IX (1936 Version: TS 15-1)

—The wind, are these falling buds or leaves or drops of rain? A veined leaf, and dead drifting blossoms like buds.

The children’s rainbowed fountain, a fan like a peacock’s tail, an eighteenth-century day; those lying down like the dead resting for a while in some green niche in Paradise, or in a first circle or no man’s land between two worlds, to forget the horror of a violent death, stir and stretch; and now the leaves, the buds, dropping faster, dropping straight like rain, these buds or ghosts of buds or truly rain; and now the wind quicker, the thunder nearer, the cries of children and the voices more urgent; a pigeon whirs in a silver panic a short frightened parabola; a leaf spins, another spirals, as squirrels scatter; what are these yellow buds like rain or like little flowers, and now surely this is a bud that drops in the dust as the good riven trees yearn into the gloom lit by heliotrope of lightning; and branches nod, the trees nod to each other, there is a rustling of leaves or of water falling on leaves, those sleeping, wake, draw their coats around them: they tramp towards the hard road: the breakers of the town crash, now the surf of the town is about their feet.

But one sits motionless under a tree watching: he knows the storm as the trees and the sea knows it.

Does he know New York too, the city that holds a Paradise in one hand at Central Park and an Inferno in the other at Columbus Avenue?

Far above the girl with the white collar leans under a sunblind that is bellying like the sail of the Lawhill making her easting: below the leaves blow towards a man like an advancing army seen from above, from ten thousand feet …

The blue sunblinds wait that conceal such secrets of summer and as the storm splits forked disaster there is the smell of tender green, of moistness and rain, and of life …

Once, in this park …

There was a lull in the storm: the rain had stopped but the sky was lowering. The river was swift.

Lawhill stood outside the doctor’s office in an anteroom looking out of the window. The corridor near him was deserted. Somehow he couldn’t make up his least they could speak to each other according to the special reality of their existence, they sensed where they were growing, or what they had become, and when their leaves fell, they were aware also that that was what must be, and was right. Now their branches nodded, the nameless trees were nodding to each other and Lawhill could hear a rustling of leaves, or of water falling on leaves. The deepest sleepers were awake, drawing their coats around them. The breakers of the town crashed, soon the surf of the town would be about their feet.

But one man sat motionless under a tree watching, as though he knew the storm as the trees knew it, and Lawhill thought of himself: years and years and years ago. He wondered if he had been such a one, to whom a lost moment of tempest was a lost moment with God. Did this man know New York too, that city which always holds a Paradise in one hand and an inferno in the other?

Far above him a young girl with a white collar was leaning under a blue sunblind that was bellying like a sail; far below the leaves were blowing toward the solitary man like an army seen from a mountain top, advancing on the plain below.

Perhaps some delicious secret waited for him with the young girl behind that blue sunblind; perhaps the solitary man was also a bearer of good news, the only news in the world that could lead him to a new life of strength and freedom. Perhaps, but he would never know.

Then the storm broke in earnest. Lawhill moved over to another window where he could see the river and watched until there was a lull. The rain had stopped but large drops still fell and the sky was lowering. The river was very swift.

The corridor near Lawhill was deserted. Somehow he couldn’t make up his mind to go back to the ward for he had the strange feeling that should he do so he never would be able to leave it again for long. And though escape was equally impossible from this point, his very isolation, the fact that for a precious fifteen minutes he had not been watched, that nobody had seen him, gave him a delicious sense of being already outside, of being free, free to run with the wind if he wished, and as fast, and as far away as possible from the hospital. Yet the bars were there; he couldn’t escape; it was all so hopeless, after all, too, that river down below there, swollen with rain.

Do they throw corpses out of the window, he wondered; at night they must do it, at the hour of the dog, at the count of Monte Cristo … Mad, he thought, I must be mad. I may be crazy but I ain’t no fool.

He pressed his face against the bars, and made a tortured gesticulation with his hands … A fuir, là-bas! But where were the ships, the good ships, with honest cargoes and trembling in every mast, bound for Hong Kong or Iloilo? Such vessels rarely passed, mostly there were only nightmare ships on this stream. Suddenly he saw that the East River could be as delirious and haunted as the minds that brooded over it, it was a mad river with grotesque, mastless steamers and flat barges slipping along like water snakes, a river of railroad boats the shape of army tanks with their askew funnels appearing to have been built on to outriggers, or they were twin-funneled, enclosing carriages, or they were strange half ships coming in in thunder preposterously high out of the water with their naked propellers thrashing like tuna fish and with single masts out of alignment.

This world of the river was one where everything was uncompleted while functioning in degeneration and from which as from the barge the shape of their own shattered or unformed souls was cast back at them. And all complementary factors had been withdrawn from this world! Its half-darkness quivered with the anguish of separation from the real light, just as in his nightmares the tortoise crawled in agony looking for its shell, and nails held nothing together, or one-winged birds dropped exhausted across a maniacal, sunless moon.

Lawhill started as though someone had touched him on the shoulder. Nobody! But Dr. Claggart, his hand on the polished knob of the open door of his office, was watching him from a distance, and with eyes that said plainly: “Get back to the ward!”

Avoiding those eyes Lawhill began to walk along the corridor but had again the curious feeling that he was on a ship. Electric numbers “7,” “11,” “7,” “11,” twinkled like stars on a board before him but the corridor pressed up at his feet as he slopped along in his straw shoes and suddenly it was a hill to climb and then the hospital began to tilt and plunge. He staggered to the side—with sea-hastened steps, he thought—and held on to a banister as a fireman might cling to a samson post, trying to get forward in a gale.

– “7,” “11,” “7,” “11,” Come 7, come 11.

While he was holding the rail he turned completely around and seeing the doctor watching him with his mouth half open had the absurd notion that perhaps Claggart himself had been intoxicated all the time he had been talking, and with this pleasing reflection, straightened himself up, and throwing back his shoulders in the manner of a drunk trying to pass muster on deck under the eye of a captain, also drunk, he walked perfectly erect until out of sight around the corner of the ward.

Once there, both as the bearer of good news and as one temporarily escaped from doom, he felt himself in calmer waters, his heart beat more evenly, the ship rode easily and calmly. The sun had come out and the black corridor with its green rim seemed beautiful to him in the evening under the dust, under the white alabaster lamps and the last stormy light casting its tawny brightness in the reflected steel prison bars at the foot of the far bed where the little old man slept who had used it as a toilet, an old man who was in eternal disgrace because he had once eaten two dinners, and who covered his head save at meal times in a gray blanket and groaned.

The sun went in again and as Lawhill approached, lingeringly now, almost as if in a trance, the room facing the wharves, a presage of disaster was flashed to his already sharply divided mind by another scribble of sudden savagely forked lightning across the window. So quickly did this race down the swaying conductor of his mind and so vivid was the flash he felt a definite sense of communication with it, as though this lightning responded to and knew him and was part of the same substance and lunacy as himself. Thunder shook the place and, trembling himself, he seemed to recall that all the important things that had happened in his life, particularly those relating to women, had occurred in thunder.

Some of the patients were running away from the window, their hands to their ears; some were laughing crazily in the face of it, but Garry and Horowitz were in their usual places, unmoved, though they seemed to be waiting.

Lawhill joined them, but disturbed by the lightning, said nothing immediately to either. At length he clapped a hand on Horowitz’ shoulder.

“You’ll be going to a sanitarium.”

“Did you tell the doctor I was sane?” asked Horowitz.

Lawhill put the other arm around Garry’s shoulder. “And you’re O.K. too, Garry. In fact, we’re all O.K.”

“That’s keen,” Garry said, “do you think I can get out soon? But I don’t care. All I want is to tell stories … I guess you know. I’ve got a story for you now. I’ve been thinking of it all the time you were out. I’ve—but it’s not exactly a story.” His eyes strayed to the old barge lying below them.

“Well, I fell in a barge oncet,” he went on, “and, well, I walked down the road and I went down to the beach and I met two of my friends. We went on this rotten old barge full of mud and sand and a lot of junk. We were playing follow the leader and I got dizzy. I climbed out. I looked all right. I was small. When I got home my mother threw me in the tub and I got some clean clothes on. Yes sir. A few years later the barge fell apart, partly fell apart and partly fell to pieces.

“It was all collapsed,” he added, as thunder rocked the hospital, and rain started to souse down from the eaves. “Grrr, listen to that.”

There was another shock and Lawhill imagined the skyscrapers swaying like trees along Central Park West.

If Horowitz were overjoyed with his news he evidently did not think it decent to show it.

“You shouldn’t ever have been here,” was all he said with a shrug, “you’ll only get worser here, what do they ever want to put you here for?”

Lawhill made no reply. He was watching a grey, destroyer-like coastguard glide past, searching for corpses in the lightning, he thought.

“—when you should be reading the works of Dickens,” Horowitz was saying to Garry, “You should read all the works of Dickens, Garry.”

“I know them all,” Garry said remotely.

“You’ve read them?” they both asked.

“I don’t have to read them, I know them,” Garry replied. “And I know Elengland, too.”

“England, Garry.”

“I can tell you this,” said Garry, “Elengland is big. There are some farms there. I know I might see artists on the hillside. Or cows or sheep grazing in the pasture. I can see them there, the artists, painting pictures of flowers and the different birds and the mountains and lakes and trees. Or you might go to one part where an artist is painting different pictures of ruins.”

“Why are you so fond of ruins?” asked Lawhill.

“Ruins? … Gee, I don’t know. I guess I’m not fond of ruins. But you see that old barge down there. I can tell you about her if you like. Yes sir, I can tell them … in 1913 she was loaded with fine coal, but the rope snapped, she drifted with the current, and most of the coal is all at the bottom now. The rest is buried here and the barge is smashed, broken.”

“What’s that got to do with ruins? Or England? Or artists?”

“And I can see it all. As if it was happening now, isn’t that a miracle? She drifted into the rocks and sank immediately. The front was sticking up and the rest was under the water … It sank deeper and deeper and got more and more rotten. The grass grew into the gravel and the coal and on one side near the powerhouse there was still one part of the barge that didn’t fall in and in three years there will be nothing more, no barge, and when the derrick goes it will smash against the stove and bring up nothing but a load of mud and once the derrick went down and knocked the stove over. Nothing but only coal that still laying there will be left but on the bottom only a few old barrels and a rusty stove.”

Suddenly Horowitz, as thunder again shook the building, banged his fist down on the windowsill.

“You will only get worser here. What are you here for? What’s the matter with your head, Garry. Put something in your stomach otherwise you won’t last it. Look at you! Look at this hospital full of lunatics half starved from hunger, they go crazy—look at them—and they all come clopping to the hospitals.” He pointed to the old man with the grey shawl over his head who was trembling with fright. “Your stomach’s going on the revolution. Wake up, brains! Put something on, stomach! Wake up, you brains! Brains of the world unite! My experience in the hospital is that workers themselves are against us more than the capitalists. I talk too much Bob Ingersoll wisdom. I don’t believe no God, I have too much Bob Ingersoll wisdom, and that’s the reason why police Mcleary wants to lock me up! Jesus Christ! If the workers will wake up and buy brains I won’t need to go to the hospital! Give the patient nicer to eat! Listen, once they pulled three teeth out of me, out of my mouth. That’s the capitalist system! I should have knocked the three teeth out of him.”

“It isn’t only the capitalist system,” said Lawhill, looking out of the window. “Isn’t it the whole world that’s fallen apart? Partly collapsed and partly fallen apart. God help us all.”

There was a flash of lightning, a ship was passing in thunder, a man screamed, “For Christ Jesus’ sake stop the noise! the noise, it’s driving me crazy, it’s driving me nuts!”

“Anyway, I should have had more examination from the doctor,” Horowitz added, “whether I am sane or insane. I might be dead by now. I have high blood pressure and this never was no place for me. These young fellows who say I am in my second childhood should go home and clean their diapers. Whether I go or not—”

There was another lull in this twilight storm and in the silence the rain could be heard hissing in the river. Some of the patients who had been frightened were returning to the room. An oil barge was passing, her tiny side-by-side funnels pillowed by tanks. Following her was a dredger, appearing less like a ship, in Lawhill’s fancy, than some terrestrial visitor, to which a flat barge many fathoms to starboard seemed to be connected in a queer, umbilical way; while after her a Fall River sidewheeler was steaming so close inshore he could read her name: Martha’s Vineyard: New Bedford … New Bedford! He started. Hadn’t he taken such a ship there once with a girl, with, in fact, his wife? Couldn’t it be possible they had passed this way, had steamed by this very hospital? But his thoughts wandered again to Ahab and Pip for some reason, Ahab the monomaniac, and Pip the half-wit who had made the last days of their pursuit of the awful Moby Dick tolerable, that pursuit which also had had its beginnings in New Bedford! Ahab and Pip: Horowitz and Garry. Or was it himself and Garry? Ah, but did not Ahab, by this sort of conjuration, become Rimbaud too, with more in common than monomania and one leg, dying far from home at harvest time? And, by the further casuistry of providence, did not he, Lawhill, become, finally, Garry?

With this thought forming in his mind Lawhill suddenly remembered the name of the sidewheeler that he had taken with his wife.

Providence.

Memories began to return to him, but spastically, like the flashes of lightning. It was as though the storm, which had abated outside for the moment, had taken refuge within him. Recollection tumbled over recollection; cocktails at the San Moritz, the delighted surprise of discovery, after the real ones in the Museum of Art, of the natural Breughels in Central Park; the yellow, musical taxi to Pier 14—or was it seven or eleven?—and all the other taxis, all with lovers in them, all going the same way, all with radios tuned to the same wave length; then the Providence. How pleased they had been because they had a cabin on the top deck! It had been his first day in New York, it was summer and they paced up and down the deck arm in arm. In the evening they had wandered around the ancient lacquered ship, like a vast London hotel with its gilt stairways, and from the muffled corridor they had seen, far below, the firemen, the trimmers of Dante, the eclipsed faces, and the slicebar hurled across the hold. They had heard together, too, and they had understood that pulse of the ship which was the pulse of the world, but which was now only the sound of the powerhouse and the hospital. Yes, what had they not learnt about the world and each other in that cabin so high up in the ship? They had not learnt that with all the beauty of the evening, with all the softness of the night, all the tenderness of the blue morning, that every beat of the engine was taking them nearer to New Bedford, nearer to Melville, nearer to the white whale, nearer to their own destruction.

The thunder started again and now another sidewheeler was approaching, her paddles lashing the water into a seething, creamy foam.

Suddenly, as if they were magnetic to her, or her arrival were a reality so electrified that an anguished chemic desire on the part of the patients to reach her, to touch her before she was gone, was born from the river and the storm, there was a rush to the bars where the gesticulating Negro sailors climbing up within the steel meshes started a roaring almost instantly taken up by everyone in the ward save by the three standing there, which, when others who had been in the corridor joined the former at the windows, soon became an uncontrollable and continuous yell. This bawling was at its height when Lawhill noticed the ship was the Providence herself —

Trembling, he tightened his grip on Garry’s shoulder as if to defend him from this bedlam of noise, which seemed to carry with it a definite but undirected physical menace, but as if also to protect himself from the ship and from the moment. He drew Horowitz closer too, at the same time feeling again that the three of them had become one, that he sought on the one hand to protect his own youth, and either side self-extending and ubiquitous, to be protected on the other by the wisdom and vision of his old age.

The storm was now becoming terrific. The lightning was almost continuous so that the heavens seemed to be full of flaming trees and icebergs. As Lawhill watched, it appeared to him that one iceberg was actually hurling northwards, but becoming poised suddenly for a moment in its own onrush, was shattered by thunder hissing like crashing glass or an avalanche of falling coal. A forked tree of light shot up, then there was the iceberg again, tilting and rushing through the clouds and Lawhill imagined his whole past life crystallized there, illumined with perfect clarity for a moment by this celestial brightness, reclaimed then by dark, and thunder which mingled with the cries of the insane as they cheered the Providence on her way, a cry which growing, coalesced in his brain with the woeful mechanic calamity of the rocking city, with the screaming of brakes, of drunkards, of suicides, of girls tortured in hotels for transients, of people burning to death in vice dens, with the ear-splitting howling of the ambulance clearing the streets in its tumultuous rush through the midst of what men called life, with the pandemonium, it might almost have been, of all the wars all over the world, and with the dreadful sounds even now unsubdued, from the corridors and offices of the hospital itself.

Lawhill remembered now about the animals again and a ship he had been on but nothing about the ship, not its name, only its iron body lying sea-weary against the wharf in perhaps Singapore, and the creatures being swung in in crates by the derricks. They had landed them on the foredeck, stacked them in the forepeak half-demolished for the purpose: elephants, tigers, jaguars, panthers, snakes, all bound for a zoo: all the snakes died, the panthers too, and in the Indian Ocean at night the lions roared, the elephants trumpeted and vomited so that none save the carpenter and the keeper dared to go forward and when they smashed into a hurricane the jaguars wailed in terror like frightened children. No forest had ever plunged so deeply into the long bending winds as that ship, and “Let us out, let us be free,” was the meaning of their wailing during the long, bitter, watches. “Let us be free to suffer like animals”; and Lawhill felt something similar in the cry he now heard. “Let us out, we who suffer like animals, let us be free to suffer like human beings”—

Was it Lenin who had said something like that? But where were Lenin’s words now? And where was Lenin? And where, indeed, would Lenin be, were he alive? Lawhill, fumbling for a cigarette in his pocket, then, remembering where he was, regretting that he had not accepted Claggart’s offer of one, found himself able to ask all these questions, able to understand all this even while feeling that the barriers between himself and life were being stormed by this wailing going up from the passing ship as from his own soul, yet he knew at the same time that this understanding was simply a trap: he knew now that, however convincing the manifestations, he could never go mad, he could only die.

This was all a kind of revolt of the insane, he thought calmly, a revolt in which only a few can have fully understood who their tormentors were: fixed for a moment in posture the scene resembled nothing so much as a reactionary caricature of some incident in a strike, a collective expression of what individually is hysteria, a caricature of an artistic creation; yet they struck against nothing save the bars and might as well have whipped the sea for all they called attention to their plight: to the contrary, their complaining gave only added density to the forces that held them.

Lawhill wondered if his wife and he had jested about this hospital as they passed it all those years ago on the Providence. If they had, what a grin must have split its Moloch’s face! Had the insane surged to the window to watch them sail by: had they climbed on the windowsills like this with their feet wedged in the bars, shouting at them?

Or had they passed unnoticed by them like the Martha’s Vineyard: themselves unnoticed in their love, even the memory of which was now somehow mutilated by this demoniacal laughter?

Now the Providence had passed, but still the insane craned their necks after, shouting even louder, standing on each other’s shoulders.

Lawhill felt a chasm open in his heart. Oh Jesus, he thought, no sorrow can be greater than this, greater than one whose source has passed utterly. He took his hand from Garry’s shoulder but at the same moment two attendants came running up behind them. While the first shouted: “Stop this noise, you crazy fools! Can’t we trust you a minute with our backs turned?” the second pulled Garry round with one hand by the scruff of the neck and with the forefinger of the other pointing at him, uttered the one word: “You.”

“What’s the matter?” Lawhill asked.

“Nothing’s the matter,” the attendant shouted against the noise. “I only know what I’m told and what I read in the newspapers. Come on.”

“Where am I going to?” Garry asked.

“Come on.”

“What the hell is this, though?” Lawhill said.

“You mind your own damn business.”

“What the devil do you mean talking to me like that.”

“You keep clear of this, will you? Now then, come along there!”

“If you do any harm to that kid—”

“I know what they’re going to do, I know it!” Garry screamed.

“Come on there—scram—” the attendant was saying, and then over his shoulder to Lawhill, “You’re to blame for this.”

Garry was yelling now as Lawhill followed them to the door and watched the two of them seesawing down the corridor that had seemed so beautiful before.

Lawhill walked back to the ward. He hardly remembered, now, about the Providence, or noticed that it was quite dark, it might as well have been dark all the time; but he did remark that the collective delirium was breaking up, in spite of the attendants’ protests, into a number of peculiar noises jostling around each individual, each peripheral sound strangely characteristic of the person whose disorder of the kinesthesia it represented, so that his impression was of a number of vaudeville acts going on at once on the same stage; he felt that chasm opening wider in his heart and wished that he too might have his vaudeville act, that he too might go mad. Horowitz came over to him.

“They’re going to put him in another ward so he can’t tell no more stories to you,” he said.

“Spiritual depravity and fair respite,” Lawhill quoted, and paused.

Horowitz pursed his lips in and out. “We can only wait and see … So many things can happen in a lifetime. My father lose his money—that’s one thing … I hike from Berlin to Paris. There’s another.”

“From Berlin to Paris?” Lawhill escaped to both in a panic: but the present squeezed its flabby face against him again.

Horowitz nodded and Lawhill realized that in a curious way the old man also understood the significance of this moment, so that an obscure yet cogent necessity arose, as if they had met at the day and the seat of Judgement, for him to make an account as best he could, to retrace the steps of his life to this encounter at the end.

“I was one little Jew and my father was a bookkeeper. He became rich in Memel, Lithuania. From there he moved to Königsberg and from there to Berlin. In Berlin I served my time as a silversmith. Then I roamed around. I became the Wandering Jew.”

But all the while the old man was speaking, it seemed to be, in a mysterious way, of his, Lawhill’s life: for whose was this story of opportunities lost, of hopes unfulfilled, of roaming on forever only to find one’s place on earth in a madhouse, and perhaps not even there since one was not mad, but his own? And what was this tale of Abraham and Isaac, of Cain and Abel, of a father’s sacrifice, and brotherhood betrayed, so confused and repetitive that one gave up trying to follow it, if not his? And Lawhill saw his own wandering patterned in the dust by the sandals of the old man.

Somewhere Battle was singing: “I was going down Main. I met a Police. He ask my name. I told him my name. It’s Battle, I says, yes sah, Battle. He said he was playin’. And around my arm was a bracelet chain. Yes sah, a bracelet chain.”

“My father lose his money and I hike from Berlin to Paris. In 1870 … A rich woman paid my fare the first time but the second time the Germans went to war. 1870. Anyone who couldn’t speak fluently French was a Prussian. So I walked over the Jura mountains and I walked this from Lausanne, Switzerland, to Geneva that was—”

“De first ah saw was a bowl of peas. De peas was red and de meat was fat. An’ de judge gave me six month just for dat!”

“That evening it was sunset and the French peasants come from work. I had a cane in my hand with a big piece of iron in the end of it and a Frenchman approached me with a scythe and asked me ‘Quelle patrie avez-vous?’ And I said, ‘Je suis Russe.’”

An Italian wandering past muttered: “Nobody has a right to be here, somebody crazy on the head, crazy on the leg, crazy on the stomach—”

“And he understood me that I had said: ‘I am a Prussian.’”

Horowitz went on: “But he said: ‘I want you to have a duel with me, you are my enemy.’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘I take your challenge.’ When he lifted up his stekel to strike me I struck him on the ground with my stick. And he had to let me go. He dropped it on the ground. And he says: ‘Repeat that word what country you belong to.’ And I repeated again: ‘I’m a Russian.’”

“But are you a Russian?” Lawhill’s voice seemed to be coming from two directions at once.

“No. I am just one little Jew.”

Horowitz tapped Lawhill on the sleeve. “Listen … Lithuania was Russia in those days. Besides I would like to die in Russia. I would like to go to a sanitarium but if I cannot do that I would like to go to Russia. Perhaps they will give us some work to do.”

“It’s safer in a sanitarium perhaps.” The words jingled dully.

“We are behind bars now,” said the Jew.

“They will be broken, smashed, as Garry would say, in two, three years, the whole house, the whole world will collapse,” Lawhill said, laughing crazily, as an unexpected vanguard of thunder shook the asylum.

It was at this moment that he saw the man hanging from the noose that dangled from the powerhouse derrick, though the vision faded instantly.

“And this man with the stekel grasped my hand and said: ‘Bien, garçon, you are a brave boy.’ And he took me to a cafe and ordered a dinner with a glass of wine. I walked a little further and I struck a rich miller—”

A three-masted private yacht had come to anchor just outside the wharves and was swinging quickly with the tide. A gold light burned above her polished ladder. The portholes were orange circles, there was the sound of music, girl’s voices, laughter. The radio was playing but the singing died away in the storm, plangently, sinking into the blast, and this unanswerable invitation to another illusory world continued to be extended from the yacht and even the thought of it to surround the hospital like an essence.

“Well, I met him and I went to him and I says: ‘Voulez-vous me donner une verre d’eau.’ And he says: ‘Venez avec moi!’ that means, come with me. And he bought a big bottle of wine and it was the month of January 1870 and it was so hot I sent my overcoat to Berlin.”

“Why, that was before my father was born!”

“Yes, it was the south of France, you see. When I finished the glass of wine that’s the time I got my high blood pressure.”

Though Lawhill was conscious of being amused, of laughing even, he heard no sound. He stared at a sailor tramping slowly forward against the speed of his white motorboat, long beaked oilcan in hand, and a phrase from Moby Dick came to his mind: Hurling from all heavens astern—

Lawhill’s head ached as with the effect of mechanical pressure and he sat down with his elbows on the windowsill, a favorite posture of Garry’s, aware as if by the application of an added weight on his soul of Garry’s steps approaching down the corridor; there was a shade of perplexity in his tone when he asked, knowing that Garry was standing beside him again: “What’s the matter?” a perplexity that already suggested an unnoted intensity and difference in him. Garry, who seemed at this moment to have become adult and suddenly aware of the scorches and scars on all of them, didn’t answer.

“I knew it,” he said at length, “they want to smash our friendship. It is condemned. They don’t want me to tell you anything, no more stories, nothing. Tomorrow they’re going to put me in another ward. All right. Let them try. They won’t break us. The world won’t let anything good be.”

Lawhill could not reply. Something extraordinary was happening to him, he tried to struggle to his feet, to struggle with the words, with whatever it was that was going on, to struggle with this demoniacal force which was—which was changing him, for that was it, he was changing

He was changing into a ship. He felt a wound in his side, his plates buckling, the waters of memory pouring into him, the grey seas of the Western Ocean of the mind stacked swaying above him.

Horowitz was blowing his lips in and out like a fish, silently, deeply subterranean.

Outside, Lawhill could still see the moon reeling through the sky taking refuge from time to time in clouds, as does a man in saloons, but she was never quite hidden from sight. Soon her insane light fell on the wet grass where the hospital lights were now reflected. The grass was very green and the sparrows hopped among little white skulls of clover lying among its narrow blades.

A seaplane was gliding whitely past, and now it was turning; to Lawhill it had the fins and flukes and blunt luminous head of the somnabulistic whale; now it was roaring straight at the window.

With a swift, catastrophic intent it surged towards him.

“Moby Dick!” shrieked Lawhill.

A bell was ringing shockingly somewhere, keys were rattling, and there was the slop-slop-slop of feet in the corridor. Battle was signalling by the window; without purpose or need or hope he signalled at the night, at the approaching seaplane: “A, B, C, D—”

“—to make ‘H’ you do make ‘AX’ and den you make ‘D’ with ‘A’ and that’s ‘H’—No sah!”

Only the vast heliograph of the lightning responded.

There was a furious crash of thunder and simultaneously Lawhill felt the impact of the whale upon his mind. While metamorphosis nudged metamorphosis, a kind of order, still preserved within his consciousness, and enclosing this catastrophe, exploded itself into the age of Horowitz again, and into the youth of Garry, who both now seemed to be spiralling away from him until they were lost, just as the seaplane was actually tilting away, swaying up to the smashed sky. But while that part of him only a moment before in possession of the whole, the ship, was turning over with disunion of hull and masts uprooted falling across her decks, another faction of his soul relative to the ship but aware of these fantasies and simultaneities as it were from above, knew him to be screaming against the renewed thunder and saw the attendants closing in on him, yet saw him too, as the whale seethed away northwards like the disembodied shape of the very act of darkness itself, passing beyond the asylum walls melting like wax, and following in its wake, sailing on beyond the cold coast of the houses and the factory chimneys waving at him their evanescent faith in the future, perceived him, knowing him not only to have remembered all that had been so mercifully forgotten, but also to be now the possessor of an even more terrible knowledge, that this was not the ultimate darkness, nor darkness falling over his mind forever, but only his spiritual annihilation, from which his body, whose release was even now presaged, would be delivered to complete, in its own time, the outward and physical event of death.

“Well …”

Dr. Claggart was standing in the ward.

“I was dizzy,” Mr. Horowitz said to no one in particular, “I lay down, ’tis not the gutter, ’tis like a trench here where I took a schnooze. I had a comrade with me, he was a German and afraid to go farther. He was with me this time and he drank the wine with me …”

Dr. Claggart sauntered over to the window, his hands in his pockets; there he straightened himself and, avoiding Battle, who was still signalling, with an effort threw open the sash behind the bars.

“The storm seems to be over.”

“Time for dat ol’ lollipop?”

“Not now, Battle.”

“You gonna hippertize me, Doc? Doggone, I gonna hippertize you fo’ sho’— ”

“No, just get on with your signalling.”

The doctor, so weary that he too could not stop himself swaying, stood at the window for a minute, smelling the green and freshness that came through the window, feeling the big dry wind in his face with gratitude. His day’s work was over, time for him to take a look at things as they were or were not, and he noted with pleasure the fluctuant sable pools on the wharves, the old barge, and the scattered wild steam rising from the gratings on the road by the powerhouse. He thought he had never noticed before just how sleek the wharf was after rain, sleek as a seal, nor how lovely those concertinas were, of scarlet and green and orange light, playing below its depths. Down there was his car too, he thought, which, at the turn of a key, would be ready to take him into the outer world, that outer world within the ravaged psyche of God, which must be still so very young.

He moved over to Garry, who had been crying, and was looking down at the grass, bright beneath the hospital lights.

“Well …”

Dr. Claggart placed one hand on his shoulder in a caressing fashion.

“It only looks like spring, Doctor Claggart,” Garry said slowly, “and it’s summer. It takes such a long time to grow. The grass looks as though it’s only in spring when the grass is just sprouting up, it’s so small, and the clover’s growing slow, the dandelions are not out quite, but they will be, yes sir, and look, there’s a path running through the little grass hill. It only looks like spring, that’s all.”

X (1939 Version: TS 15-4)

Once more a drunkard paused outside the City Hospital —

Sigbjørn Lawhill had not been cured of anything, but he had no more brainstorms, he no longer trembled all over: since he was a public charge there was no point in keeping him. Now, like a salt grey prop, he could look after himself.He had said goodbye to one person only: Dr. Claggart, who lent him ten dollars. Once more, with a dithering crack, the hospital door had shut behind him.

Outside, he felt no sense of release, only inquietude. He kept looking back with a sort of longing at the building that had been his home for the last months. Now he had no home. As if to make up his mind what to do, he stopped at a little store which sold foreign postage stamps.

Here he bought a packet of stamps with little reproductions of tigers on them from the Straits Settlements, and elephants from India: a Negro climbed a tree of a Senegalese variety, there was a duck-billed platypus from Australia, another, more terrible sort of tiger, from Obangui-Tchari-Tchad.

He had thought of sending these up to Garry but instead he pocketed them himself with a queer, eclipsed look.

As he approached the center of the city he began to hear strange noises, the faces of the patients were swarming about him, once he jumped nervously, thinking his wife was just behind him. The face of Battle, but grinning hideously, swooped up at him. Once he thought he saw his mother and father curtseying down the street with pained, terrified looks. He ran after them a little distance, but they turned mysteriously into two little Indians.

After a little hesitation, he threw away the bottle of whiskey he had. This, together with Moby Dick, his little money and his clothes, had been, simply and without any irony, returned to him by the janitor as his property. “You won’t be needing that any more I suppose,” the janitor had said. “Thanks,” Lawhill had replied, “I’ll throw it away myself.”

So he threw it away now, into the ash can.

Then he went back and got it.

Passing deliberately the site of Melville’s house—Zimmerman, carpenter—he wagged his head to and fro like an old man. There’s a riddle for you, he said to his reflection in the shop window, solve that one, you Ethan Brand of the Bronx, you Beowulf of the Bowery.

He entered a tiny church and looked about him. Round the walls were pictured the stages of the cross. In the printing above him, Christ was being offered a glass of wine, and the thought of this sent the blood coursing through his veins. He stood for a while in meditation. There was only one other person there, a woman in black, kneeling. Ah, how much suffering there was in the world: was not she suffering, just as he? But since she was suffering so much, and the church was empty, besides which he had Christ’s gesture itself for precedent—here was his opportunity. With a guilty, flurried motion he took a long draught of drink, then hurried out with a fatuous smile of triumph.

He was elated now, feeling the throat-numbing fire of the whiskey, but he shunned the lovers walking past in the wind, swinging tennis rackets. An idiotic verse occurred to him: “And how the brown ones do and how the blue ones are,” and he kept time with this jingle until he reached the B.M.T.

The roar of the subway, which was a kind of hell, he thought, seemed to be trying to communicate something to him. First it said ‘womb’ then ‘tomb.’ Then it said both in succession, very rapidly, over and over again.

Outside, under the El he paused in the dappled sunlight swept by enormous shadows. Here he took another drink. This was like a forest: out of the forest had grown the church, from the church, the ship. So he had learned: but soon they would scrap the El, and then there would be nothing at all: no ship, no church, no forest, no shadows, no learning, nothing. It would all be collapsed, as Garry would have said.

Stepping out of the sunlight he turned unconsciously towards the waterfront. There was a smell of ropes here, of seafaring, and strange merchandise, a smell he knew well, but which hurt, like the smell of women’s furs in the rain. He had heard of someone saying of this place: Here, I fell down the funnel of the world.

His footsteps took him to the sailor’s tavern he knew, a bad spot. He ordered a whiskey, sat down in a corner and, for something to do, opened Moby Dick. Call me Ishmael, he read. He shut the book. Why not call me Jonah? Ah, and none shall affright thee asleep in the arms of the slow swinging deep. He went to the toilet and leaned for awhile against the door, a burden of anguish on his soul so heavy he could not move.

He finished the bottle and, looking around for somewhere to put it, noticed an obscene sketch of a girl, with lips like lobes, on the wall. For some reason, suddenly enraged, he hurled the bottle against this drawing, and in the instant he drew back to escape the fragments of glass, an atrocious vision of Garry flashed across his consciousness.

Returning to the saloon he picked out a secluded place to sit, where they brought his whiskey.

But, feeling he was being watched there, he moved later, drink in hand, to the obscurest corner of the bar, where, curled up like an embryo in the womb which had afforded him his only peace on earth, Sigbjørn Lawhill could not be seen at all.

– Vancouver.

The End.