Collected Stories

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Home,” the little man told him, “I’m going home.”

  “Yes, go home,” said the stranger. “Back to the bowels of earth. But not forever. The humble cannot be destroyed, they keep on going!”

  “Going?” asked Lucio. “Where?”

  “Where?” said the prophet, “Where?—I don’t know where!” He began to sob—his sobbing shook him so that he dropped the bottles once more. And this time when Lucio crouched to assist in the gathering up, his strength went from him suddenly in a wave that swept far out and left him stranded, empty and flat and very nearly lifeless, upon the walk in the rapidly blackening snow outside the cafe.

  “Drunk,” said the burly policeman.

  The man who had called himself God protested but he could do nothing.

  The wagon was called and Lucio thrust inside it.

  “Nitchevo, Nitchevo,” was all he could say when they asked him where his home was.—So they bore him away.

  For nearly an hour the man who called himself God remained on the corner outside of the Bright Spot Cafe. He appeared to be puzzled by something.

  At last he shrugged and moved on down the street to the next beer parlor.

  What is your name? What did your mother die of? Do you have dreams at night?

  No, no, no, no. No name, no mother, no dreams. Please leave me alone.

  He was a very bad patient. Refuses to co-operate, the doctors decided.

  Finally after a week they turned him away.

  He went directly back to the rooming house. The door was unlocked. The hall was frosty and silent.

  Where was the cat? Not there, he could tell without asking. If she had been there he would have been able to feel her breath in the stillness. There would have been something liquid and warm in the air like the womb of the mother remembered a long way off.

  Mrs. Hutcheson heard him and came from the rear of the house where the radio blared a ceaseless popular dream.

  “I heard that you’d been laid off,” was all that she said.

  It was easy to see that the Swanee and roses and moonlight had been turned off to meet a stricter occasion. Her amplitude now was hostile. It blocked his way.

  He started to go upstairs but she blocked the staircase.

  “The room has been taken,” she told him.

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t afford to let my rooms be vacant.”

  “No.”

  “I got to be practical, don’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone’s got to be practical. That’s how it is.”

  “I see.—Where is the cat?”

  “The cat?—I turned her out Wednesday.”

  Now for the last time vehemence stirred inside him. Energy. Anger. Protest.

  “No, no, no!” he shouted.

  “Be still!” said the woman. “What do you think I am? The nerve of some people—expect me to play nursemaid to a sick alley cat!”

  “Sick?” said Lucio—he was suddenly quiet.

  “Yes,” said the woman.

  “What was the matter with her?”

  “How should I know?—She cried all night and created an awful disturbance.—I turned her out.”

  “Where did she go?”

  The woman laughed harshly. “Where did she go! How on earth should I know where that dirty cat went! She might have gone to the devil for all I know!”

  Her great bulk turned and she climbed back up the stairs. The door of Lucio’s former room stood open. The woman entered. A male voice spoke her name and the door was closed.

  Lucio went back out of the enemy’s house.

  Dimly, remotely, and without any definite feeling, he knew that the game was up. Yes, he could see behind him the whole of his time on earth. Mad pilgrimage of the flesh. Its twistings and turnings, its seemingly empty excursions. He saw how the lines, delusively parallel-seeming, had now converged and had made all forward motion impossible from now on.

  He was not conscious of fear nor self-pity nor even regret anymore.

  He walked to the corner and turned instinctively down.

  Then there occurred once more and for the last time in his life a great and a merciful thing; an act of God.

  At the entrance of an alley just beyond where he stood he saw abruptly the limping and oddly misshapen figure of his lost companion.—The cat! Yes! Nitchevo!

  He stood quite still and let his friend approach him. This she did, but with great difficulty. Their eyes were ropes that drew them slowly together in spite of the body’s resistance. For she was hurt very badly, she could hardly move…

  The consummation was gradual. Still it progressed. And all of the time the eyes of the cat stayed on him.

  Her amber eyes regarded him with their usual dignified, unquestioning devotion as though he had only returned from a few minutes’ absence and not after days and days of hunger, calamity, cold.

  Lucio reached down and gathered her into his arms. He observed now the cause of her limping. One of her legs had been crushed. It must have been for several days in that condition. It had festered and turned black and was very ill-smelling. Her body in his arms felt like a tiny bundle of bones and the sound that she made to greet him was less than a sound.

  How had it happened, this injury? Nitchevo could not tell him. Neither could he tell her what had happened to him. He could not describe the foreman who watched and grunted, the calm superiority of doctors, nor the landlady, blond and dirty, in whom desire could be satisfied as well by one man as another.

  Silence and physical closeness spoke for them both.

  He knew she could not go on living. She knew it, too. Her eyes were tired and dark; eclipsed in them now was that small, sturdy flame which means a desire to go on and which is the secret of life’s heroic survival. No. The eyes were eclipsed. They were full to the amber brims with all of the secrets and sorrows the world can answer our ceaseless questioning with. Loneliness—yes. Hunger. Bewilderment. Pain. All of these things were in them. They wanted now to be closed on what they had gathered and not have to hold any more.

  He carried her down the steep, cobbled street toward the river. It was an easy direction. The whole town slanted that way.

  The air had grown dark, no longer containing the terrible brilliance of sunlight reflected on snow. The wind took the smoke up quickly and sent it scudding across low roofs in sheep-like surrender. There was cold in the air and a sooty gathering darkness. The wind whined a little as thin metal wires drawn taut.

  High up on the bank, on the levee, a truck rumbled past. It was loaded with ingots of metal. Iron from the forge of the plant that was soaring away into darkness as the earth averted this side of its face from the stinging slap of the sun and gradually gave it the other.

  Lucio spoke to the cat as the stream climbed about them.

  “Soon,” he whispered. “Soon, soon, very soon.”

  Only a single instant she struggled against him; clawed his shoulder and arm in a moment of doubt. My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Then the ecstasy passed and her faith returned, they went away with the river. Away from the town, away and away from the town, as the smoke, the wind took from the chimneys—

  Completely away.

  (Published 1945)

  The Important Thing

  They met at the spring dance by the Baptist Female College which Flora was attending that year. The college was in the same town as the State University at which John was completing his sophomore year. He knew only one girl at the college and wasn’t able to find her in the ballroom. It was hot and crowded in there and had that feverish, glaring effect which usually prevails at a spring dance given by a sectarian girls’ school. The room was lighted by four or five blazing chandeliers and the walls were covered with long mirrors. Between dances the couples stood about stiffly in their unaccustomed formal dress and glanced uneasily at their reflections in the highly polished glass, shifted their weight from foot to
foot, nervously twisted or flipped their program cards. None of them seemed to know each other very well. They talked in loud, unnatural voices, shrieked with laughter or stood sullenly quiet. The teachers flitted among them with bird-like alacrity, intently frowning or beaming, introducing, prompting, encouraging. It was not like a social affair. It was more like an important military maneuver.

  John walked around the edge of the floor several times and was rather relieved at not finding the one girl he knew. When he arrived at the palm-flanked entrance he turned to go out, but just then his arm was violently plucked by one of the teachers, a middle-aged woman with frowzy gray hair, sharp nose and large yellow teeth. She looked so wild and Harpy-like that John involuntarily squirmed aside from her grasp.

  “Are you alone?” she shrieked in his ear.

  The band was thumping out a terrifically loud fox trot. John rubbed his ear and pointed vaguely toward the door. She tightened her grasp on his arm and propelled him across the floor by a series of jerks that careened him from one dancing couple to another till they reached a corner where stood an apparently stranded group of young Baptist Females beneath the protective fronds of an enormous boxed palm.

  The Harpy gave his arm a final twist and John found himself facing a tall, thin girl in a pink taffeta dress who stood slightly apart from her fellow refugees. He caught the name Flora shrieked through the increasing din. He didn’t notice the girl’s face. He was too furious at being roped in like this to even look at her. They advanced awkwardly toward each other. John slid his arm around her unbelievably slender waist. Through the silk he could feel the hard ridge of her spine. There was no weight in her body. She floated before him so lightly that it was almost like dancing by himself, except that the cord of bone kept moving beneath his warm, sweating fingers and her fine, loose hair plastered itself against his damp cheek.

  The fox trot had reached a crescendo. Cymbals were clashing and drums beating out double time. The girl’s lips moved against his throat. Her breath tickled his skin but he couldn’t hear a word she was saying. He looked helplessly down at her. Suddenly she broke away from him. She stood slightly off from him, her eyes crinkling with laughter and one hand clutched to her mouth. The music stopped.

  “What’re you laughing at?” John asked.

  “The whole situation,” said Flora. “You no more wanted to dance than I did!”

  “Didn’t you want to?”

  “Of course not. When I think of dancing I think of Isadora Duncan who said she wanted to teach the whole world how to dance, but this wasn’t what she meant—do you think it was?”

  She had a way of looking up that made her face very brilliant and for a few moments obscured the fact that she was by no means pretty. But there was something about her, something which already excited him a little, and so he said;

  “Let’s go outside.”

  They spent practically all the rest of the evening in the oak grove between the gymnasium and the chapel, strolling around and smoking his cigarettes. While smoking the girl would flatten herself against a tree trunk for smoking was forbidden on the campus.

  “This is the advantage of being a fence-pole,” she told him. “You can hide behind anything with the slightest diameter.”

  Everything that she said had a wry, humorous twist and even when it wasn’t humorous she would laugh slightly and John had the impression that she was unusually clever. They went into the empty chapel for a while and sat in a back pew and talked about religion.

  “It is all so archaic,” Flora said. “It is all a museum piece!”

  John had recently become an agnostic himself. They agreed that Christian religion and Hebrew, in fact nearly all religions were based on a concept of guilt.

  “Mea culpa!” said John, thinking that she would say, “What’s that?” But she didn’t. She nodded her head. And he was excited to discover that she, too, was interested in writing. She had won a literary prize in high-school and she was now editor of the college literary magazine. The teacher who had brought them together was Flora’s English instructor.

  “She thinks I’m very talented,” said Flora. “She wants me to send one of my stories to Harper’s.”

  “Why don’t you?” asked John.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Flora. “I think the main thing is just expressing yourself as honestly as you can. I am not interested in style,” she went on, “it’s such a waste of time to do things over and get the right cadence and always just the right word. I’d rather just scramble through one thing and then rush into another, until I have said everything I have to say!”

  How extraordinary it was that she and John should feel exactly the same way about this! He confessed that he was himself a writer and that two or three of his stories were coming out in the University’s literary magazine—and when Flora heard this she was almost absurdly moved.

  “I’d love to see them. I’ve got to see them!” she cried.

  “I’ll bring them over,” he promised.

  “When?”

  “As soon as they come out!”

  “I don’t care how the style is as long as they’re honest. They’ve got to be honest!” she pleaded. “Are they?”

  “I hope so,” he answered uneasily.

  She had taken his arm and was squeezing it in a grip that was almost as tight as a wrestler’s and with every excited inflection in her speech she squeezed it tighter. There was no relaxation in Flora, none of the softness and languor which he found physically interesting in girls. He could not imagine her lying passively still and quietly submitting the way he thought a girl should to a man’s embraces.

  “What do you think about human relations?” she asked him just at the moment when this disturbing image was in his mind.

  “That’s a large subject,” said John.

  “Oh, what a large, large subject! And it is the one I will never be able to cope with!”

  “Why?” asked John.

  “I’m equal to anything else, but not human relations! I’ll always be moving when other people are still, and still when they’re moving,” said Flora, “and it will be a terrible mess and a mix-up from start to finish!”

  “You shouldn’t feel that way about it,” he told her lamely, astonished at the way her words fitted exactly what he had been thinking.

  She looked up at John. “You‘ll have the same trouble!” she told him. “We‘ll never be happy but we‘ll have lots of excitement and if we hold on to our personal integrity everything won’t be lost!”

  He wasn’t quite sure what Flora was talking about, and personal integrity seemed the vaguest of terms. Was it something like what she meant by “honest” writing?

  “Yes, something,” said Flora, “but ever so much more difficult, because writing is ideal reality and living is not ideal…”

  At the window of the gymnasium they stood for a while and watched the dancers who had reached what appeared to be nearly the point of exhaustion. Faces that had been flushed and perspiring when they had left the room were now quite desperate-looking and the men in the jazz band seemed to be playing now out of sheer inability to break an old habit. Some of the paper streamers had come unfastened and fallen upon the floor, others hung limply from the ceiling and in one corner a small crowd, mostly teachers, were clustered about a girl who had fainted.

  “Don’t they look silly!” said Flora.

  “Who?”

  “Dancers—everybody!”

  “What isn’t silly, in your opinion?” asked John.

  “Give me a little while to answer that question!”

  “How long shall I give you?”

  “I’ll tell you right now—The Important Thing isn’t silly!”

  “What Important Thing?” John asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Flora. “Why do you think I’m living, except to discover what The Important Thing is?”

  John didn’t see her again that spring. Final examinations came soon after the dance, and besides he was not a
ltogether sure that she was the sort he would get along with. She was not good-looking and her intensity which was so charming while he was with her seemed afterwards a little—fantastic!

  Very soon after he returned to school that fall he ran into her on the campus. She was now enrolled as a sophomore in the State University. He barely recognized her. It had been so dark in the oak grove, where they spent most of their time at the spring dance, that he hadn’t gotten a very clear impression of her face. She was at once homelier and more attractive than he remembered. Her face was very wide at the top and narrow at the bottom: almost an inverted pyramid. Her eyes were large and rather oblique, hazel brown with startling flecks of blue or green in them. Her nose was long and pointed and the tip covered with freckles. She had a way of smiling and blinking her eyes very rapidly as she talked. She talked so fast and shrilly that he felt a little embarrassed. He noticed a group of girls staring at her and giggling. Fools! he thought, and was angry at himself for having felt embarrassed.

  It was noon when they met and she was on her way to the boarding house where she was staying. She hadn’t pledged a sorority. She announced the fact with an air of proud defiance that John liked.

  “I could see that I wouldn’t fit into any of them,” she said. “I’d rather be independent, wouldn’t you? The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform. Oh, I’m sick of it! I won’t do it! I shall live my own life just the way that I please!”

  John had felt the same way about joining a fraternity and he told her so.

  “Ah, we’re a couple of Barbs!” she shrieked. “Isn’t that marvelous? The other girls at the boarding house simple detest being called Barbs—but I adore it! I think it’s really thrilling to be called a barbarian! It makes you feel like you could strip off your clothes and dance naked in the streets if you felt like doing it!”

  John felt a warm glow as though he’d been drinking. It was the way he’d felt in the oak grove, talking to her last spring. It seemed suddenly that he had a great deal to say. He became excited and started talking rapidly about a one-act play that he was writing. It was full of involved symbolism and hard to explain. But Flora nodded her head with quick, eager jerks and supplied words wherever he stumbled. She seemed to know intuitively what he was trying to say.