CHAPTER VII

1

By slow and laborious stages the symphony that Lewis Orling was working on progressed. Though it was difficult work and baffled him completely at times, he felt it shaping under his hand, he became aware of its meaning. And this was the allegory of the first movement...

There were, first, four notes of a seeking nature ... four notes informed with a profound question, that once stated was asked again, in the endless repetition of the theme, in its intricate weaving about. Yet what was this question and what was it seeking? Who was it that asked? It was the question of an exile, of someone longing for a place once known, yet not for any country in the world or for anything that the world could give. It was the question of a soul smitten with memory and knowing itself for lost ... the memory of its childhood and the knowledge that it was alone and lost in a strange world. For the world is strange to everyone, and everyone is exiled in it ... because in childhood each soul has lived its own civilization, one that was never before known on the earth ... because each childhood that has ever been lived was a different civilization ... and when the memory of it returns, the soul knows itself for lost, the only survivor in a strange world. So the four notes were seeking, turning despairingly on themselves, running here and there with querulous hope ... repeating their question over and over with terrible insistence. But now, instead of one clear instrument asking the question each time, there came an interplay of the instruments, and the question became louder and more insistent, until it shouted with a frenzy of all the instruments. And now it was no longer the voice of one soul, but whole nations seeking, crying out ceaselessly on their past with one despairing voice. The voice of an army trapped in the mountains ... they look up to the distant sky and back on the way they have come, and know themselves caught in a despairing pass...

These were the things that Lewis heard in his music, that seemed to speak from it. And in moments when he heard this, he heard also an overtone ... the sound of multitudes clapping, a vast applause for him because he had said these things. Then his breath would come more quickly, he would feel his body tremble with eagerness to finish it. And wonder filled him, that, sitting alone in his room and with no other means than his pencil and the paper ruled with the staff, he could make such things known. It did not yet occur to him that because of the very simplicity of it, there might be some betrayal here, some form of self-deception.

Meanwhile he was hardly aware of Ruth. He did not seem to see her, or rather he saw her only in a curious oblique way. When she was in the same room with him, he was oblivious to her presence, as if all the senses by which he might perceive her had suddenly gone blind. And yet when he happened to think of her, or when he saw anything that suggested her, his heart would begin to beat violently, and then he himself did not know whether it beat with love or hatred. Though often he questioned it, this oblique way of seeing her remained a mystery to him ... a transference that kept its secret, too obscure and cunning to reveal its meaning. Yet one day, catching sight of her unexpectedly, he was surprised to see how well she was looking, how well her advancing pregnancy agreed with her. He pretended now that the impulse which had drawn him to her that night was only curiosity to see her pregnant, a desire to show his power over her. He tried to forget his moment of panic when she returned ill from her flight, and the feeling of guilt in his heart, which he had sought to expiate by the most immediate means. He did not think of their child. The reality of her pregnancy did not exist for him, except as a symbol of his power.

And it was true that Ruth seemed happier than she had ever been before. Often now as she went about her work she hummed to herself, with lips tightly shut and thoughtful face. It was a weird and toneless humming, yet there was about it an intense gaiety. In those days too she was very much out-of-doors, lying on the sparse grass in back of the house, feeling the sun penetrate her flesh, and the hard earth beneath her body ... giving herself to the sun and wind, that touched her without passion. Then her brain passed into a coma, its placidity was almost a trance, in which the power to think, the power to use words left her. But there was meanwhile the profound thinking of her body, and she arose each time with a feeling of renewed contentment. It was also part of her ritual each day, whenever Lewis was out, to take the book of music that he worked on from his desk, and to sit down near the window, holding it on her lap. She would try to decipher the notes; with her finger she would count off the intervals on the staff and then look up thoughtfully, as if singing it in her mind. And one time when she was through with this, she closed the book and tore it in half, then laid the two halves together and tore them, and continued with it until the scraps in her hands were too thick to be torn together, and she had to take them separately. This she had done automatically, with no more sense of what she did than if she had been reading an unimportant letter, intending to tear it up at the end as a matter of course, and tearing it with her mind already on other things. She disposed of the scraps and sat down at the window to wait, feeling there would have to be some explanation ... but feeling also impatient because so simple and obvious a matter should require explanation ... as if she were waiting for a child who was going to be unreasonable for the loss of some casual toy.

But Lewis did not return until very late, and it was not until the next day, when she was clearing the dishes away from their supper that he came into the kitchen and signalled to her mysteriously, and she followed him back to his room.

"Where is it..." he asked.

She leaned in the doorway watching him. "Where is what?" There was in her voice the emphasis of complete bewilderment.

"Where is the book that was here?" Lewis repeated, his words sounding slightly breathless, his hand sweeping through the pigeon-hole as if the thing he looked for might materialize there.

"I sent it away," she said slowly.

"Where did you send it?"

Ruth came in and sat down, and considered her answer for a long time. "Why, I asked Levine where it could be sent ... that time he was here. He told me someone to send it to. Because," she added, lifting her eyes to him with their expression of innocent wonder, "you wanted that, didn't you?"

He looked at her and moved towards her with calm precision, the threat of an attack in his deliberate approach. But near her he stopped and put his hand to his forehead as if recalling himself. Against the unnatural pallor of his face his hand showed dark and grotesque. He tried to speak, but there was only an insane sucking motion of his lips. "Why did you do that?" he asked at last.

Ruth made a slight movement of impatience. "I've told you, haven't I?"

"Why did you do that?" he repeated querulously, and then, coming close to her, he lowered his voice to a whisper and thrust his face into hers. "You must get it back..."

She leaned back to escape the nearness of his face, and looked up at him from under her lowered-eyelids, half smiling. "Why should you want it back?"

"You must get it back," he repeated weakly.

"But why ... Tell me why you want it back..."

He did not answer, and suddenly, with unexpected agility, she slipped from him and went to the door. Lewis made as if to call to her, but instead there was only that insane sucking motion of his lips. The words were wrung from him, a strident harshness in his voice. "Because it's no good..."

She turned then, smiling to him from the doorway. "Why, then, so much the better," she said with cheerful finality. But Lewis followed her and resumed his questioning ... his voice weak and petulant now, his face twisted into an abstracted frown.

"To whom did you send it?"

"I forget ... I forget..."

"You must get it back..."

"I can't, I tell you ... not yet." She gathered up the table-cloth with angry swiftness, and shook it out on the floor. "Because I tore it up," she added, in a voice deliberately casual. Lewis stared at the crumbs that scattered from the cloth, and waited until they ceased rolling and lay still in a haphazard pattern on the floor before he spoke again. "You see," he said patiently, watching her fold the cloth, "they will laugh at me."

It struck her that there was something stupid in the way he repeated this, and she motioned angrily with her arm to be free of him. But he caught hold of her elbow and she had to stand there, a little in front of him, holding the table-cloth ceremonially in her hand, and feeling his words breathed on her cheek. A vivid flash of their position came before her, and she burst out laughing. The sound seemed to awaken Lewis from his trance, and he looked at her ... his expression changing slowly from its abstracted frown to one of grave wonder.

* * * * * * *

Lewis went back to his room. In the short transit between the kitchen and his room he had a strange duality of vision, seeing himself walking through the narrow hallway, entering the room and going to the window ... seeing an aura of his body moving with him in whatever he did, as when the finger is pressed to the eyeball, and each thing appears with double reflection. Standing at the window, he saw that it was raining, and he noted that everything was glistening wet ... the boards in the fence, and the trees and every leaf of the trees. And this fact, simple and irrefutable, that when it rained nothing that was exposed could escape from becoming wet, seemed to be revealed to him for the first time. He saw the drops of water on the pane, how each drop was suspended on a fine thread of rain, and he saw that some of the drops rolled all the way down, and others stopped midway and others were arrested near the top. For a long time he studied this, trying to discover some law that determined it; but wearying of this he went back to the desk and put his hand once more into the pigeon-hole, sweeping it with his fingers as if he was not certain that it was empty...

Meanwhile he was conscious of a feeling of wonder. He was waiting for something ... he was waiting for something to snap within him. And yet it seemed as if this first moment of calm was not to end after all ... it was stretching itself infinitely, and he was watching it, a little breathless and surprised, as if it was a conjuror's trick. Or was this calm, he asked himself, the end of the whirling, that moment he had foreseen when the motion of his mind would slacken ... and all things that had been held in place by the whirling fly apart? But how, then, if this had happened, could he reason about it ... how could he be aware of it? Or was there something else here ... something more terrible than madness that had come to him? Was there a profound confession in his calm ... an admission that he had failed in his work ... and was this his relief at its being destroyed? But though he felt these questions vaguely, he did not yet dare the answers. Best not to be sitting alone now and thinking ... best to bestir himself, he said, to find some diversion that would tide him over this bewildering moment...