Judd tells her how he searched all last spring. And then, one day, he recognized the warbler’s call.
“But you had never heard it before?”
“When I heard it, I knew it.”
“That must be such a wonderful feeling,” Ruth says, “to be the discoverer, to be the first.”
“I’d like to be the first with you,” he remarks, with the expected double meaning. Boys feel they have to say things like that, Ruth knows, and momentarily it even gives her a sunny sensation that Judd has made a silly remark, like an ordinary boy. She feels a surge of sureness – something good is happening – and she gives him her hand so he may pull her up a steep dune. Everyone likes being “different”, but with Judd it is such a terrible passion. Like the way he has to brag about the different courses he takes at school, how he is the only student in that course in Umbrian dialect. And here, his pleasure seems to have been not so much in what he discovered but in having been alone to prove others were mistaken.
He drops her hand and hurries ahead. There is a dip between dunes, an area of stunted bushes, forming clusters in the sand. She comes alongside him and stands still, as he is standing.
“Oh, it’s so wonderful here,” Ruth says. “The sand is untouched.” It looks as if no one in the whole world had ever been here before.
He moves a few steps, and she moves, but then Judd makes a halting gesture with his hand, and Ruth freezes, her arm arrested gracefully. Judd listens. There are a few calls. Not the warbler. “Hear anything?” he asks.
“I was afraid to breathe,” she says softly.
“You can breathe,” he says.
“Doesn’t it frighten them to hear people talk?”
“You can talk. Just naturally, so the voices fit in.”
“I think I never listened to nature before,” Ruth says. “I mean, just to the air. It’s as though the sky itself had a sound, not quite a sound, but-”
“I know,” Judd says. And he is startled, at a feeling as of anguish rising up in himself.
He leads her farther, over several dunes, until they are well away from where any beachgoers might wander. Then he slips down on the sand, nesting down behind some shrubs. She settles herself beside him, her legs neatly folded. “Is this where you found your bird!” she asks.
Judd draws out his wallet to show her the picture of the warbler perched on his hand, feeding. This is the same picture that his father has enlarged to keep on his desk at the office. Judd tells himself that he has not forgotten his purpose in coming, and the self-wager he made over the call of the bird.
Then they listen for calls. She sits alert, listening. “A mating call,” he remarks. He focuses the field glasses, and directs her to a low distant branch, the birds flickering around it, alighting, circling, alighting. A curl of her hair moves against his cheek.
“This is what you really love, isn’t it!” Ruth says.
Judd doesn’t reply. He feels a choking rush of conflicting emotions; he feels invaded by her, and he turns against this a scorn for her, for her female sentimentality. And yet the same sense of anguish has returned, as though her voice has touched upon some unbearably sensitive mechanism within him.
“I can always do this,” he says.
He puts the glasses to her eyes. After a moment Ruth remarks, “It makes you wonder if we ourselves might be watched, like this, by superior beings.”
This breaks the spell, he tells himself. And he tells her she might just as well ask if the birds are speculating about being watched by human gods.
“Why not?” she says. “Last night you were arguing that birds have intelligence and can think.”
“Then perhaps we exist only in the minds of the birds,” he says.
Ruth smiles. “Philosophy 3,” she says. “Berkeley.”
“Well, why not?” he persists, irritated. “What proof is there of anything else? If God exists, it is because we created him in our minds. And if man can conceive of God, then God is less than man – he is merely a conception in man’s consciousness. Isn’t that right?”
“I know it’s logical,” she says softly, “but it seems so conceited. According to that idea, everyone is his own God.”
“Why not?” he demands again. She is once more merely the female, refusing to recognize logic! Can’t she see that a person, a consciousness, can be sure only of itself alone? A flood of ideas rushes through his mind – the “God is dead” of Nictzsche – but it is no use explaining to her. Judd sees the archaic bearded gods, the Jehovah – all those gods that little men had invented to fill up their areas of fear. Even his father doesn’t have the nerve to swing out alone into the universe, to admit God is dead. No. He still sends cheques to the Sinai Temple.
Ruth seems somehow to have followed part of his thought. “I thought you were an atheist,” she says. “Are your folks atheists, too?”
It angers him that she has touched on his folks. What should that have to do with his beliefs? “My father still adheres to vestiges of Jewish superstition,” he declares. “He still belongs to a temple.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters, Judd?” she asks.
He feels even more resentful; she has diverted him from the main discussion. “I have two older brothers,” he mutters. “But they’re just Babbitts.”
Looking up at the sky, Ruth tells him, “My folks are agnostics. I think I am too.” Then, with almost an apologetic note: “Oh, Judd, sometimes the world seems so beautiful, like here, don’t you feel that things have to be good?”
“Good?”
Her warm throaty laugh acknowledges that sophisticated people don’t speak of such sentimental concepts. Oh, she remembers from last night. His philosophy. There is no such thing as good or evil. Things just are.
“What about the beauty in evil?” he challenges. “What about Baudelaire?”
Ruth says, “Of course, there is a deeper kind of experience, as in Dostoevski, an evil that has good in it too.”
“No! There is only experience itself!” Judd insists. And he feels he is almost ready now for his intention. He feels that somehow she has revealed herself, she is really from the other side, from the enemies of his own kind. He guides the conversation now to the Medici, to Aretino, to the rare book he wants to translate, listing all the forms of perversion.
“Are you trying to excite me?” Ruth asks.
“Why not? I’ve got you alone here.”
“Yes.” She is a trifle breathy. Then she tries to return to the lighter tone, impersonal. “You men! For all we intellectualize about it, the double standard is still in force. Men want women to be pure, don’t they?” And then, with a sudden burst, “Oh, darn, Judd, sometimes I think the whole question is silly, and what am I waiting for, and I just wish something would happen to me so I would get rid of the whole question.”
“It’s well known,” he says, “that every woman really wants to be raped.”
“Oh, don’t talk like a callow youth with a line,” Ruth answers.
“Well, you invited it,” he snaps, beginning to feel the necessary anger toward her.
“It’s not really like that,” she says. “I think what every woman dreams of is more like a dream I used to have as a little girl, that the great lover is going to climb through the window, and then something wonderful will happen.”
She continues, appealingly, and it is anguish for me to imagine her saying this to Judd, for this is a fantasy Ruth once confided, so intimately, to me. “When I was a little girl, we used to live in a downstairs flat where there were bars on the windows, and I used to imagine that was why the bars were there, but that somehow my Lochinvar would come in, even through the bars. It used to give me kind of nightmares, but I knew I wanted to have those nightmares.”
He moves so that the whole length of their bodies touch, as they lie side by side in the sand. She turns her face to him, like on a bed, Judd thinks. “Please don’t – you know – get excited,” Ruth says.