To move upward like this, surrounded by one’s own speech, and continuously more closely surrounded by one’s own body, the hand heavy on the heart, the heart beating insistently in the ear, that which a moment ago was the chime of a dream become the rhythm of the pulse, the distorted faces and filaments of the dream becoming only the fluttering defense of the eyelashes against the square of light from the window — all the somatic disturbances, as of cramped elbow and bent knee and cold hand and stifled nostril, which were a moment since so marvelously translated into wastes of snow or ugly corners of rock or difficult escapes from social awkwardness, now again assuming the simple physical reality, against which the dream had fought, as it were, a rear-guard action — to say again, after all this obscure welter of images and spaces, this kaleidoscope of times, “here,” “now,” “time,” “I”—I that was there, twisted, twisted into that strange shape, am here again, but with a queer difference—
The confusion fell slowly away, in ebbing rings of sound, he looked more firmly at the window, putting one hand up to touch the brass knob at the head of the bed above him, he looked and listened, and knew that the sound was the bell of Memorial Hall. How many strokes he had missed, or heard only in his sleep, he couldn’t know, but he counted four. Four. Not in the morning, it was almost that when he had fallen asleep. It must be five or six in the afternoon. The light from the square of window at the foot of the bed was that of winter twilight, and lamplight, mixed — cold natural gray tinged with artificial orange: and something in it, too, suggested the pale reflections of snow. Thursday. Another day gone, soundlessly gone, an agony got through without pain, as if he had been anaesthetized. What a good thing. And to wake up, or come to, comparatively refreshed, comparatively calm! But how refreshed? He explored dry lips with his tongue, tasted the salt, opened and shut his mouth experimentally, and found himself thirsty. Turning his head from side to side on the pillow, he felt no headache, or only a very slight one, at the base of the skull. He looked at his watch. Seven o’clock.
But it was difficult to get up, if one didn’t know what one got up for. Or at such an hour, so dislocated, in such a place, after such a series of nights, with so much of oneself gone, so much of one’s secret gone. Idiot! You have confessed: your virtue is lost. Only the reticent man retains his virtue. But was virtue precisely the word? Or if not, what was it? He tried to remember the details: Michelangelo, the sea, Melville, the Gurnett, the secret of intimacy — intimate secrets. Sleep was better, or perhaps laughter.
He laughed lightly, almost gaily, but as if without meaning, and turned his head toward the door that led to Bill’s study; then cut the laugh short and said “Bill.” There was no answer. He heard the study clock ticking. He said it again, and listened again, and still getting no answer clasped his hands under his head. So it all came to this. After all the agony, all the confusion, all the death, one came to this. One awoke on a strange bed, at twilight, and found that suddenly everything was — peace. No longer a need to run, to hurry, to evade, to escape. No problems to solve. No people to avoid. No single person to hate. Except perhaps oneself. And why bother to hate oneself? Why bother? This curious amiable little collocation of wishes and repugnances — but more amiable than hateful — decidedly more amiable — with his hands clasped under his head and a fixed small smile — and the sounds of the Memorial Hall bell agreeably in his ear — why hate him? Or had it been the Unitarian Church. No, it was Memorial Hall. But was it still snowing?
He groaned, and heaved himself off the bed, and went to the window, which was six inches open at the bottom — that must have been done by Bill. A soft current of rainwashed air flowed in coolly over the sill, it was raining a little, and when he looked down at the street lamps and the College Yard he saw that most of the snow was gone. The slope of the hill towards the Union was white, but a white soddened and darkened; the street was cleared; only at the sides were the piled and hardened drifts. And the sound of the snow shovels, scraping the rain-loosened snow — the raucous scraping and chopping, the ringing of steel on stone—
The face that looked back at him, from the lamplit bathroom mirror, was pale, the cheeks pale and a little sunken, but it faced him steadily and calmly, and the eye was not as bloodshot as he might have expected. Nor did the hands, which supported him on the cold marble, tremble, though he felt weak. You, Andrew Cather — old One-eye Cather. You in the flesh again, redivivus; you emaciated and with a hangover; but with that soft-clear sort of hangover which a fried egg and a stiff whisky would put right. Clear-headed, amused, detached — and with a queer deep historical sense. Wash your face in cold water. Dip your face in the cold green basin of water. Your hair too. The time-worn temples. And the three-days’ growth of brown stubble, so long as to be getting soft. And shave, with Bill’s dirty little brush and rusty safety razor. The little ridged clots of soaped hair, floating testimonially in the water, the dirt-streaked water. And a borrowed collar from Bill’s bureau.
But where was it all gone, where was all the tumult gone? Into what remote sunset sound, what slow and distant and delicious thunder of crumbling, as of a world lost in entire peacefulness?
He switched on the light in the silent study, and found that the chaos had been once more reduced to order; the empty bottles had been removed; a new fire of white birch logs had been laid neatly in the brown brick fireplace; the cigarette ends were gone from the ashes and the ash stand. A fresh bottle of whisky stood on the brass tray, and on the table was a folded note, over which lay a small key and a pink ticket. Sanders Theater. Of course, the symphony concert tonight. From Bill. And the small bright key. “Andy. Going to Portland for a few days. Use the ticket if you like. Also my car, at the Church Street garage. Why not go off and think it over quietly, if you can — first telling Bertha, please! Not a bad idea. I suggest Duxbury. Were you saying something about a pig when I fell asleep. Bill.”
The crucified pig, of course! He touched his smoothed chin and smiled, recollecting; feeling again the drunken glass in his hand, the precise torrent of eloquence in his mouth, the spate of ideas and images. Had it been absurd. Had it been as logical as it had seemed. Had he been as wonderfully in control of it as he had thought. He went to the window and looked across at the lights in the Widener Library and Boylston Hall, watched the dark figures going and coming through the gate to the Yard, figures in raincoats, figures hurrying in the soft rain. All the Smiths and Joneses of the world, accumulating knowledge, the ransackers of others’ words, the compilers and digesters. Those who knew nothing, and those who knew a little, and those to whom life would painfully teach more. Were they jealous. Did they betray, or had they been betrayed. Were they sex-ridden, was sex a monster for them, a nightmare, was all this busy come-and-go a mere flight, a disguise, a pretense, a raincoat surface which concealed—
Concealed what.
The slow pang, recapitulative, rose in the darkness of his thought, lazily, languidly, as with the perishing last little energy of an exploding rocket, undecided at the last whether it should be propelled further or fall in a broken and slow dishevelment of fire-streaked pain. Bertha. Bertha and Tom. Yes. This deep violation, which was now past, this blood which was now shed and lost. This wound which was now beginning to be a scar. The inevitable, and God-to-be-thanked-for, cicatrix; the acceptance — but was it cowardly or was it merely wisdom — the acceptance of all of life as a scar. The pig, not crucified, perhaps, after all, but merely cicatrized. Circumscribed. But we mustn’t be misunderstood—! Like that unfortunate fellow in the hospital; who said—“circumcised — that’s what I meant!”