Barbary Shore

  Guinevere heard this with her lips parted, her eyes far away. Bliss animated every curve in her face. “Yes,” she murmured, “yes,” dropping her voice into a gentle reflective sigh. The nectar she tasted rolled in her mouth until she could have absorbed her tongue in the sentience of the moment. Unconsciously, she clasped her breast. If it had been possible she would have kissed herself upon the throat.

  “There is no one,” Lannie went on, “who loves you as I and is devoted to your beauty.”

  “No one.” Response to the invocation, Guinevere chanted the words.

  “Then why oh why,” burst out Lannie with sudden anguish, “do you cheat upon me in a corner until only the worst in Blondie can meet the depraved in you, and both must wallow in stinkheat?”

  Marvel of anger, Guinevere’s nose turned red. “Leave me alone,” she said raucously, “I got to think of the future.”

  “There is no future,” Lannie told her. She caught Guinevere by the arms. “It is shameful to entice him and worse that he forgets himself.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “It can’t be true that you and he really plan …? Oh, but that is impossible!” she cried aloud, hands at her temple. “No, listen”—and now her hands fluttered to Guinevere’s cheek—“there must be honor in punishing the other. Justice must be done I tell you, and not profit.”

  “We’ve got our plans to worry about,” Guinevere muttered.

  “Oh, no, the evil state,” Lannie rambled, “has beauty because it is so strong. But my friend must not leave them or it means that he is . . frightened of what is to come, and I was so certain that they were so strong.” She collected herself. “Oh, he will take you away from me, and you don’t care. Not even you will they allow me.”

  What Guinevere would do I could hardly imagine. Anger swelled in her face until it bulged her eyes, and yet she might as easily have given herself to Lannie’s arms. “Why don’t any of you ever leave me alone?” she blurted out for still another time.

  Monina made the decision. Motionless on the floor since Lannie had entered, her tiny fists frozen at her side, head cocked rigidly in the straining attitude of a foreigner who would overhear a conversation and is baffled by his equipment, she was nonetheless an audience for all that passed. Words may go by and the sense be retained. Though the child remained seated, she was no longer silent.

  “Mommie hate you,” she whispered, “Mommie hate you.” And hardly moving, her back curled, her eyes distended, she spat at Lannie with the intense venom of a cat.

  “Monina!” Guinevere shrieked.

  “You kissed her. You kissed her.” Monina began to cry. And turning on her mother, she struck a blow. “Mommie will die.”

  Guinevere blanched at the child’s words. “You keep quiet,” she bawled. But when Lannie attempted to touch her cheek again, Guinevere threw her off with a shudder of revulsion. It must have burned Lannie’s fingers.

  “Oh,” Guinevere moaned in her fishwife voice. “Oh, I’ll go nuts.”

  “Stop that,” Lannie snapped. We had completed the circle.

  If Guinevere muttered, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,” it was only to furnish momentum. A second later she turned to Lannie and said, “Look, girlie, you better leave.”

  “Leave?” Lannie repeated.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Guinevere protested, “I don’t know what to think, maybe it was wrong to do what we did, oh brother, I don’t know if I can get it out of my head. Just go, fellow,” she begged at Lannie. “If we had a good time once, well I can always say I tried everything …” And the last sentence rolled out with a swagger.

  Did Lannie bear defeat well, or did she sup on it with nearly all her heart? “All right, I’ll leave,” she said, a faint smile upon her face. She moved toward the door, Monina watching her with intense suspicion. Lannie halted, fumbled through her purse in characteristic distress, and came up at last with her hand crushing a few dollar bills. “Do you know what I shall do with this?” she asked of me.

  I made a meaningless motion in answer.

  “I’m going out to buy a can of dark dark paint, for there is something I must cover. The little mouse who came to me and said he was Jesus will leave me alone no longer. This morning I found his hole, and once I have the paint I’ll cover it, and he will die.” She said this with resignation. “I had hopes for him, but this”— she waved her hand benignly about the room—“has made me realize that there is small future for such a mouse.” She closed the door carefully behind her.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Guinevere declared. But moving about the room to empty an ashtray into a basket, straightening the corner of the rug, she was also settling herself.

  “It’s my fault,” she announced with her back to me, and then immediately burst into laughter. “How I can send them away.” The laughter exhausted, she was yanking at her hair again in distress. “Christmas, you tell me, why did I tell her to go?”

  “She frightened you,” I suggested.

  I aimed too hard and stabbed the air. Guinevere shrugged and pointed to Monina. “It’s your fault, that’s what it is. Why can’t you give me a moment’s peace?” Monina took it like a puppy, smiling from ear to ear, her eyes shining.

  “You know, all kidding aside,” Guinevere told me, and she would brush it thus away, “that Lannie is quite a character. She’s a very wonderful and strange girl.” Guinevere delivered her last remark as though it were a manufactured article she sold across a counter. “Wonderful and strange,” she repeated.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “No, there’s something about her. I’ll tell you the truth, Lovett, she does me good. I don’t know, maybe I am that way … she makes me feel like I haven’t felt in years.” Secure now, Guinevere could become the captive of what she said. “You know, I believe in happy endings. I love her, I guess.” And for the moment she was in love.

  “Fine.”

  Only for a moment, however. She chuckled. “Boy, I got to admit it, that dame does have a line on her. I used to think I could hold up my end in a conversation, but your friend Miss Madison makes me look tongue-tied.” She tossed this off so casually that I might have wondered if I had ever seen them together.

  “My friend?”

  “Yeah.” Once again I could be charmed by Guinevere’s powers of recuperation. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s gone on between you and her. From what I heard your ears ought to burn.” She shook her head. “I used to think it was a compliment you went for me, but I should have known. You’d chase anything.” And in a crude burlesque of Lannie, she crooned, “Oh, I don’t know what I’ll do, I’m sooo wild about you.” In chorus, Monina laughed with her.

  “Ah-huh,” Guinevere said, “you like that, don’t you?”

  Monina nodded, roaring indecently, her baby cheeks quivering with mirth adequate for a middle-aged woman. “You’re a devil,” Guinevere said to her.

  That way I left them.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “A FELLOW has to ask it of himself because there are so many problems,” Hollingsworth was saying. “You know, we have courses now, and some of them in very abstruse subjects I can tell you. To be a good man in the organization a knowledge of the psychological is essential.” With that he had finished cutting his nails, the product deposited neatly on the flap of an envelope which he kept to the left of him on the desk as though in opposition to the other envelope to his right, also open, which contained the shavings of three pencils he had carefully sharpened at the beginning of the interview. So he sat, the lamp behind him shining over his head into the eyes of McLeod, the envelopes serving as balance pans for the justice he would dispense.

  “I’ve considered your allegations very carefully,” Hollingsworth was continuing, “but one gets to wondering what the psychological part of it is.” In reproduction of a gesture which had once belonged to McLeod, Hollingsworth touched his finger tips together lightly, judiciously. “It’s part of a case I would say,” he offered mildly, and haw
ked his throat. “I wonder if you would object to my just thinking aloud for a little while?”

  Before there could be an answer, Lannie had interrupted. “I have a question,” she said in a low voice.

  “Not now,” Hollingsworth snapped.

  “No, but I …” she began.

  “I said, ‘Not now.’ ” Reaching across the desk he lit a cigarette for McLeod. “Here is the way I put it to myself,” he said thoughtfully. “We have a fellow who one could call intelligent like yourself, and yet I must say it, one can’t help being struck by the idea that he acts like a fool. Now, the last thing I want to do is to be offensive”—Hollingsworth radiated geniality—“but still there’s not an awful lot he does which makes sense.”

  “Would you care to specify?” McLeod slumped in his chair, the top of his head barely visible, his long legs propped for support against the table. Arms hanging at his side, his finger tips must have trailed the floor. He might have appeared wholly patient, wholly passive, if it were not so evident that the glare of the lamp had begun to affect him.

  “Let’s look at it. It seems to me that for something to make sense, there’s got to be a balance; you know one side has to weigh as much as the other.”

  “No balance here?”

  Again the finger tips touched. “Not much, a fellow would have to say.” Hollingsworth separated his hands, then pressed them lightly against the table. “In one of the courses we were instructed in, there was a great deal about what we called the psychology of the Bolshevists, and in it we were taught that these fellows thought they could change the history of the world, and naturally like everybody else they thought they were doing it for world betterment. Now, to take the fellow we been talking about all this time, he undoubtedly reasoned that way, and so everything he did there was a purpose to it. And no matter how terrible we might think those things would be, world betterment was the idea. So he could go ahead and do all that.” Abruptly, Hollingsworth chuckled. “Only the poor fellow decided he was wrong, and so he quit them. What is his psychology now?”

  “You want me to answer?”

  “I’ll go on, thank you. He feels very bad we can suppose. Here are all those terrible things he’s done, and how can he change all that? Well, first of all he goes to work for the people I represent, and that doesn’t pan out so well, now does it? He feels even worse, and so he has to take something to make up for it, and that he does, and then here he is now.”

  “Except for his theoretical work.”

  “Yes, I’m so glad you mentioned that. Except for his theoretical work.” Hollingsworth reached deftly into his brief case, and deposited a pile of mimeographed pamphlets on the table. “We have here the sum total of the said fellow’s work. I can enumerate all the categories of subjects treated, but why bore you with something you know already? The thing that’s more interesting is that out of all these articles and pamphlets we’ve made a list of the circulation, and the one that was read by the most people numbers five hundred readers.” He fanned them out upon the desk, and touched his finger to one and then another as though he were examining samples. “This one had a hundred and fifty readers; this one, two hundred twenty-five; this one, seventy-five; this one, fifty.” Hollingsworth yawned. “These figures are all in round numbers, of course.”

  “What point do you make?” McLeod asked.

  “Well, it’s very difficult for me to understand,” Hollingsworth began. Before he could continue, however, Lannie had clutched a page from one of the papers, and read the title. She put it down. “You didn’t write this,” she said to McLeod in a strangled voice.

  He nodded.

  “No, he didn’t write it,” Lannie was on her feet now. “It’s you he’s swindling, you!” she screeched at Hollingsworth.

  “He wrote it,” Hollingsworth said quietly, studying her outburst.

  “It’s impossible,” she cried, and now she was pleading for herself. “Contradictions and class relations in the land across the sea, as he puts it. Yes, he may have written it, his hand, his ink, and so you’re convinced, but all the while he was writing he laughed because he never believed a word of it.”

  Hollingsworth merely stared at her, his silence weighing upon her speech until the effect cumulative, she was quiet at last. “I told you,” he said, clearing his throat, “that there would be twists and turns.”

  “You’re wrong,” she managed to blurt out.

  “Very well, then, I’m wrong,” he said, and unable to restrain himself, began to laugh at her. “Yes, I’m sure wrong.”

  She was back in her seat, but the chair gave small comfort. Her body pressed against the wood, her stained fingers plucked cuticle from her ragged nails, and her poor soft lips fluttered one against the other. “I …” she started to say.

  “Be quiet now,” Hollingsworth said. With evident distaste he rearranged the papers she had strewn and consulted his notes.

  “Applying statistical methods,” he informed McLeod, “a fellow can see that the average circulation of these pamphlets is one hundred and ninety-eight point three people per unit of political propaganda.”

  McLeod said wryly, “I’d often wondered what it was.”

  “This is the point I’ve been trying to make,” Hollingsworth went on. “A fellow who has as many things to keep him up at night as the gentleman we’ve been discussing, seems to think that to balance it out, all he has to do is to write these articles. I suppose he’s trying to make the plus equal the minus. But one is forced to think this fellow in question has a very interesting arithmetic. Because the way I figure it is that he’s down about a million, and every one of these things is worth maybe ten off the score.”

  “The difference between you and me,” McLeod said, “is that I depend upon potentiality. Who are you to state that in a decade there will be no possibility for new revolutionary ferments?”

  “Assess the plus and minus,” Hollingsworth intoned.

  “There is still the future. And if there will be a revolutionary situation and revolutionaries of stature, then it is of the utmost importance the lessons of the last revolution be learned.” He sat there blinking his eyes slowly into the glare of the light bulb, while across the tight skin of his face, steadily, involuntarily, a tremor rippled through the flat muscle of his cheek. “Why do you insist?” he asked finally, querulously.

  “Because you want to influence people,” Hollingsworth said shortly. “And when people want to influence people, then that falls into the area of my occupation.” He sighed heavily. “And I am obliged to question your qualifications. For example would you say that the gentleman mentioned was in complete possession of all faculties at the time he was so active in said and aforementioned Mediterranean country?”

  “What do you mean by faculties?”

  “There’s a better answer than that,” Hollingsworth suggested. “Take the time he goes with the revolver in his pocket to see his old political friend. Can you say he found no enjoyment at all in the events of the evening?”

  “None.”

  Hollingsworth made a deprecatory sound with his tongue. “You’re an intelligent fellow. Would anybody feel bad for all of four or five hours, talking to somebody, knowing he’s going to kill him?

  “I don’t know any more.”

  “No pleasure at all?”

  McLeod raised a hand to his temple. “How can I remember?”

  “In other words, some pleasure. That’s looked down upon, isn’t it?” Hollingsworth nodded to answer his own question. “The fellow we’re considering has an unhealthy psychological part to him one is forced to conclude.”

  “All right.”

  “This unhealthy part affects all his actions. An eminent specialist in these matters told me so. We think we have an idea just cause it’s an idea, but the truth is we have such and such an idea because we want it so.”

  “All right,” McLeod said tonelessly.

  “One is forced to conclude politics is the bunk and so are opinions.”
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  “All right.”

  “Then,” Hollingsworth continued rigorously, “how can a fellow pretend to act for the future?”

  “All right, all right. All right,” McLeod said.

  Hollingsworth adjusted the lamp so it shone equitably between them. In a gentle voice, he continued. “Now, unlike most people, I don’t look down on such a fellow. We all have our different characters, and that’s true. It’s just that we mustn’t be stubborn. You’ve been an unhappy man all your life, and you didn’t want to admit it was your own fault. So you blame it on society, as you call it. That isn’t necessary. You could have had a good time, you could still have a good time if you’d realize that everybody is like you, and so it’s pointless to work for the future.” His hand strayed over the desk. He might have been caressing the wood. “More modesty. We ain’t equipped to deal with big things. If this fellow came to me and asked my advice, I would take him aside and let him know that if he gives up the pursuits of vanity, and acts like everybody else, he’d get along better. Cause we never know what’s deep down inside us”—Hollingsworth tapped his chest—“and it plays tricks. I don’t give two cents for all your papers. A good-time Charley, that’s myself, and that’s why I’m smarter than the lot of you.” His pale face had become flushed. “You can shove theory,” he said suddenly. “Respect your father and mother.”