Chapter 3
I suppose it was Dr. Meadows who advised my aunts to send me back to England. For themselves, I am sure they would have preferred to keep me in America. They spoke vaguely of my health. They seemed to be moving and making decisions in a dream.
I was nearly thirteen when I sailed back across the Atlantic. I never saw my aunts again for they were dead when I returned to America ten years later.
Of the period between, I shall speak only briefly. I went from school to university and by the time I was twenty-two I was a Bachelor of Arts. For ten years I followed the conventional course, studying desultorily, passing examinations, playing a little sport, reading, and occasionally going out with a girl. But without exception I despised the girls I met; they were pretty, docile, and unserious. Nothing touched them to the quick and they had no more effect upon me than the idiot boys with whom I was forced, at school and college, to associate.
Had I not after all killed a man?
I felt myself to be ... different.
There could be nothing for me in what others called "love"-where was the risk? I despised civilized affections, the soul-destroying "matey" quality, the sugar-sweet tendernesses of the liaisons between boys and girls of my own age. What I sought after was something much more terrible, something which could be described as a commitment, intense, obscene, even criminal, and undertaken, assented to religiously, as a nun defines herself by her vow. Indeed, up till that time, except for my experience with Anna, I was as chaste as any nun. On my twenty-second birthday, I had still not known a woman. The only woman I had ever met who measured up to my peculiar standards was the one who was ever present in my belly like a dark pencil of lust from the time I committed murder for her.
Anna haunted me, always evasively-the white thighs, a ripple of olive-tinted flesh and a fleck of black hair disintegrating in my dreams. I would lie awake at night, the flesh of my belly crushed cruelly between my fingers, aching in every nerve to feel her flesh close, possessing me, and to feel her will move in me again. Would she still be the same? Or would she have become soft, spavined, fat, cow-like, in the ten years which had passed since she used me for her fatal lust? I didn't know.
The fact that she would be ten years older, a woman past thirty, excited me tremendously. If she had not gone to seed, if she had preserved that vital quality of contempt, her dark purity, the green fury of her passion, then how much more easily, and with how much more subtle calculation, would she be able as a mature woman at the height of her powers to take possession of me and make me her own consecrated instrument!
For that is what she had made of me, and the wax, once set, was firm and unchangeable: I experienced no desire to possess nor to mould in my own--likeness but an urgent necessity to be annihilated, used again even to the point of murder, and to draw identity of every act done of another's necessity. The memory of Anna electrified me. She alone of all the women I had met was fit to receive such homage. Had she not made me commit murder for her? I nurtured the memory like an orchid, an extravagant, dangerous orchid, with as much loving care as a poet gives to his creation. I worshipped her. I imagined myself prostrate before her. I buried my head between her soft thighs, knowing their strength. I asked her to judge me, to control me, to administer my punishment. I loved her, called to her in my dreams that I would kill my uncle all over again. She had to exist. She could not be dead, or worse, grown weak and insipid as the women I met at college. That would be a betrayal. Men have destroyed gods for less.
But my doubts remained. Ten years is a long time, and had I met another woman to whom I could have brought the same religious dedication I should without doubt have committed myself afresh. I even attempted to do so.
On my twenty-second birthday I traveled to London for a week's holiday. The idea had been growing in my mind for some time. Surely in such a huge city as London I would be able to find such a woman? Somewhere, I had to find her, for by the act of poisoning my uncle I had delivered myself over to an obsession.
I was walking along Piccadilly when it occurred to me that I might find my woman among the hustlers who plied their trade there. I had few illusions about a chance meeting with an unprofessional girl. None I had met so far had been remotely like the woman I was looking for. But a prostitute-a prostitute surely had to have some metal in her. I halted at a comer and glanced at the people who were passing by. It was already dark and as the weather was cold the people were muffled up to the ears. Nevertheless, it was easy just because of the cold to tell which women were going somewhere and which were not. I counted three prostitutes and considered them one by one. The first was a slim dark-haired girl, rather pretty but also rather pathetic, I felt, with her rabbit-fur collar and little pageboy cap. The second was a tired-looking peroxide blonde, about thirty-five, who was constantly stamping her feet on the pavement to keep herself warm. It occurred to me that she would be better off in a brothel. She didn't attract me. The third woman was different. She was a heavily-built woman with a big bust, good legs, and coppery-red hair. She looked healthy and as strong as a horse. She, too, was over thirty, but probably a year or two younger than the blonde. I decided to approach her.
She smiled as I came up.
"Short time, luv?"
I nodded.
"Three quid," she said, looking me up and down.
I nodded again.
She beamed, and when she did so I nearly walked away. I didn't want this kind of attitude. But I decided to go through with it. When I had her alone in a room I would try to get her to understand. Nevertheless, I didn't hold out much hope.
I followed her through a number of back streets and into an entrance beside a newspaper shop. It was ill-lit. Instead of mounting the stairs as I had anticipated, she led me under them into a dark comer.
"Do it here, luv," she said.
"Have you not got a room?"
"Cost you another quid," she said.
"Is it far?"
"Just around the corer."
"Let's go then," I said.
She nodded and went out ahead of me. Again I had an impulse to turn back. By this time I was certain that I had chosen the wrong woman-perhaps the young girl, after all....
We turned the comer and went into an entrance and up a narrow wooden staircase.
On the third floor she knocked at a door with a large brass nameplate on it. We stood for a long time before it was opened to us, first on a chain and then wide to allow us to pass in. It was an old woman with grey hair and a wart below her left eye who let us in. She pointed at once to one of the rooms on the far side of the hall. My prostitute nodded and, indicating with a motion of her head that I should follow her, went in.
It was a smallish room with a four-poster brass bed. She pointed to it and I sat down. Then she carefully locked the door. When she turned again she was beaming. She came across to me.
"Present first," she said.
I gave her four pounds. She tucked them away neatly in an inner pocket of her handbag. Then she removed her coat, revealing her large-busted figure in a green woolen dress.
She began to strip.
I watched, fascinated.
Her thighs were fat and the color of damp chalk, wounded where the split sex, almost un-haired, lay open like a mass of pale calf's liver. Her belly hung down over it in a rounded fold, abrasive as rough sandpaper where the hairs had been shaved. Crabs probably. She had not removed her brassiere.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was standing about two yards away. I had to summon up all my courage to spread out my arms, wider than her hipspan, implying without speech that she should move forward from where she stood. She did so slowly, her big blue-pink knees betraying her hesitation.
And then she halted, the ambiguous mass of her sex about six inches from my face. At that distance, every terrible flaw in her skin was visible, the pitted areas, the places where the fragile networks of veins lay close under the skin.
"Satisfied?"
For a moment the question made no impact upon me. It hovered beyond my comprehension, like an irrelevant minor motif in a bad painting.
And then, suddenly, I understood.
She had misinterpreted my desire. She thought I was examining her for purely utilitarian reasons. She had no notion of sacrifice, no acquaintance whatsoever with the sacred. I was at that moment confronted by a big stupid cow submitting dutifully to a veterinary examination! I seized her angrily by the hips to check her retreat and thrust my face squarely between her thighs. She emitted a gasp of astonishment and, grasping me by the hair, forced my head away.
For a few seconds, she looking down, I looking up, we regarded one another balefully. I hesitated no longer. Raising my feet and planting the soles of my shoes firmly in her soft, sagging belly, I kicked out with all my strength.
She cried out as she hurtled backwards across the room, big, ungainly, shock starting in her eyes. Her head struck heavily against the edge of the dressing table and, with the sound of air escaping from a soft tire, subsided unconscious on the floor.
I crossed over and looked down at her. Then, with my ear pressed against the door, I satisfied myself that the old woman had not been alerted. There was no sound.
I turned back towards the unconscious woman. Some unusual quality in the crooked abandonment of the limbs made me excited. I felt as though I were on the threshold of a discovery. Somewhere outside a clock struck seven. I approached her without articulate purpose.
Now that she was no longer conscious, no longer free to intrude her vulgarity, she was beautiful. The heaps of pink and white flesh had a warm life of their own.
With my penknife I cut through the tag which joined the two bags of her brassiere. I laid them aside and gazed down at the breasts. They were heavy, pulp-white, and filigreed with tiny red veins. The nipples were as big as olives, and crinkled as olives sometimes are, tough, chewable. I took her left nipple in my mouth and sucked it. She didn't stir.
A moment later I was on my feet again. The torso had the strange humility of the sacrificial lamb. It was a new experience for me, to have at my mercy another's body in this way. I was the priest, invested temporarily with the powers of deity, and she the brute material out of which in some act or other of piety I was at liberty to ... what precisely?
Yes, everything depended upon my skill, or rather upon my knowledge, my intuition. But there was no sudden illumination. And it was the absence of such an illumination that made me hesitate. I was in a state of awe, of lust, of frantic expectancy. I could feel myself growing hard. But what act would bring about the urgent, the mystical resolution? What does one do with one hundred and eighty pounds of unconscious female flesh? What act would express the fluency of knowledge?
The naked whore, unconscious, spread-eagled clumsily on the dirty red carpet, her breasts sagging now that the cheap pink brassiere had been cut away-these were the facts, the police court details, to which one could react in any number of ways. I could have called an ambulance or I could have thrown a jug of cold water over her-more police-court details, and not at all the kind of thing to assuage the strange unrest which had been a prominent feature of my life ever since the death of my uncle.
Priest? I sat down disconsolately on the bed again. A priest without knowledge of the sacraments. What was the use? I stared almost hatefully at the sprawling woman. But I could not bring myself to go just then.
Instead, I sat down beside her and laid the palm of my hand flat on her belly. I allowed it to ride with the movement of her breathing, up, down, up, down, and as I clenched my hand, smooth hot dough, pulsing, living. I laid my ear at her belly and listened to the rumbles within. She smelled quite clean. I opened my trousers and took out my penis. Then, supporting myself with my hands, I lowered the hot mass onto her soft, putty-like crotch. It felt good. Leaning my whole weight now on that part of me, I joggled about on top of her until I felt the spasm approaching. Then, carefully, and breathing heavily, half-afraid she would recover consciousness, I opened the lips of her sex and laid myself just inside. I grasped her big buttocks, threw my weight forward, and in three tremendous lunges brought my vital juices smoldering into her belly.
I felt better after that. It had been an interesting experience.
I withdrew, washed myself in a flowered china bowl, and arranged my clothes.
Now there was nothing for it but to go. Why waste more time? Anyway, she was beginning to stir and I had small mind to have a hysterical woman on my hands. She might even send for a policeman, or worse, for her pimp.
I opened the door quietly and gauged the distance to the door across the quiet hall. There was no one in sight. I hesitated no longer. A moment later I had let myself out the front door and was climbing once again down the flight of stairs.
As I walked again through Piccadilly it occurred to me that it would have been possible to kill her....
That was the last time I tried to come to terms with myself or with my strange passion while I was in England.
The half-abortive experience with the prostitute weighed on my mind during the following months. In May of that year I completed my studies and wrote to Elmer Lewis saying that I had now decided to return to America and that I intended to live on the old property.
After the death of my aunts, my uncle's estate had passed entirely to me, or rather, it was to be held in trust for me until I attained the age of thirty. Elmer Lewis was one of the trustees.
He replied at once saying that he looked forward with great eagerness to meeting me again and that he hoped I would always consider him as a counselor and a friend.
I traveled on the Queen Mary. The voyage in Cabin Class was entirely uneventful. I spent most of the time in my cabin occupied with two distinct but allied questions. In the first place, I was anxious to know whether Dr. Meadows was dead and whether he had died keeping my secret. Secondly, I was curious to know whether Elmer Lewis suspected (or knew) the truth, and, if so, what his attitude towards me would be.
Lewis, as I well remembered, was a highly intelligent individual and it was not at all un- likely that he had surmised the truth about Uncle Harris' death. Would he hold the boy's crime against the man. From the tone of his letter, it didn't look like it. He might know, but if he did he still seemed willing to overlook what had happened. It was not that I gave a damn what Lewis thought. I didn't require his approval for any fantastic theory of history. But as he was one of the trustees it was in his power to keep me extremely short of cash during the next eight years. I always had expensive tastes and I had only six thousand dollars a year at my disposal. More than that depended entirely upon the approval of the trustees. And so it would be to my advantage to make a friend of Lewis even though it would be out of the question for me to make him my confidant.
My confidant!
Dear old Elmer Lewis! What would he think if I told him of my intention to search out Anna wherever she was and to make some kind of unholy alliance with her? What if she was married? She might have married Inez. Yes, I remembered Inez....
What if she had children?
I was ready for all such eventualities. I would allow nothing, no one to stand in my way. Such a strange and immutable purpose was not likely to recommend itself to a died-in-the-wool liberal like Elmer Lewis. It would more likely have appealed to my dead uncle.
The thought made me smile.
It was my first intimation of the fact that in some ways my late uncle and myself were alike....
I had not expected to be met at New York.
The skyline of the city rose on the horizon out of the early-morning mist like matchboxes open and shut. As we left the Statue of Liberty astern I descended to my cabin to make ready to disembark. A steward approached me with a cable on a tray. I tipped him and entered the cabin to read it. It was from Lewis. It said shortly that he was meeting the boat.
All the better. Somehow I felt relieved to know that I should meet him again for the first time on neutral territory. If he had not already planned to do so, I would persuade him to spend one night in New York before setting out for Vermont where my late uncle's estate was located. I would pump him as expertly as I could. I wished at once to know three things:
Was Meadows dead?
Did Lewis know the truth about my uncle's death?
And, where was Anna?
I was very excited. I couldn't remember being so excited in a long time.
The familiar figure on crutches was waiting for me as I passed through customs. He looked older. His hair was white. But it was the same round, benign face with small well-modeled features, and watery grey eyes which looked kindly out from behind small gold-rimmed spectacles. The whole impression, in fact, was one of smallness. He was a smallish man, with small hands and feet, and as, leaning forward on his crutches, he stretched out both hands to contain one of mine in his, the impression one had was of limitless love and good will.
"Glad to see you again, my boy! It's been a long time! Ten years, dear me! Makes quite a difference. You've grown up to be quite a man!"
I laughed as naturally as I could and returned his warm handshake. But I was uncomfortable all the same. This little scholar had seen right through my uncle. I should have to be very careful if I didn't wish him to see right through me.
"Well now," he went on in his fussy way, "let's see!"
I waited for him to go on.
"Yes," he said. "Now I have my car outside. Traveled here by car, you know. Easier with these pins of mine to be driven. Can't stand trains! John-that's my chauffeur-is outside with the car just now. Let's see...."
I relaxed. It would be better to allow him to make any plans that were to be made. I would do my utmost to give him the impression that I was a well-mannered young man with the appropriate respect for my elders. And so I walked slowly along beside him without interrupting, an expression of polite interest on my face. A porter followed with my bags.
"I'm staying at a small hotel in Manhattan," he proceeded. "Thought it might be a good idea to spend the day together in New York ... get to know one another, ha! ha! ... and then get a good early start in the morning. How does that strike you? Not too impatient to get back to Vermont, eh, my boy?"
"Just as you wish, Mr. Lewis. I'm glad to be back. It's pleasant enough just to be back. I'm not in any particular hurry to do anything, to tell you the truth!"
"Ha! ha!" Lewis twinkled, "Glad to hear it! You're like me then! Never was in a particular hurry to do anything! Give me leisure, my books, and a few friends, and I wouldn't change places with a Sultan!"
It was an unfortunate alternative. I disagreed with him entirely, but in reply I simply laughed and nodded.
The shining Rolls-Bentley was waiting at the curb. The negro chauffeur saluted and opened the door for us.
"Climb in, my boy!" Lewis said. "You first. Easier that way with these confounded crutches!"
I did so and then the chauffeur helped his employer to get in beside me. The bags were loaded in the boot and then the car started up and moved into the stream of traffic.
"Back to the hotel first, John," Lewis said to the chauffeur.
"Yes sir."
Lewis turned his attention to me again.
For a moment he said nothing, simply studying me from behind his spectacles. I felt he was on the verge of saying something very important. He was.
"I want you to know, Saul-you don't mind my calling you Saul?"
I shook my head.
"Good," he said. "I want you to know that I know how your uncle died."
His eyes flickered behind his spectacles. It struck me that they were an asset to him. The lenses were so shaped that in certain lights it was difficult for the person he addressed to see his eyes. He, on the contrary, was able to see the other's eyes quite clearly. I felt myself reddening under his gaze.
"I tell you this at once," he went on, "because I don't wish our relationship to start off on the wrong foot. I want to put your mind at ease. I didn't want you to be obsessed with the question: Does old Lewis know or doesn't he? You know now that I know, that I understand, don't condemn, and that your secret is safe with me. And so that should get rid of any horrible suspicions between us."
"Dr. Meadows told you?"
"He told me just before he died. He thought it was better that I should know."
Inwardly I cursed Meadows. Once a murderer, always a murderer. I could imagine the old fool's reasoning. Watch that boy! He might do it again! The fact that his reasoning was valid made the situation worse. Lewis would reason in the same way. I felt he approved of Meadows' disclosure. He would watch me carefully.
"You are the only one who knows?"
"Except Anna, of course."
"Anna!"
"Yes," Lewis went on. "I imagined at the time that she must have had something to do with it. You were very much under her influence. I took the liberty of questioning her. She told me everything."
"I see."
"You see, I knew that you wouldn't have done anything like that by yourself. Dear me, no! You were quite fond of your uncle. He wasn't altogether a bad man. In fact he was my best friend."
"I'm sorry," I said mechanically, without looking at him.
He reached out and put his hand on my knee.
"But it's all over and done with, Saul," he said. "I want you to know that. Unless you feel like discussing the matter, I shan't refer to it again. You're a man now and you have all your life ahead of you. You must try to forget. What happened then is no longer important."
How blithely he said it! I wondered bitterly if he believed it.
As the car turned out of Fifth Avenue I asked him where Anna was now, making my voice as casual as possible.
"As a matter-of-fact she lives not far from your place. With her husband. She married a man called Inez, an old groom of mine. I don't know whether you remember him."
Did I remember him! The man in the copse!
I feigned ignorance.
"It was a long time ago," I said quietly.
"Of course! Dear me, you can't be expected to remember everything!" He hesitated before he went on. "As a matter-of-fact," he continued, "I told Anna you were coming. I suggested that it might be a good idea if she left the district. She agreed. She said she would talk to her husband. He's a poacher. A drunken lout. I was gravely mistaken in him. No good to God or himself. Poor Anna!"
"I don't think it matters," I said more purposively than I had intended.
His eyes flickered.
"You mean that she goes away?"
"Yes," I said. "After all, it's a bit thick to ask her to get up and leave just because I arrive...."
"Perhaps," he said reflectively. "But I really don't believe she cares one way or the other and I intend to make it worth her while. Don't worry about her, my boy! She can take care of herself."
The old meddler! Why couldn't he mind his own stupid business? So she didn't care! Well, we would see about that!
I pretended to have lost interest in the subject. I didn't want to arouse his suspicions.
"Did my aunts ever know?"
"Poor dears, no. Meadows thought it best not to tell them. Meadows took a risk, you know. He could have got himself into hot water. Accessory after the fact, don't you know?"
"I suppose so."
"But then he was an old friend of your uncle's, a good old family doctor. He had courage." He hesitated. "Well, anyway, it's over now," he said with a small laugh. "It's best forgotten. And here we are, this is my hotel. I've already reserved a room for you. I'm sure you would like a bath. Nothing like a bath to help you relax, eh?"
The car drew up outside a small but expensive-looking hotel. The doorman moved out from under the blue and white striped awning, saluted, and opened the car door.