‘Yes, my dear Katina,’ Theodora sighed.
Already, from her corner, Katina Pavlou watched the slow smoke rise from white houses and sleepily finger the dawn. She sat upright, to arrive, to recover the lost reality of childhood. Her eyes were strained by sleeplessness.
‘Yes, Katina,’ Theodora said.
There was no reason to suppose that this was not the sequence of events. Theodora contemplated the fire eating the feeble fretwork of a gable, turning it to fierce lace.
Then the crowd began to call. The roof would fall, called the crowd. It was time, time, time. The voice thickened.
‘Ahhhh,’ cried the crowd in a last desperate spasm of consummation.
Theodora was glad that she did not see the faces flame.
‘I shall not look any more,’ Katina Pavlou said.
There was blood on her face. It had dried. It glittered, rather like new paint, or a murder on the stage.
‘And what shall you do, Miss Goodman?’ Katina Pavlou shivered.
‘I? I shall go now,’ Theodora said. ‘I shall go too.’
She touched the smooth, cold skin of a leaf of aloe.
‘Where?’ Katina Pavlou asked.
‘I have not thought yet,’ Theodora said.
The forms of the jardin exotique remained stiff and still, though on one edge, where they had pressed against the side of the Hôtel du Midi, they were black and withered. Their zinc had run into a fresh hatefulness.
‘But I shall go,’ Theodora said, indifferent to any pricking pressure, any dictatorship of the jardin exotique
Katina Pavlou yawned. Her face was rounding into sleep.
‘I may even return to Abyssinia,’ Theodora said.
After the metal hieroglyphs she felt an immeasurable longing to read the expression on the flat yellow face of stone. If the biscuit houses still existed.
‘You will go where?’ Katina Pavlou asked.
‘Come, Katina, you are almost asleep,’ Theodora Goodman said. ‘We must join the others. Listen. They are calling us.’
Part Three HOLSTIUS
When your life is most real, to me you are mad.
12
ALL through the middle of America there was a trumpeting of corn. Its full, yellow, tremendous notes pressed close to the swelling sky. There were whole acres of time in which the yellow corn blared as if for a judgement. It had taken up and swallowed all other themes, whether belting iron, or subtler, insinuating steel, or the frail human reed. Inside the movement of corn the train complained. The train complained of the frustration of distance, that resists, that resists. Distance trumpeted with corn.
Theodora Goodman sat beside the window in the train. Her hands were open. She had been carrying a weight, and now she was exhausted, slack, from receiving full measure, a measure of corn. Against her head the white mat gave her face a longer, paler, yellow shape. Like a corn cob. But in spite of outer appearances, Theodora Goodman suggested that she had retreated into her own distance and did not intend to come out.
This distressed the man in the laundered shirt, who wished to tell about his home, his mother, his cocktail cabinet, the vacation he had taken in Bermuda, and how he had sold papers as a boy. He sat in a corner, opposite Theodora Goodman, and felt and looked nervous, and fingered his mentholed chin, and rustled cellophane.
Or he talked, and heard his own voice made small.
Because all this time the corn song destroyed the frailer human reed. It destroyed the tons of pork the man’s firm had canned. It dumped the man’s cans beside the railroad track. It consumed the man’s plans for better pork. The well-laundered, closely-shaven man scratched his slack white muscles through his beautiful, hygienic shirt, and could not understand. He could not understand why, beside the strong yellow notes of corn, his voice should fall short. He chewed popcorn, chewing for confidence, the white and pappy stuff that is a decadence of corn.
Theodora heard the difference between doing and being. The corn could not help itself. It was. But the man scrabbled on the surface of life, working himself into a lather of importance under his laundered shirt. She heard the man’s words, which were as significant and sad as the desperate hum of telephone wires, that tell of mortgages, and pie, and phosphates, and love, and movie contracts, and indigestion, and real estate, and loneliness. The man said that the population of Chicago had risen from 2,701,705 in 1920 to 3,376,438 in 1930. The population was being raised all the time. But in Chicago also, Theodora had seen the nun who danced along the sidewalk, unconsciously, for joy, and the unnaturally natural face of the dancing nun had sung some song she had just remembered. The nun’s feet touched grass. So that Theodora smiled now. And the man in the perfect shirt was encouraged. He leaned forward to tell the populations of Kansas City, St Louis, Buffalo, and Detroit.
So they were getting somewhat at last.
In her turn, Theodora tried to remember some population of her own. But she could not. She tried to remember some unusual game that is played after adolescence. Because it was time, she saw, that she contributed to ease the expression on the man’s face, that was an expression of expectation, and sympathy, and pain. But she could not. And the man, sitting back, said that, anyway, it would be fine for her folks to have her back home after so much travelling around. It would be safe. The man had read his papers, it seemed. Europe, he said, was a powder magazine, all hell was waiting to be let loose. Then he sat back. He had done his duty. He had composed life into a small, white, placid heap.
Theodora remembered she was in America and going home. She remembered the letter to Fanny in which she had written:
My dear Fanny,
I am writing to say that I have seen and done, and the time has come at last to return to Abyssinia. Because I like to allow for events, I cannot say when I shall be with you, but probably some time in the spring, that is, of course, your Abyssinian spring …
‘Theo is coming home,’ announced Fanny Parrott. ‘What is more, she appears to be quite mad.’
Fanny dug at her cup, to sweeten her annoyance with the dregs of sugar. With the tips of her teeth she bit the half-melted sugar and looked apprehensively at her safe room. A room is safest at breakfast. At Audley the mail arrived in the afternoon, but Fanny had deferred Theodora’s letter, waiting for the safer moment of stiff, sweet porridge, and the consoling complacency of bacon fat, when she too was stronger. Though even so.
‘Well?’ said Frank, who was fitting bacon, lean, fat, lean, half a kidney, a square of toast, and a little gravy, on to his fork.
Thought was slow and comfortable as breakfast. No one should destroy Frank Parrott. He was stronger than Theodora. He wiped the gravy from his mouth.
‘We are not committed to Theo,’ he said. ‘Theo has always led her own life.’
If guilt stirred, and impinged on Frank Parrott’s conscience, it quickly congealed. He swallowed down a mouthful of fat meat, and felt personally absolved.
‘But she is my sister,’ Fanny said.
‘Well?’
‘I have my conscience,’ said Fanny.
As if this wistful thing might break.
‘And I cannot bear it if you sit there saying well. I would rather you made no comment.’
Because she had begun to enjoy nerves. It was one of the many peculiarities which made her superior to Frank, and which a man accepted. Besides, his financial status and social position justified a wife who had nerves, and could pronounce French, and knew what to say to an Honourable.