He went back to the same table, sat down, and ordered another cocktail. It was now perfectly dark. The canoe with the lantern had glided away to a distance, faint voices came over the lake, a night-hawk was mewing somewhere in the upper darkness. He put his elbows on the table and began again rubbing his forehead with cruelly violent hands. Everything was meaningless, mad, ridiculous. Those two poor fools—that nice harmless girl—the cocktails, the canoes, the evening—and his wife’s unanswered letter. What on earth could he say to her? He took between thumb and forefinger the stem of the cocktail glass which the waiter had brought him, and revolved it to and fro. He began to imagine the letter. “My darling—this world is insane, ridiculous, mad, full of fools. When I revolve this cocktail glass the glass moves but the liquid remains still; and the olive stirs only faintly, like some weed at the bottom of the sea when a current wafts it. Someone is singing on the lake. I can hear the plop of a paddle. I am an old idiot, a failure, a blundering creature who means well. I love you much more than I thought I did. I shall have to hire a car to get back to the factory from here. I was cruel to Mrs. Ulrich—because I want to be cruel to you, and to myself. But I am no worse than anyone else—I am a harmless fellow, likable, amiable, and I want to have my life. Why did you fall in love with Paul? Why did you stand there by the door in your bathing suit, letting the raincoat momentarily slip from your shoulders in order that he might see you? I knew that you were thrilling to his presence, conscious of him with your whole being, and I was deeply hurt; I felt as if the world had fallen away from beneath my feet. And now I am lost.”
Laboriously, he took out a cigarette and lighted it. The match fell to the floor still blazing, and he trod out the flame with an uncertain foot, taking a cruel pleasure in an unnecessary repetition of the treading. He had at the same time an impulse to laugh; but the laugh remained—as he himself phrased it, in continuation of the letter—a “cerebral giggle, which twice contracts the diaphragm.”
I LOVE YOU VERY DEARLY
My darling, you’ll be surprised to hear from me, to see an envelope addressed to you in your father’s indecipherable, rheumatic handwriting—and perhaps it will surprise you to see that it comes from Paris. You probably thought you were at last through with Pauper after that revolting scene last year. But you know the old saying about the bad penny. You can’t keep a bad man down. The truth is that I love you far too much to let you go out of my life like that, for no good reason at all. Even if we did quarrel, and even if it became obvious that we couldn’t get on, you and Jim and I, and even if I am a Chinese egg (you know, the Chinese bury the eggs to let them ripen), that doesn’t, I hope, prevent me from taking a deep and lasting interest in you and yours. I know only too well my faults; I never was any sort of a person to live with. Your poor mother found that out before we had been married two years—she always used to say that I was the kind that never ought to have married at all. The truth is, I belong to that unhappy and ridiculous type of human being that has an artistic temperament without having any talent. I am as selfish as a guinea pig and as immoral; there’s no use denying it; I guess there isn’t a worse father in the world. I made all your lives a perpetual torment, with my eternal fussiness about meals and food and neatness, and my irascible outbursts about nothing at all. There is a sort of cruelty in me that I never was able to control. If there was a horrible smell of frying fish in the house, I simply had to break out with some violent profane remark about it. I even felt that you used to have smelts just to provoke the usual reaction—though I knew perfectly well that you did it for the sake of economy. That was how that last scene started. I was sure, somehow (with the obsessive fear of the maniac), that you had invited Warren to the house just because you knew how I hated and loathed and despised him. I argued with myself about it all that night, for I couldn’t sleep a wink, and though I could see perfectly clearly the other side of the question—I mean, that he was a friend of yours, that you liked him, and that you had a perfect right, in your own house, to invite him to dinner—nevertheless I was somehow secretly sure that you were simply doing it to annoy me, and perhaps to drive me out. I tried to smother this idea, and to behave myself, but it was no good. If I didn’t burst out about it in my usual manner, with a “Jesus Christ!” or two, then I knew that I would revenge myself on you and Jim in subtler ways and more prolongedly; so I decided to burst out. I knew I was wrong, and yet I did it. And when I had done it, nothing on earth would have made me admit that I was wrong.
Oh, well, I suppose there’s no use in digging all this up. I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to apologize with the idea of having you invite me to come back. I know as well as you do that it wouldn’t work. I just want you to realize that I blame myself for it, not you. I also realize that we were fools ever to think that we could live together, the three of us. When the children are grown up and married, it’s time for the parents to fade out of the picture—good old platitude. I thought when I went away that I could never be happy again—it seemed to me there was nothing left for me but to crawl off to a dark corner and rot. It’s no joke, beginning your life over again when you’re sixty! I felt beaten, there was nowhere I wanted to go, nothing I wanted to do. I don’t know how it was I got the idea of coming abroad; but it was the thing that saved me. The little income I have (from the block of Union Pacific which I kept) just suffices to keep me going, provided I live modestly. I have got a flat here, in a slummy corner of the city, and—this will surprise you—taken to painting! I found that I had to have something to do. When I was just out of college, before you were born or thought of, I used to have vague ambitions of that kind. Well, I bought myself a full equipment of brushes, palettes, canvases, tubes of paint, and started in. And I’m enjoying myself hugely. I know perfectly well I’m mediocre; but I’ve discovered that I can, after a fashion, paint. So now I spend my days, when it isn’t too dark, with a gaudy palette on my thumb, approved style, painting my little German model, Gretchen, or still-lives à la Van Gogh. I haven’t yet imitated his pair of deserted and disastrous boots, or his famous yellow chair, but I don’t doubt I will, before I get through. I know all the galleries like a connoisseur, go sometimes, when I’m flush, to the Opera, or to the Comique. In fact, I’m deliberately turning myself into one of those resigned and eccentric old failures, who wear shabby coats but pride themselves on their neat gloves and brilliant sticks, who haunt all the second-rate pensions of Europe, and who follow the seasons back and forth from Cairo to Scheveningen, arriving everywhere punctually with the blossoming of the cherry. As if one were a migratory bird—a swallow or a cuckoo. And I can truly say that I’m happier than I’ve ever been in all my life.
My dear Winky—my motive for writing you is a double one. In the first place, I wanted to let you know where I was, and what I was doing, and that I was alive; I wanted to make amends, if I could, for the abrupt and mannerless way in which I disappeared from Philadelphia without letting you hear a word of where I was going. For all you knew, I might have drowned myself in the Wissahickon. After I had told you at lunch that you were barbarians, and that it was impossible for a civilized being to live with you, and you had burst into tears, and when Muffet came in and saw this extraordinary scene going on, I went out, at first with the idea that I would of course come back. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was impossible. I was ashamed to face you, and at the same time I was angry. So I telephoned Margaret to pack up my things and send them to the station for me; and I asked her to say nothing about it, assuring her that I was attending to that myself. I waited at the station, and as soon as my trunk and bags came, I started off to New York. That was horrible of me—but it’s probably the kind of thing you have by this time learned to expect of your father. When you were little, I used to be cross with you for no reason, sometimes I slapped you or was harsh with you over some absurd trifle which you wouldn’t at all understand. I would be nice to you one day, go for a walk with you, and tell you fairy stories by the hour, and the next day I would be morose and avoid you as if you were a little nuisance. You learnt to regard me as the most undependable being in the whole world, one who obeyed only one law, the law of his own egoistic nature. Like your brother and your mother, you learnt that if affairs went badly with me at the insurance office, you would be punished for it; and that if I had a headache, or hadn’t slept well, the day would be ruined for the entire family. So in all likelihood you merely thought, when I vanished so unceremoniously, and without a word, that it was just the sort of thing the old crab would do. All the same, I want to tell you and Jim how sorry I am about it. In fact, I want to make a sort of final confession and apology. I regret almost everything in my whole career. I am ashamed of myself, most of all ashamed of the way in which I treated your mother. God knows I made a hash of her life.