Soon after this Ralph Neville discovered the little shooting gallery, presided over by the female clownface, where the clay ducks jerked on the leather stream, and the kewpies and the chocolates gathered flies. Ralph Neville began to jingle the coins in his pocket, and to gather his audience excitedly, for what febrile exhibition he could not quite suggest, but it had to take place, some primitive, dimly apprehended tail-spreading by the red cock.
‘Come on, Paul, Huntly,’ Ralph called.
His neck was bursting in his collar, rich red. His hands gathered them in, and his eyes, watery blue from many bars.
The clowness yawned, preening, out of her white cloud, saying it was sixpence a pot, and high-class prizes for the winners, kewpie dolls for the ladies, wristlet watches, and boxes of lovely chocs.
Huntly, Paul, and Ralph took the little toy rifles to shoot at the jerking clay ducks, jerking on their leather stream to bob behind a painted waterfall. But Elsa and Marion were bored. They stroked their expensive clothes. With their beautiful-smelling useless fingers they smoothed their pasted lips. And all the time the emotional, hysterical, canvas-tearing voice of the little toy rifles as the men missed the clay ducks.
‘You men wouldn’t earn your living as cowboys,’ Marion said.
The clowness dusted a kewpie. She was a cloud, but fleshy, big, white, smelling of warm flesh and the hot flinty barrels of the rifles she handed back.
‘Ladies care to try their luck?’ the clowness asked. ‘Come on, girls, show the gents how.’
‘No, thank you!’ Elsa laughed. Now she had begun to be annoyed. She bit her purple upper lip.
‘I shall try,’ Theodora said.
‘Have you been hiding your talents, Theodora?’ Marion asked.
But Theodora took the rifle, closing her eyes to the glare. She stood already in the canvas landscape against which the ducks jerked, her canvas arms animated by some emotion that was scarcely hers. Because the canvas moments will come to life of their own accord, whether it is watching the water flow beneath a bridge, or listening to hands strike music out of wood. The Man who was Given his Dinner, and Moraïtis, for some, had already shown her this. Now she stood in the smell of flint and powdered flesh, from which the world of Huntly Clarkson had receded, and she took aim at the clay heads of the jerking ducks. She took aim, and the dead, white, discarded moment fell shattered, the duck bobbed headless.
‘Good for Theodora,’ Ralph said.
They all gathered, watched, spoke, but they were speaking now at a door that had closed tight, leaving them embarrassed and surprised. They did not know what any of this might signify. They watched the clay ducks shatter each time Theodora fired, and it was as if each time a secret life was shattered, of which they had not been aware, and probably never would have, but they resented the possibility removed. It was something mysterious, shameful, and grotesque. What can we say now? they felt.
‘The lady appears to be a crack shot,’ the clowness said. ‘Care for a kewpie, dear? Or chocs?’
But Theodora did not hear. Huntly Clarkson’s face was smiling, but grey.
‘Let us go on somewhere else,’ Theodora said.
They walked over the grass that feet had trampled dead green. At Meroã also, she remembered, the grass was dead, whether among the tussocks on the flat or along the flanks of the black volcanic hills; and she remembered, too, the swift moment of the hawk, when her eye had not quivered. It is curious, she felt, and now, that my flesh does not flap. She was quite distinct. She was as taut as leather, or even bronze. And somewhere behind, the others trailed in uneasy silences of best clothes. Huntly, who walked almost beside her, had become big and soft, with a band of sweat beginning to show through the broad band round his smart grey hat. An abject and sorry deference had begun to make Huntly soft. He was all acceptance, like a big grey emasculated cat, waiting to accept the saucer of milk that would or would not be given. Only Huntly had begun to know that it would not. In the circumstances, or any way at the moment, you could not say that he was sad, because it had to be like this, from the beginning. Behind them the others walked, half knowing, in their silence, ever since Theodora had shot the clay heads off the ducks, that she was separated from them for ever by something that their smooth minds would not grope towards, preferring sofas to a hard bench.
Only some way farther on Huntly turned to Theodora and said, ‘You realize we forgot to collect your prize?’
She looked at him and regretted his smile. It was like the last smile of someone on a railway platform, to whom one should have spoken while there was still time.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I realized.’
So they walked on, and later in the evening they went out of the gates.
‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ asked Mrs Goodman, half in fear.
‘Yes,’ said Theodora. ‘I had a mild success at a shooting range.’
Mrs Goodman turned her face, as if she were hiding a scar, and her breath some quick stab. She hated her daughter painfully. She hated her feet, which had always seemed to move over the earth without touching, and the ridiculous rifle she had carried, which still blackened her brown hands.
‘In front of all those people?’ Mrs Goodman said.
‘Why ever not? They applauded me,’ said Theodora dryly. ‘I won a kewpie in a feather skirt.’
Mrs Goodman stared at one of her rings that she had never seen before.
‘You must have looked a sight,’ said Mrs Goodman, ‘carrying a vulgar doll through the crowd.’
In her hate she would have hewn down this great wooden idol with the grotesque doll in its arms.
‘I spared your sensibility,’ Theodora said. ‘I did not take my prize.’
‘I cannot believe that I played even an indirect part in the incident,’ said Mrs Goodman.
‘Mother, must you destroy?’
‘Destroy?’ asked Mrs Goodman.
‘Yes,’ said Theodora. ‘I believe you were born with an axe in your hand.’
‘I do not understand what you mean. Axes? I have sat here all the afternoon. I am suffering from heartburn.’
At night Theodora Goodman would bring her mother cups of hot milk, which she drank with little soft complaining noises, and the milk skin hung from her lower lip. She was old and soft. Then it is I, said Theodora, I have a core of evil in me that is altogether hateful. But she could not overcome her repugnance for the skin that swung from her mother’s lip, giving her the appearance of an old white goat.
Mrs Goodman rumbled and sighed. ‘Give me my slippers. Give me my glasses, Theodora. It is time I took my drops. It is cold. It is hot. I am an old woman, and nobody understands the tragedy of age, unless they have experienced it themselves. You, Theodora, will experience a double hell, because you have rejected life.’
‘Go to sleep, Mother,’ Theodora would say.
‘Sleep! How can I sleep?’
Horses clattered through the grey light.
‘Why won’t you take him?’ Mrs Goodman said.
‘Why must I take, take? It is not possible to possess things with one’s hands.’
‘I remember the other evening he rode across the bridge. Well,’ said Mrs Goodman, ‘Fanny has been happy. It was different when one waited for the sound of horses’ feet.’
Horses clattered through the grey world that was Mrs Goodman’s sleep, and the morning when Theodora, for some inexorable reason, had got up and gone to look at her mother. Theodora breathed low. Her hair hung over her mother’s bed, just not sweeping the face. Neither the softening of sleep nor the callous demolition of age could conceal Mrs Goodman’s hatefulness. If there had been only the old soft body, Theodora could have pitied, as if it had been some discarded object in white kid. But she did not pity. At times she could still love, because her mother sat at the end of the passage of roselight, upright on her scroll-back sofa, reading from mahogany lips the little hard poems of Hérédia, which she let fall like pebbles from the past, and the roselight closed and opened. Faces swam at Mrs Goodman’s will, the drowning faces of the lost or dead, Father, and Gertie Stepper, and the Syrian, and Pearl Brawne. You see all these faces that I command, said Mother, it is they who give me my significance, they are why I can smile, and you will answer it with love.