5 The Burthen of Nineveh
Seeping in red twilight out of the Gulf Stream fog, throbbing brassthroat that howls through the stiff-fingered streets, prying open glazed eyes of skyscrapers, splashing red lead on the girdered thighs of the five bridges, teasing caterwauling tugboats into heat under the toppling smoketrees of the harbor.
Spring puckering our mouths, spring giving us gooseflesh grows gigantic out of the droning of sirens, crashes with enormous scaring din through the halted traffic, between attentive frozen tiptoe blocks.
Mr Densch with the collar of his woolly ulster up round his ears and a big English cap pulled down far over his eyes, walked nervously back and forth on the damp boat deck of the Volendam. He looked out through a drizzly rain at the gray wharfhouses and the waterfront buildings etched against a sky of inconceivable bitterness. A ruined man, a ruined man, he kept whispering to himself. At last the ship’s whistle boomed out for the third time. Mr Densch, his fingers in his ears, stood screened by a lifeboat watching the rift of dirty water between the ship’s side and the wharf widen, widen. The deck trembled under his feet as the screws bit into the current. Gray like a photograph the buildings of Manhattan began sliding by. Below decks the band was playing O Titin-e Titin-e. Red ferryboats, carferries, tugs, sandscows, lumberschooners, tramp steamers drifted between him and the steaming towering city that gathered itself into a pyramid and began to sink mistily into the browngreen water of the bay.
Mr Densch went below to his stateroom. Mrs Densch in a cloche hat hung with a yellow veil was crying quietly with her head on a basket of fruit. ‘Dont Serena,’ he said huskily. ‘Dont… We like Marienbad… We need a rest. Our position isnt so hopeless. I’ll go and send Blackhead a radio… After all it’s his stubbornness and rashness that brought the firm to… to this. That man thinks he’s a king on earth… This’ll… this’ll get under his skin. If curses can kill I’ll be a dead man tomorrow.’ To his surprise he found the gray drawn lines of his face cracking into a smile. Mrs Densch lifted her head and opened her mouth to speak to him, but the tears got the better of her. He looked at himself in the glass, squared his shoulders and adjusted his cap. ‘Well Serena,’ he said with a trace of jauntiness in his voice, ‘this is the end of my business career… I’ll go send that radio.’
Mother’s face swoops down and kisses him; his hands clutch her dress, and she has gone leaving him in the dark, leaving a frail lingering fragrance in the dark that makes him cry. Little Martin lies tossing within the iron bars of his crib. Outside dark, and beyond walls and outside again the horrible great dark of grownup people, rumbling, jiggling, creeping in chunks through the windows, putting fingers through the crack in the door. From outside above the roar of wheels comes a strangling wail clutching his throat. Pyramids of dark piled above him fall crumpling on top of him. He yells, gagging between yells. Nounou walks towards the crib along a saving gangplank of light ‘Dont you be scared… that aint nothin.’ Her black face grins at him, her black hand straightens the covers. ‘Just a fire engine passin… You wouldn’t be sceered of a fire engine.’
Ellen leaned back in the taxi and closed her eyes for a second. Not even the bath and the halfhour’s nap had washed out the fagging memory of the office, the smell of it, the chirruping of typewriters, the endlessly repeated phrases, faces, typewritten sheets. She felt very tired; she must have rings under her eyes. The taxi had stopped. There was a red light in the traffic tower ahead. Fifth Avenue was jammed to the curbs with taxis, limousines, motorbusses. She was late; she had left her watch at home. The minutes hung about her neck leaden as hours. She sat up on the edge of the seat, her fists so tightly clenched that she could feel through her gloves her sharp nails digging into the palms of her hands. At last the taxi jerked forward, there was a gust of exhausts and whir of motors, the clot of traffic began moving up Murray Hill. At a corner she caught sight of a clock. Quarter of eight. The traffic stopped again, the brakes of the taxi shrieked, she was thrown forward on the seat. She leaned back with her eyes closed, the blood throbbing in her temples. All her nerves were sharp steel jangled wires cutting into her. ‘What does it matter?’ she kept asking herself. ‘He’ll wait. I’m in no hurry to see him. Let’s see, how many blocks?… Less than twenty, eighteen.’ It must have been to keep from going crazy people invented numbers. The multiplication table better than Coué as a cure for jangled nerves. Probably that’s what old Peter Stuyvesant thought, or whoever laid the city out in numbers. She was smiling to herself. The taxi had started moving again.
George Baldwin was walking back and forth in the lobby of the hotel, taking short puffs of a cigarette. Now and then he glanced at the clock. His whole body was screwed up taut like a high violin-string. He was hungry and full up with things he wanted to say; he hated waiting for people. When she walked in, cool and silky and smiling, he wanted to go up to her and hit her in the face.
‘George do you realize that it’s only because numbers are so cold and emotionless that we’re not all crazy?’ she said giving him a little pat on the arm.
‘Fortyfive minutes waiting is enough to drive anybody crazy, that’s all I know.’
‘I must explain it. It’s a system. I thought it all up coming up in the taxi… You go in and order anything you like. I’m going to the ladies’ room a minute… And please have me a Martini. I’m dead tonight, just dead.’
‘You poor little thing, of course I will… And dont be long please.’
His knees were weak under him, he felt like melting ice as he went into the gilt ponderously ornamented diningroom. Good lord Baldwin you’re acting like a hobbledehoy of seventeen… after all these years too. Never get anywhere that way… ‘Well Joseph what are you going to give us to eat tonight? I’m hungry… But first you can get Fred to make the best Martini cocktail he ever made in his life.’
‘Très bien monsieur,’ said the longnosed Roumanian waiter and handed him the menu with a flourish.
Ellen stayed a long time looking in the mirror, dabbing a little superfluous powder off her face, trying to make up her mind. She kept winding up a hypothetical dollself and setting it in various positions. Tiny gestures ensued, acted out on various model stages. Suddenly she turned away from the mirror with a shrug of her toowhite shoulders and hurried to the diningroom.
‘Oh George I’m starved, simply starved.’
‘So am I’ he said in a crackling voice. ‘And Elaine I’ve got news for you,’ he went on hurriedly as if he were afraid she’d interrupt him.
‘Cecily has consented to a divorce. We’re going to rush it through quietly in Paris this summer. Now what I want to know is, will you… ?’
She leaned over and patted his hand that grasped the edge of the table. ‘George lets eat our dinner first… We’ve got to be sensible. God knows we’ve messed things up enough in the past both of us… Let’s drink to the crime wave.’ The smooth infinitesimal foam of the cocktail was soothing in her tongue and throat, glowed gradually warmly through her. She looked at him laughing with sparkling eyes. He drank his at a gulp.
‘By gad Elaine,’ he said flaming up helplessly, ‘you’re the most wonderful thing in the world.’
Through dinner she felt a gradual icy coldness stealing through her like novocaine. She had made up her mind. It seemed as if she had set the photograph of herself in her own place, forever frozen into a single gesture. An invisible silk band of bitterness was tightening round her throat, strangling. Beyond the plates, the ivory pink lamp, the broken pieces of bread, his face above the blank shirtfront jerked and nodded; the flush grew on his cheeks; his nose caught the light now on one side, now on the other, his taut lips moved eloquently over his yellow teeth. Ellen felt herself sitting with her ankles crossed, rigid as a porcelain figure under her clothes, everything about her seemed to be growing hard and enameled, the air bluestreaked with cigarettesmoke, was turning to glass. His wooden face of a marionette waggled senselessly in front of her. She shuddered and hunched up her shoulders.