itself with a few st feet of yard oher side. On the left is a stable, out of use since he sold the horse. In the back lot grow a few pear trees, laden at this season.
On this particular m, as luck would have it, only one of the two Borden girls sleeps in their fathers house. Emma Lenora, his oldest daughter, has taken herself off to nearby New Bedford for a few days, to catch the o breeze, and so she will escape the slaughter.
Few of their social class stay in Fall River in the sweating months of June, July and August but, then, few of their social class live on Sed Street, in the low part of town where heat gathers like fog. Lizzie was invited away, too, to a summer house by the sea to join a merry band of girls but, as if on purpose to mortify her flesh, as if important business kept her in the exhausted town, as if a wicked fairy spelled her in Sed Street, she did not go.
The other old man is some kind of kin of Bordens. He doesnt belong here; he is visiting, passing through, he is a ce bystander, he is irrelevant.
Write him out of the script.
Even though his presen the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the c of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect.
Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script.
One old man and two of his women sleep in the house on Sed Street.
The City Hall clock whirrs and sputters the prolegomena to the first stroke of six and Bridgets alarm clock gives a sympathetic skip and click as the minute-hand stutters on the hour; back the little hammer jerks, about to hit the bell on top of her clock, but Bridgets damp eyelids do not shudder with premonition as she lies iig flannel nightgown under ohi on an iroead, lies on her back, as the good nuns taught her in her Irish girlhood, in case she dies during the night, to make less trouble for the uaker.
She is a good girl, on the whole, although her temper is sometimes uain and then she will talk back to the missus, sometimes, and will be forced to fess the sin of impatieo the priest. Overe by heat and nausea -- for everyone in the house is going to wake up sick today -- she will return to this little bed later in the m. While she snatches a few moments rest, upstairs, all hell will be let loose, downstairs.
A rosary of brown glass beads, a cardboard-backed colour print of the Virgin bought from a Puese shop, a flyblown photograph of her solemn mother in Donegal -- these lie or are propped on the mantelpiece that, however sharp the Massachusetts winter, has never seen a lit stick. A bain trunk at the foot of the bed holds all Bridgets worldly goods.
There is a stiff chair beside the bed with, upon it, a dlestick, matches, the alarm clock that resounds the room with a dyadic, metallic g, for it is a joke between Bridget and her mistress that the girl could sleep through anything, anything, and so she he alarm as well as all the factory whistles that are just about to blast off, just this very sed about to blast off. . .
A splintered deal washstand holds the jug and bowl she never uses; she isnt going to lug water up to the third floor just to wipe herself down, is she? Not when theres water enough i sink.
Old Borden sees no y for baths. He does not believe in total immersion. To lose his natural oils would be to rob his body.
A frameless square of mirror reflects in cated waves a cracked, dusty soap dish taining a quantity of black metal hairpins.
ht regles of paper blinds move the beautiful shadows of the pear trees.
Although Bridget left the door open a cra forlorn hopes of coaxing a draught into the room, all the spe of the previous day has packed itself tightly into her attic. A dandruff of spent whitewash flakes from the ceiling where a fly drearily whines.
The house is thickly redolent of sleep, that sweetish, ging smell. Still, all still; in all the house nothing moving except the droning fly. Stillness oaircase. Stillness pressing against the blinds. Stillness, mortal stillness in the room below, where Master and Mistress share the matrimonial bed.
Were the drapes open or the lamp lit, one could better observe the differences between this room and the austerity of the maids room. Here is a carpet splashed with vigorous flowers, even if the carpet is of the cheap and cheerful variety; there are mauve, ochre and harsh cerise flowers on the aper, even though the aper was old when the Bordens arrived in the house. A dresser with another dist mirror; no mirror in this house does not take your fad twist it. On the dresser, a runner embroidered with fet-me-nots; on the runner, a bone issing three teeth and lightly threaded with grey hairs, a hairbrush backed with ebonised wood, and a number of lace mats underh small a boxes holding safety-pins, hairs etc. The little hairpiece that Mrs Borden attaches to her balding scalp for daytime wear is curled up like a dead squirrel. But of Bordens male occupation of this room there is no trace because he has a dressing room of his own, through that door, on the left. . .
What about the other door, the oo it?
It leads to the back stairs.
And that yet other door, partially cealed behind the head of the heavy, mahogany bed?
If it were not kept securely locked, it would take you into Miss Lizzies room.
One peculiarity of this house is the number of doors the rooms tain and, a further peculiarity, how all these doors are always locked. A house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors, for, upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. It is a house without passages. There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmates personal territory; it is a house with no shared, no on spaces between one room and the . It is a house of privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal dot.
The only way to Emmas room is through Lizzies. There is no way out of Emmas room. It is a dead end.
The Bordens of log all the doors, inside and outside, dates from a time, a few years ago, shortly before Bridget came to work for them, when the house was burgled. A person unknown came through the side door while Borden and his wife had taken one of their rare trips out together; he had loaded her into a trap a out for the farm they ow Swao ensure his tenant was not bilking him. The girls stayed at home in their rooms, napping on their beds or repairing ripped hems or sewing loose buttons more securely or writiers or plating acts of charity among the deserving poor or staring vatly into space.
I t imagine what else they might do.
What the girls do when they are on their own is unimagio me.
Emma is more mysterious by far than Lizzie, for we know much less about her. She is a blank space. She has no life. The door from her room leads only into the room of her sister.
"Girls" is, of course, a courtesy term. Emma is well into her forties, Lizzie ihirties, but they did not marry and so live in their fathers house, where they remain in a fictive, protracted childhood.
While the master and the mistress were away and the girls asleep or otherwise occupied, some person or persons unknown tiptoed up the back stairs to the matrimonial bedroom and pocketed Mrs Bordens gold watd , the coral necklad silver bangle of her remote childhood, and a roll of dollar bills Old Borde under union suits ihird drawer of the bureau on the left. The intruder attempted to force the lock of the safe, that featureless block of black iron like a slaughtering block or an altar sitting squarely o the bed on Old Bordens side, but it would have taken a crowbar to pee adequately the safe and the intruder tackled it with a pair of nail scissors that were lying handy on the dresser so that didnt e off.
Theruder pissed and shat on the cover of the Bordens bed, khe clutter of this and that on the dresser to the floor, smashing everything, swept into Old Bordens dressing room there to maliciously assault the funeral coat as it hung ih-balled dark of his closet with the self-same nail scissors that had been used on the safe (the nail scissors now split in two and were abandoned on the closet floor), retired to the kit, smashed the flour crod the treacle crock, and then scrawled an obsity or two on the parlour window with the cake of soap that lived beside the scullery sink.
What a mess! Lizzie stared with vague surprise at the parlour window; she heard the soft bang of the open s door, swinging idly, although there was no breeze. What was she doing, standing clad only in her corset in the middle of the sitting room? How had she got there? Had she crept down when she heard the s door rattle? She did not know. She could not remember.
All that happened was: all at once here she is, in the parlour, with a cake of soap in her hand.
She experienced a clearing of the senses and only then began to scream and shout.
"Help! We have been burgled! Help!"
Emma came down and forted her, as the big sister had forted the little one since babyhood. Emma it was who cleared from the sitting-room carpet the flour and treacle Lizzie had heedlessly tracked in from the kit on her bare feet in her somnambulist trance. But of the missing jewellery and dollar bills no trace could be found.
I ot tell you what effect the burglary had on Borden. It utterly discerted him; he was a man stunned. It violated him, even. He was a man raped. It took away his hitherto unshakeable fiden the iy i in things.
The burglary so moved them that the family broke its habitual sileh one another in order to discuss it. They blamed it on the Puese, obviously, but sometimes on the ucks. If their e remained stant and did not diminish with time, the focus of it varied acc to their moods, although they aloihe finger of suspi at the strangers and newers who lived in the gruesome ramparts of the pany housing a few squalid blocks away. They did not always suspect the dark strangers exclusively; sometimes they thought the culprit might very well have been one of the mill-hands fresh from saucy Lancashire across the o who itted the crime, for a slum landlord has few friends among the criminal classes.
However, the possibility of a peist occurs to Mrs Borden, although she does not know the word; she knows, however, that her youepdaughter is a strange one and could make the plates jump out of sheer spite, if she wao. But the old man adores his daughter. Perhaps it is then, after the shock of the burglary, that he decides she needs a ge of se, a dose of sea air, a long voyage, for it was after the burglary he sent her on the grand tour.
After the burglary, the front door and the side door were always locked three times if one of the inhabitants of the house left it for just so much as to go into the yard and pick up a basket of fallen pears when pears were in season or if the maid went out to hang a bit of washing or Old Borden, after supper, took a piss under a tree.
From this time dated the of log all the bedroom doors on the inside when one was on the inside oneself or oside when one was oside. Old Borden locked his bedroom door in the m, when he left it, and put the key in sight of all o shelf.
The burglary awakened Old Borden to the eva nature of private property. He thereafter uook an y of iment. He would forthwith i his surplus in good brid mortar, for who make away with an office block?
A number of leases fell in simultaneously at just this time on a certain street in the downtown area of the city and Borden shem up. He owhe block. He pulled it down. He plahe Borden building, an edifice of shops and offices, dark red brick, deep tan stone, with cast-iroail, from whence, iuity, he might reap a fine harvest of unsaleable rents, and this mo, like that of Ozymandias, would long survive him -- and, indeed, stands still, foursquare and handsome, the Andrew Borden Building, on South Main Street. Not bad for a fish peddlers son, eh?
For, although "Borden" is an a name in New England and the Borden between them owhe better part of Fall River, our Borden, Old Borden, these Bordens, did not spring from a wealthy branch of the family. There were Bordens and Bordens and he was the son of a man who sold fresh fish in a wicker basket from house to house to house. Old Bordens parsimony was bred of poverty but learo thrive best on property, for thrift has a different meaning for the poor; they get no joy of it, it is stark y to them. Whoever heard of a penniless miser?
Morose and gaunt, this self-made man is one of few pleasures. His vocation is capital accumulation.
What is his hobby?
Why, grinding the faces of the poor.
First, Andrew Borden was an uaker, ah, reising an aplice, did well by him. Iy of spindles, few made old bohe little children who laboured in the mills died with especial frequency. When he was an uaker, no! -- it was not true he cut the feet off corpses to fit into a job lot of coffins bought cheap as Civil War surplus! That was a rumour put about by his enemies!
With the profits from his coffins, he bought up a te or two and made fresh profit off the living. He bought shares in the mills. Then he ied in a bank or two, so that now he makes a profit on moself, which is the purest form of profit of all.
Foreclosures aions are meat and drink to him. He loves nothier than a little usury. He is halfway on the road to his first million.
At night, to save the kerosene, he sits in lampless dark. He waters the pear trees with his urine; waste not, want not. As soon as the daily neers are doh, he rips them up iric squares and stores them in the cellar privy so that they all wipe their arses with I them. He mourns the loss of the goanic waste that flushes down the WC. He would like to charge the very cockroaches i rent. A he has not grown fat on all this; the pure flame of his passion has melted off his flesh, his skin sticks to his bones out of sheer parsimony. Perhaps it is from his first profession that he has acquired his bearing, for he walks with the stately dignity of a hearse.
To watch Old Borden bearing dowreet towards you was to be filled with an instinctual respeortality, whose gaunt ambassador he seemed to be. And it made you think, too, what a triumph over nature it was when we rose up to walk on two legs instead of four, in the first place! For he held himself upright with such ponderous assertion it erpetual remio all who witnessed his progress how it is not natural to be upright, that it is a triumph of will ravity, in itself a transdence of the spirit over matter.
His spine is like an iron rod, fed, not born, impossible to imagihat spine of Old Bordens curled up in the womb in the big C of the foetus; he walks as if his legs had joints at her knee nor ankle so that his feet hit the tremblih like a bailiff pounding a door.
He has a white, -strap beard, old-fashioned already in those days. He looks as if hed gnawed his lips off. He is at peace with his god for he has used his talents as the Good Book says he should.
Yet do not think he has no soft spot. Like Old Lear, his heart -- and, more than that, his cheque-book -- is putty in his you daughters hands. On his pinky -- you ot see it, it lies uhe covers -- he wears a g, not a wedding ring but a high-sch, a singular tri for a fabulously misanthropic miser. His you daughter gave it to him when she left school and asked him to wear it, always, and so he always does, and will wear it to the grave to which she is going to send him later in the m of this bustible day.
He sleeps fully dressed in a flannel nightshirt over his long-sleeved underwear, and a flannel nightcap, and his back is turowards his wife of thirty years, as is hers to his.
They are Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt in persoall and gaunt as a hanging judge and she, such a spreading, round little doughball. He is a miser, while she is a glutton, a solitary eater, most i of vices ahe shadow or parodic vice of his, for he would like to eat up all the world, or, failing that, sie has not spread him a suffitly large table for his ambitions, he is a mute, inglorious Napoleon, he does not know what he might have done because he never had the opportunity -- since he has not access to the entire world, he would like to gobble up the city of Fall River. But she, well, she just gently, tinuously stuffs herself, doesnt she; shes always nibbling away at something, at the cud, perhaps.
Not that she gets much pleasure from it, either; no gourmet, she, forever meditating the exquisite differeween a mayonnaise sharpened with a few drops of Orleans vinegar or one pointed up with a squeeze of fresh lemon juio. Abby never aspired so high, nor would she ever think to do so even if she had the option; she is satisfied to stiple gluttony and she eschews all overtones of the sensuality of indulgence. Since she relishes not one single mouthful of the food she eats, she knows her ceaseless gluttony is nression.
The Fall River Axe Murders-2
Here they lie iogether, living embodiments of two of the Seven Deadly Sins, but he knows his avarice is no offence because he never spends any money and she knows she is not greedy because the grub she shovels down gives her dyspepsia.
She employs an Irish cook and Bridgets rough-and-ready hand i fulfils Abbys every criterion. Bread, meat, cabbage, potatoes -- Abby was made for the heavy food that made her. Bridget merrily slaps oable boiled dinners, boiled fish, eal mush, Indian pudding, johnnycakes, cookies.
But those cookies. . . ah! there you tou Abbys little weakness. Molasses cookies, oatmeal cookies, raisin cookies. But wheackles a sticky brownie, oozing chocolate, then she feels a queasy sense of having gone almost too far, that sin might be just around the er if her stomach did not imm?t>ediately palpitate like a guilty sce.
Her flannel nightdress is cut on the same lines as his nightshirt except for the limp flannel frill round the neck. She weighs two hundred pounds. She is five feet nothing tall. The bed sags on her side. It is the bed in which his first wife died.
Last night, they dosed themselves with castor oil, due to the indisposition that kept them both awake and vomiting the whole night before that; the copious results of their purges brim the chamber-pots beh the bed. It is fit to make a sewer faint.
Back to back they lie. You could rest a sword in the space between the old man and his wife, between the old mans bae, the only rigid thing he ever offered her, and her soft, warm, enormous bum. Their purges flailed them. Their faces show up deposing green in the gloom of the curtained room, in which the air is too thick for flies to move.
The you daughter dreams behind the locked door.
Look at the sleepiy!
She threw back the top sheet and her window is wide open but there is no breeze, outside, this m, to shiver deliriously the s. Bright sun floods the blinds so that the linen-coloured light shows us how Lizzie has goo bed as for a levée in a pretty, ruffled nightdress of snatched white muslin with ribbons of pastel pink satin threaded through the eyelets of the lace, for is it not the "naughty ies" everywhere but dour Fall River? Dont the gilded steamships of the Fall River Line signify all the squandered luxury of the Gilded Age within their mahogany and deliered interiors? But dont they sail away from Fall River, to where, elsewhere, it is the Belle Epoque? In New York, Paris, London, champagne corks pop, in Monte Carlo the bank is broken, women fall backwards in a crisp meringue of petticoats for fun and profit, but not in Fall River. Oh, no. So, in the immutable privacy of her bedroom, for her own delight, Lizzie puts on a rich girls pretty nightdress, although she lives in a mean house, because she is a rich girl, too.
But she is plain.
The hem of her nightdress is rucked up above her knees because she is a restless sleeper. Her light, dry, reddish hair, crag with static, slipping loose from the night-time plait, crisps and stutters over the square pillow at which she clutches as she sprawls oomach, havied her cheek oarched pillowcase for ess sake at some earlier hour.
Lizzie was not an affeate diminuti9９ｌｉb?t>ve but the h which she had been christened. Since she would always be known as "Lizzie", so her father reasoned, why burden her with the effete and fancy prolongation of "Elizabeth"? A miser ihing, he even cropped off half her name before he gave it to her. So "Lizzie" it was, stark and unadorned, and she is a motherless child, orpha two years old, poor thing.
Now she is two-and-thirty ahe memory of that mother she ot remember remains an abiding source of grief: "If mother had lived, everything would have been different."
How? Why? Different in what way? She wouldnt have been able to ahat, lost in a nostalgia for unknown love. Yet how could she have been loved better than by her sister, Emma, who lavished the pent-up treasures of a New England spinsters heart upotle thing? Different, perhaps, because her natural mother, the first Mrs Borden, subject as she was to fits of sudden, wild, inexplicable rage, might have takechet to Old Borden on her own at? But Lizzie loves her father. All are agreed on that. Lizzie adores the ad father who, after her mother died, took to himself another wife.
Her bare feet twitch a little, like those of a dog dreaming of rabbits. Her sleep is thin and unsatisfying, full of vague terrors and ierminate meo which she ot put a name or form once she is awake. Sleep opens within her a disorderly house. But all she knows is, she sleeps badly, and this last, stifling night has been troubled, too, by vague nausea and the gripes of her female pain; her room is harsh with the metallic smell of menstrual blood.
Yesterday evening she slipped out of the house to visit a woman friend. Lizzie was agitated; she kept pig nervously at the shirring on the front of her dress.
"I am afraid. . . that somebody. . . will do something," said Lizzie.
"Mrs Borden. . ." and here Lizzie lowered her void her eyes looked everywhere in the room except at Miss Russell. . . "Mrs Borden -- oh! will you ever believe? Mrs Borden thinks somebody is trying to poison us!"
She used to call her stepmother "mother", as duty bade, but, after a quarrel about money after her father deeded half a slum property to her stepmother five years before, Lizzie always, with cool scrupulosity, spoke of "Mrs Borden" when she was forced to speak of her, and called her "Mrs Borden" to her face, too.
"Last night, Mrs Borden and poor father were so sick! I heard them, through the wall. And, as for me, I have myself all day, I have felt se. So very. . . strange."
For there were those somnambulist fits. Since a child, she endured occasional "peculiar spells", as the idiom of the plad time called odd lapses of behaviour, ued, involuntary trances, moments of dise. Those times when the mind misses a beat. Miss Russell hasteo discover an explanation within reason; she was embarrassed to mention the "peculiar spells". Everyone khere was nothing odd about the Borden girls.
"Something you ate? It must have been something you have eaten. What was yesterdays supper?" solicitously queried kind Miss Russell.
"Warmed-over swordfish. We had it hot for dihough I could not take much. Then Bridget heated up the leftovers for supper but, again, for myself, I could only get down a forkful. Mrs Borden ate up the remains and scoured her plate with her bread. She smacked her lips but then was sick all night." (Note of smugness, here.)
"Oh, Lizzie! In all this heat, this dreadful heat! Twice-cooked fish! You know how quickly fish goes off in this heat! Bridget should have knower than to give you twice-cooked fish!"
It was Lizzies difficult time of the month, too; her friend could tell by a certain haggard, glazed look on Lizzies face. Yet her gentility forbade her to mention that. But how could Lizzie have got it into her head that the entire household was under siege from malign forces without?
"There have been threats," Lizzie pursued remorselessly, keeping her eyes on her nervous fiips. "So many people, you uand, dislike father."
This ot be denied. Miss Russell politely remained mute.
"Mrs Borden was so very sick she called the doctor in and Father was abusive towards the doctor and shouted at him and told him he would not pay a doctors bills whilst we had our own good castor oil in the house. He shouted at the doctor and all the neighbours heard and I was so ashamed. There is a man, you see. . ." and here she ducked her head, while her short, pale eyelashes beat on her cheek bones. . . "such a man, a dark man, with the aspect, yes of death upon his face, Miss Russell, a dark man Ive seen outside the house at odd, at ued hours, early in the m, late at night, whenever I ot sleep in this dreadful shade if I raise the blind and peep out, there I see him in the shadows of the pear trees, in the yard, a dark man. . . perhaps he puts poison in the milk, in the ms, after the milkman fills his . Perhaps he poisons the ice, when the i es."
"How long has he been haunting you?" asked Miss Russell, properly dismayed.
"Since. . . the burglary," said Lizzie and suddenly looked Miss Russell full in the face with a kind of triumph. How large her eyes were; promi, yet veiled. And her well-manicured fingers went on peg away at the front of her dress as if she were trying to unpick the shirring.
Miss Russell knew, she just khis dark man was a figment of Lizzies imagination. All in a rush, she lost patieh the girl; dark men standing outside her bedroom window, indeed! Yet she was kind and cast about for ways to reassure.
"But Bridget is up and about when the milkman, the i call and the whole street is busy and bustling, too; who would dare to put poison iher milk or ice-bucket while half of Sed Street looks on? Oh, Lizzie, it is the dreadful summer, the heat, the intolerable heat thats put us all out of sorts, makes us fractious and nervous, makes us sick. So easy to imagihings in this terrible weather, that taints the food and sows worms in the mind. . . I thought youd plao go away, Lizzie, to the o. Didnt you plan to take a little holiday, by the sea? Oh, do go! Sea air would blow away these silly fancies!"
Lizzie her nods nor shakes her head but tio worry at her shirring. For does she not have important business in Fall River? Only that m, had she not been down to the drug-store to try to buy some prussic acid herself? But how she tell kind Miss Russell she is gripped by an imperious o stay in Fall River and murder her parents?
She went to the drug-store on the er of Main Street in order to buy prussic acid but nobody would sell it to her, so she came home empty-handed. Had all that talk of poison in the vomiting house put her in mind of poison? The autopsy will reveal no trace of poison iomachs of either parent. She did not try to poison them; she only had it in mind to poison them. But she had been uo buy poison. The use of poison had been denied her; so what she be planning, now?
"And this dark man," she pursued to the unwilling Miss Russell, "oh! I have seen the moon glint upon an axe!"
When she wakes up, she ever remember her dreams; she only remembers she slept badly.
Hers is a pleasant room of not ungenerous dimensions, seeing the house is so very small. Besides the bed and the dresser, there is a sofa and a desk; it is her bedroom and also her sitting room and her office, too, for the desk is stacked with at books of the various charitable anisations with which she occupies her ample spare time. The Fruit and Flower Mission, under whose auspices she visits the i old in hospital with gifts; the Womens Christian Temperanion, for whom she extracts signatures for petitions against the Demon Drink; Christian Endeavour, whatever that is -- this is the golden age of good works and she flings herself into ittees with a vengeance. What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves i.99liｂ.he poor ceased to exist? There is the Newsboys Thanksgiving Dinner Fund; and the Horse-trough Association; and the ese version Association -- no class nor kind is safe from her merciless charity.
Bureau; dressing-table; closet; bed; sofa. She spends her days in this room, moviween each of these dull items of furniture in a circumscribed, uing, plaary round. She loves her privacy, she loves her room, she locks herself up in it all day. A shelf tains a book or two: Heroes of the Mission Field, The Romance of Trade, What Katy Did. On the walls, framed photographs of high-school friends, seally inscribed, with, tucked inside one frame, a picture postcard showing a black kitten peeking through a horseshoe. A watercolour of a Cape Cod seascape executed with poignant amateur inpetence. A monoe photograph or two of works of art, a Delia Robbia madonna and the Mona Lisa; these she bought in the Uffizi and the Louvre respectively when she went to Europe.
Europe!
For dont you remember what Katy did ? The story-book heroiook the steamship to smoky old London, to elegant, fasating Paris, to sunny, antique Rome and Florehe story-book heroine sees Europe reveal itself before her like an iing series of magitern slides on a gigantic s. All is present and all unreal. The Tower of London; cliotre Dame; click. The Sistine Chapel; click. Then the lights go out and she is in the dark again.
Of this journey she retained only the most circumspect of souvenirs, that madonna, that Mona Lisa, reprodus of objects of art secrated by a universal approval of taste. If she came back with a bag full of memories stamped "o be Fotten", she put the bag away uhe bed on which she had dreamed of the world before she set out to see it and on which, at home again, she tio dream, the dream haviransformed not into lived experie into memory, which is only another kind of dreaming.
Wistfully: "When I was in Florence. . ."
But then, with pleasure, she corrects herself: "When we were in Florence. . ."
Because a good deal, in fact most, of the gratificatiorip gave her came from havi out from Fall River with a select group of the daughters of respectable and affluent mill-owners. Once away from Sed Street, she was able to move fortably in the segment of Fall River society to which she belonged by right of old name and new money but from which, when she was at home, her fathers plentiful personal etricities excluded her. Sharing bedrooms, sharing state-rooms, sharihs, the girls travelled together in a genteel gaggle that bore its doom already upon it, for they were the girls who would not marry, now, and any pleasure they might have obtained from the variety aement of the trip oiled in advance by the knowledge they were eating up what might have been their own wedding-cake, using up what should have been, if theyd had any luck, their marriage settlements.
All girls pushing thirty, privileged to go out and look at the world before they resighemselves to the thin dition of New England spinsterhood; but it was a case of look, dont touch. They khey must not get their hands dirtied or their dresses crushed by the world, while their affeate panionship en route had a certain steadfast, determined quality about it as they bravely made the best of the sed-best.
It was a sour trip, in some ways, sour; and it was a round trip, it e the sour place from where it had set out. Home, again; the narrow house, the rooms all locked like those in Bluebeards castle, and the fat, white stepmother whom nobody loves sitting in the middle of the spider web, she has not budged a single inch while Lizzie was away but she has grown fatter.
This stepmother oppressed her like a spell.
The days open their cramped spaces into other cramped spaces and old furniture and never anything to look forward to, nothing.
When Old Borden dug in his pocket to shell out for Lizzies trip to Europe, the eye of God on the pyramid blio see daylight, but ravagance is too excessive for the misers younger daughter who is the wild card in his house and, it seems, have anything she wants, play ducks and drakes with her fathers silver dollars if it so pleases her. He pays all her dressmakers bills o and how she loves to dress up fine! She is addicted to dandyism. He gives her each week in pin-mohe same as the cook gets fes and Lizzie gives that which she does not spend on personal adoro the deserving poor.
He would give his Lizzie anything, anything in the world that lives uhe green sign of the dollar.
She would like a pet, a kitten or a puppy, she loves small animals and birds, too, poor, helpless things. She piles high the bird-table all winter. She used to keep some white peons in the disused stable, the kind that look like shuttlecocks and go "vroo croo", soft as a cloud.
Surviving photographs of Lizzie Borden show a face it is difficult to look at as if you knew nothing about her; is cast their shadow across her face, or else you see the shadows these events have cast -- something terrible, something ominous in this face with its jutting, regular jaw and those mad eyes of the New England saints, eyes that belong to a person who does not listen to you. . . fanatics eyes, you might say, if you knew nothing about her. If you were s through a box of old photographs in a junk shop and came across this particular, sepia, faded face above the choked collars of the 1890s, you might murmur when you saw her: "Oh, what big eyes you have!" as Red Riding Hood said to the wolf, but then you might not even pause to pick her out and look at her more closely, for hers is not, in itself, a striking face.
But as soon as the face has a name, once ynise her, when you know who she is and what it was she did, the face bees as if of one possessed, and now it haunts you, you look at it again and again, it secretes mystery.
This woman, with her jaw of a tration-camp attendant, and such eyes. . .
In her old age, she wore pinez, and truly with the years the mad light has departed from those eyes or else is deflected by her glasses -- if, indeed, it was a mad light, in the first place, for dont we all ceal somewhere photographs of ourselves that make us look like crazed assassins? And, in those early photographs of her young womanhood, she herself does not look so much like a crazed assassin as somebody ireme solitude, oblivious of that camera in whose dire she obscurely smiles, so that it would not surprise you to learn that she is blind.
There is a mirror on the dresser in which she sometimes looks at those times when time snaps in two and then she sees herself with blind, clairvoyant eyes, as though she were another person.
"Lizzie is not herself, today."
At those times, those irremediable times, she could have raised her muzzle to some ag moon and howled.
At other times, she watches herself doing her hair and trying her clothes on. The dist mirror reflects her with the queasy fidelity of water. She puts on dresses and theakes them off. She looks at herself in her corset. She pats her hair. She measures herself with the tape-measure. She pulls the measure tight. She pats her hair. She tries on a hat, a little hat, a chic little straw toque. She punctures it with a hatpin. She pulls the veil down. She pulls it up. She takes the hat off. She drives the hatpin into it with a strength she did not know she possessed.
Time goes by and nothing happens.
She traces the outlines of her face with an uain hand as if she were thinking of unfastening the bandages on her soul but it isnt time to do that, yet: she isnt ready to be see.
She is a girl of Sargasso calm.
She used to keep her pigeons in the loft above the disused stable ahem grain out of the palms of her cupped hands. She liked to feel the soft scratch of their beaks. They murmured "vroo croo" with infienderness. She ged their water every day and ed up their leprous messes but Old Borden took a dislike to their g, it got on his nerves, whod have thought he had any nerves but he ied some, they got on them, oernooook out the hatchet from the woodpile in the cellar and chopped those pigeons heads right off, he did.
Abby fahe slaughtered pigeons for a pie but Bridget the servant girl put her foot down, at that: what?!? make a pie out of Miss Lizzies beloved turtledoves? JesusMaryandJoseph!!! she exclaimed with characteristic impetuousness, what they be thinking of! Miss Lizzie so nervy with her funny turns and all! (The maid is the only one in the house with any sense and thats the truth of it.) Lizzie came home from the Fruit and Flower Mission for whom she had been reading a tract to an old woman in a poorhouse: "God bless you, Miss Lizzie." At home all was blood ahers.
She doesnt weep, this o isnt her nature, she is still waters, but, when moved, she ges colour, her face flushes, it goes dark, angry, mottled red. The old man loves his daughter this side of idolatry and pays for everything she wants, but all the same he killed her pigeons when his wife wao gobble them up.
That is how she sees it. That is how she uands it. She ot bear to watch her stepmother eat, now. Each bite the woman takes seems to go: "Vroo croo."
Old Borden ed off the hatchet and put it ba the cellar, o the woodpile. The red reg from her face, Lizzie went down to ihe instrument of destru. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand.
That was a few weeks before, at the beginning of the spring.
Her hands awit her sleep; the nerves and muscles of this plicated meism wont relax, just wont relax, she is all twang, all tension, she is taut as the strings of a wind-harp from which random currents of the air pluck out tuhat are not our tunes.
At the first stroke of the City Hall clock, the first factory hooter blares, and then, on another note, another, and ahe Metaet Mill, the Ameri Mill, the Meics Mill . . until every mill iire town sings out aloud in a on anthem of summoning and hot alleys where the factory folk live bla with the hurrying throng: hurry! scurry! to loom, to bobbin, to spio dye-shop as to places of worship, men, and women, too, and children, the streets bla, the sky darkens as the eys now belch forth, the g, bang, clatter of the mills ences.
Bridgets clock leaps and shudders on its chair, about to sound its own alarm. Their day, the Bordens fatal day, trembles on the brink of beginning.
Outside, above, in the already burning air, see! the angel of death roosts on the roof-tree.天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》