The Other Passenger

by John Keir Cross

  But all this is not any part of the story—at least not directly. I should talk first about Kolensky and in doing so introduce Miss Thing.

  But she was Kolensky’s big Surrealist gesture. She was a creation—a personality. She was a work of Art—if you concede a work of Art is something made out of nothing—bits and pieces put together and something intangible emerging, that has or takes a life of its own. Miss Thing was that.

  Kolensky was forty or forty-five—a cadaverous man with deep sleepy eyes. Indeed he seemed always to be sleeping—to need much more sleep than most people did, yet to sleep in a heavy and poisoned way. A diabetic you might have said though he wasn’t in fact. He was a man too who seemed to have secrets. He talked seldom and when he did it was slowly and as if on guard. He wore a beard—it was one of his disguises (I did myself in those days, for there is always a time—at least one time—when you must from yourself disguise yourself. Later on you realise that when you meet your own ghost sitting quietly and accusingly on your doorstep when you go home at night, he must look like you yourself or he has, poor soul, no meaning.)

  Kolensky’s studio was at the top of a large house near Battersea Bridge. It was as it were a sort of outhouse built on to the flat roof. You ascended to it by the inside stair but the last flight was no more than an elaborated ladder that took you through a sky-light. Then you were in the open air. Kolensky’s door faced you.

  The door was painted Blue. And for a handle—well it is here that we encounter the first of Miss Thing.

  The handle of Kolensky’s door was a Hand—a white and beautifully made wax Hand. It was held a little open and at the wrist there was a small circlet of lace that covered the join of it to the wood of the door. To open the door and go in, in answer to Kolensky’s sleepily-shouted bidding, you took hold of this Hand as if you were shaking it and turned it just like a door handle—which is what it was after all. But to touch that clammy wax unyielding thing was curious—oh curious. People not like us in our valuation of these attitudes turned away.

  The Hand then was the first of Miss Thing. The other Hand was inside the studio—but let me take it all in order.

  You went in: and like as not Kolensky lay on the bed half asleep. You had perhaps gone to see some of his canvases—quite beautifully powerful things some of them—but it was not to them that your attention was first attracted. No. You saw, my friend, the Rest of Miss Thing—the Rest of the Gesture.

  The truth was that Miss Thing (it was Howard’s name for the personality she undoubtedly became in our minds) was Kolensky’s studio. He lived almost literally in Miss Thing. The only thing that was missing was Miss Thing’s face—but she needed not a face, that woman—the face is only an index—you give up faces after a while—it is only strangers you know by their faces. Miss Thing you knew by presence and implication.

  There were of course the Parts. Protruding inconsequentially from a wall was a beautiful rounded Breast of coloured wax. The other Breast stood on a table. It had holes pierced in it symmetrically all round and flowers stuck out of these like the glass things people in the suburbs use. (Daffodil time showed the Breast at its best I think. Snowdrops made it forlorn, roses made you think of Dowson.)

  In the centre of the studio was a large lovely chair with curved legs. These legs ended in two little and beautifully made wax Feet.

  The fireplace was very low. The mantelshelf was a plain long board sustained on two pillars one on either side of the fireplace. They were the wax and footless Legs of Miss Thing.

  In a corner by the inner door of the studio and also protruding from the wall like the first Breast was a small smooth feminine Belly all waxen. The Navel was a little bell-push—you pressed it and an electric bell rang away in the basement for the desolate old woman who did Kolensky’s charring.

  A big sideboard stood all along one wall of the room. Stuck on the centre mahogany panel of it were what were unmistakeably recognizable as the smooth and delicately pink Buttocks of the Presence.

  Kolensky’s bed was a narrow one and old fashioned. On top of the iron rails at the foot of it were the usual brass balls rather tarnished. Equivalently at the head of the bed (as it were overlooking the artist as he slept like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the rhyme) were bright wax Eyeballs.

  And the other Hand?—to complete the Parts?

  When you were visiting Kolensky you went perhaps into the lavatory. At the end of the flush chain and like the one on the door, half open to be grasped, was the other Hand. Here again—to their embarrassment—the uninitiate had been known to turn away.

  To us in those mad days that second Hand was the best of the gesture.

  But all of Miss Thing we loved. The whole idea was a glory. Kolensky was our king—the noblest Roman of us all. We hardly noticed his canvases. To us he was the man who lived in Miss Thing. He was the true Surrealist—the noblest and only begetter­ . . .

  And so it came about, you see, that when we numbered ourselves we numbered Miss Thing also. She was one of us. She was the unexplained presence we all at one time in our lives feel dogging us—what Keir Cross (a devilish queer friend of mine—a writer) calls somewhere The Other Passenger. A door would open mysteriously in a draught—Miss Thing was in, we said. Some fabulous coincidence impressed us—Miss Thing had arranged it. One of us lost something. Miss Thing—that occult hooligan—had hidden it.

  Those beautifully made waxen Parts all stood for a personality somewhere hidden in our own minds. Kolensky had as I’ve said created something. She—It—was The Secret Sharer, The Incalculable Factor. It was genius to have conceived her and to have carried her out so exquisitely. We grew fond of Miss Thing—we loved Miss Thing. She was our communal Familiar.

  We used to say that Miss Thing was able to defeat anyone—anyone. No one could stand up to Miss Thing. Surrealism and Miss Thing combined were uncombatable.

  Yet I have a feeling in my heart that Miss Thing was most subtly and most shamefully defeated. Howard and I were talking about it only the other night and speculating.

  What after all is Surrealism? Who was the greatest Surrealist of us all?

  Was it indeed Kolensky?

  Or was it Vera?—Vera the last and the outside edge?

  Vera was the woman Kolensky married.

  Vera—for truth.

  Vera. I write it carefully. V-E-R-A. In writing it so carefully I am confessing a weakness. It is now necessary to describe Vera. But I hedge. I hesitate. Where to begin?

  Why did Kolensky marry Vera? Was he mad? There was a theory at one time that Kolensky was mad. Or was he still in his role of King of the Surrealists?

  Where did Kolensky even meet Vera? That pale ascetic face of his surely never wandered over Putney Bridge or into Wimbledon. It never was poised over flowered teacups in villa drawing rooms. It never opened its thin-lipped mouth to receive small cress sandwiches or slices of Madeira cake. That leonine mop of Kolensky’s never rested back on embroidered antimacassars. Those large-knuckled hands never turned over the leaves of family photograph albums.

  Yet plainly it was from Putney or Wimbledon that Vera hailed. It was from Putney or Wimbledon that Kolensky like a ravenous Asmodeus snatched her. He introduced her suddenly into our company complete with her lavender scent and her cream lace fichu. And we were aghast.

  . . . She was at that time I should say nearer forty than thirty. She was small. She had a round smiling face and a prim manner. Her hair was done in a little bun at the back. When she walked out she wore black cotton gloves and a toque.

  She was the incarnation of all we gestured against. And here she was in our midst, all waiting to be gestured at. Yet somehow—

  My friend, I am a poor lost sinner. There is nothing I understand. In those far-off mad days when we lived in Chelsea and ate kippers and drank beer and daubed at canvases or struggled with monumental poems I thought in my young folly that I had an occasional inkling as to what it was all about. I thought I knew a thing or two as we stood at twilig
ht on the Embankment looking at the dying sun on the water and the big misty shapes of the pylons and sneered at Whistler and Turner. I was in my eyes an exceeding wise ancient patriarch as I juggled with Ezra Pound and Salvador Dali and turned to Dostoevsky for light reading.

  But the day of my deliverance was at hand. Vera had arrived.

  Would you believe it if I told you that she still went to chapel after she married Kolensky and came into our midst?—twice on Sundays and once on Wednesday evenings? You could see her prim small figure, like a bird’s, go skipping along Oakley Street with a Bible clasped in the chubby gloved hand. She smiled and nodded as you passed her as if you were yourself a Wimbledon spinster—yes even to Jo and to Chloe she nodded, with their sandals and home-woven skirts and enormous blood-red earrings.

  We were helpless. We did not know what to do. You see she had done, when she arrived among us, the unanswerable thing. She had accepted us. She liked us!

  She liked every one of us. She accepted every iconoclasm with a distant and patient smile. She could no more understand Howard Darby’s aphorisms than we could understand her passion for going to church. But they did not outrage her—they did not disturb her.

  Even Tania’s more suggestive witticisms were accepted. Even Chloe’s wildest blasphemous verses raised no more than a faint sweet blush.

  Poor Chloe poor Chloe! Mad, mad and with straw i’ the hair . . .

  And Kolensky?

  We said at first that Kolensky would tire of Vera. She had been, we said, a new sort of gesture. He had found her and brought her home as we used often in those days to bring things home from the junk shops—an ornate gas bracket, a hideous vase, a chamber pot with the willow pattern on it—anything for a gesture. Or she would tire of him, we said. The mystery of it all was upon us. Kolensky the polymorphous pervert (as Howard once called him) and Vera the Wimbledon Virgin. She would run away screaming. He would revolt her.

  But he did not revolt her. She did not run away screaming. She cleaned out his studio. She cooked his meals. She washed his violent flannel shirts. When we went to see him and sat into the small hours talking monumentally round every subject under and over the sun, she sat quietly knitting and nodding. She looked at him with fond soft eyes. He was we could see the most marvellous thing that had ever happened to her. He was her Golden Boy.

  She was, in short, in love with him. And I honestly think now as I look back with some sort of balance on it all that he—yes Kolensky—was in love with her. She was eminently respectable. She was gas-light and horse-hair and plush and aspidistras. She was the doyenne of a thousand vicarage tea-parties. She was Cheltenham Spa. She was Trollope and Mrs. Hemans and Charlotte Yonge and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. But she was Kolensky’s Golden Girl.

  So we nodded to each other wisely—for we had to be wise about something, with so many illusions crashing madly all round us.

  “Miss Thing,” we said smiling. “Let’s leave it to Miss Thing. She’ll destroy Vera. She will avenge us. Miss Thing is not to be trifled with. Miss Thing is not to be accepted as easily as all that. Miss Thing is a Presence and a Personality to be coped with. No one from Wimbledon can live blithely in Miss Thing and disregard her. Miss Thing will rise in her wrath and destroy. Miss Thing will smite and Miss Thing will spare not. Miss Thing is the Final Ally . . .”

  So we watched and nudged each other and waited.

  We waited.

  We waited.

  We nudged each other and waited.

  Little whispering voices ran all round us as we waited. “Miss Thing,” they said. “Miss Thing . . . She will destroy. That clammy wax Hand on the Blue door will one day rend the sweet usurper. Those Eyes on the bedpost will stare her out of countenance as she kneels one night to say her prayers. That Navel bell-push will one day summon an astonished charlady who will discover Vera insane and gibbering on the floor with Kolensky senseless with sleep on the bed and impervious . . .

  “Go to, go to!” the voices cried. “There is a rat behind the arras of that respectable chamber of Vera’s mind. And the rat is Miss Thing. Go to, go to . . .”

  We waited. We waited.

  And nothing happened.

  Vera accepted Miss Thing. The Presence seemed to be conquered. That little woman from the suburbs remained undisturbed by the monster her man had created. The Presence seemed to be conquered. On Vera’s journey there was no Other Passenger.

  But yet—(somewhere William Shakespeare says,

  “But yet” is gaoler to bring forth

  Some monstrous malefactor).

  I feel it sometimes in my bones as I look back that Vera conquered Miss Thing in thus accepting her. At other times it seems that after all it was Miss Thing that conquered Vera. The female Achilles of Wimbledon had her heel. She dusted the Parts of Miss Thing each day, she filled up Breast 2 with fresh flowers. But in her vulnerable corner she was wounded . . .

  All this, you must understand, was before they took Kolensky away and hanged him.

  But now—to the climax. It is called:

  DEFEAT

  We were sitting one night in Chloe Whitehead’s studio. It was a large room with a north light. The furniture was sparse—it consisted for the most part of drawing-donkeys set in a semicircle round the fireplace. There was no fire though it was chilly. It was one of our gestures that we could not afford a fire. So instead the fireplace was filled with beer bottles some full and some empty. On the mantelshelf was a figure of Chloe in the style of Epstein (Tania’s work). On one wall was a portrait in oils of Chloe in the style of Picasso—the Blue Period. (This also was the work of Tania.) On another wall was a mystic Arrangement of circles and lines in the style of Ben Nicholson (another example of the work of Tania).

  (The thing about Tania was that she was the only one who didn’t know that she borrowed. When she eventually got on the stage I seem to remember it was because she bore a certain fleeting resemblance to John Gielgud . . .)

  To continue:—In a corner of the studio was the little printing press on which Chloe did her poems. They were issued in extremely limited editions on rice paper with simple covers in two colours. There were some half-dozen poems or lyrics in each little book and the volumes were titled as they were issued: Opus 1, Opus 2, Opus 3, and so on. She had just finished printing the first batch of Opus 7 and was reading us the opening poem—a longish lyric in the evocative manner. The People of the Moon it was called, I remember.

  Tania lay back on the divan with her hands behind her head. Tony del Monte knelt on the floor beside her picturesquely stroking her temples. Jo Haycock was astride one of the donkeys with her eyes closed (she looked like a neat little horse did Jo—some passing fancy by Chirico). Howard Darby was on another donkey with a half-empty beer glass dangling from his hand. I squatted on the floor staring upwards at Chloe who stood leaning against the mantelshelf with her lovely hair falling down all over one side of her face and covering one eye.

  (Poor Chloe! It was impossible not to adore her with that deep modulated voice of hers and the green cat-eyes that never rested for an instant. I wonder what undreamt-of Surrealisms she stares at now in the asylum. And are they a patch on Miss Thing?)

  She read:

  The dead are quickly buried

  bury the dead

  with tall white candles for remembrance.

  Yet let us forget the candles after all

  after all we have only a moment.

  It is all an approximation.

  I could say:

  “Do you remember this, remember that?”

  But the poignancy is rare

  and is not to conjured:

  the poignancy is rare

  and is not to be perjured.

  The dead are better buried

  the candles are easily blown out

  and the room is easily darkened . . .

  (My thoughts went wandering away as the deep slow voice went on. As they so often did those days they circled round Vera. I had a vision of her rising in the
morning with her hair in a little pink net: of her cheerfully preparing breakfast: of her dusting those hideous Parts. She goes out for a morning shopping expedition—Kolensky still abed. She returns. She climbs the inner stairway and mounts the glorified ladder at the top of the house. She faces the Blue door. She puts out her soft smooth hand to grasp without a tremor that pale unyielding waxen Thing . . . Ugh! I shudder—and wonder. She accepts. She accepts! . . .)

  The voice went on:

  O you and I were meant for other things indeed,

  there was a destiny for us

  a shade of something glorious:

  some hint and echo from a greater height

  for other men to cling to!

  Our banner waves diaphanous

  is, as it were, an ancient tattered map,

  long scrawled upon but splendid,

  of countries from an old lunatic dream

  and stories never ended . . .

  (Vera with a Woolworth’s feather duster. As she works perhaps she whistles or hums a tune—a hymn tune from the Wimbledon prayer meetings or the Sunday School in which she was surely a teacher. We Are But Little Children Weak or Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam. She buys some flowers—anemones I fancy. She sets them in the Breast. She steps back with her head cocked to one side like a bird’s to admire the effect. She accepts, she accepts . . .)

  And suppose that you and I

  suppose that we

  inept and condescending

  gathered our thin resources round about

  and, in the autumn, in a willow trance,

  sounded our trite alarums to the moon

  and led our own dry ghosts but once to dance? . . .

  (Kolensky is her Golden Boy. She defeats us all by accepting. The Personality conjured up by those scattered Parts has no effect on her. The years of ingrained respectability, the anti­macassars, the plush and the horsehair, the Madeira cake and the vicarage tea-parties—they count for nothing. She is not defeated. She accepts and conquers . . .)

  And now the voice moves slightly up in tone and tempo as the climax is reached. Chloe shakes her head and the hair falls away from the lovely cat-eyes.