The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

“Oh, Poky has done her worst. Now she has made us welcome.”

  “If you trust her you’re mad.”

  They went. The full dropping summer days passed and trees hung out the golden bough. The Parsons had decided to go to town for the winter and return the next spring. Bill Jermyn, meanwhile, making a sketch of his own plan, was sending down two brothers named Imber to stay, look around, see what could be done to make the cottage watertight, to extend it, make it habitable for a small community. As the villages in this part of the Delaware country declined in workers, and farmers, like the ten sons of Farmer Thornton, went farther out to the plains because of big-scale farming methods, the derelict farms and follies were becoming the homes of workers in the arts. Jermyn was shaping up his idea of planting small semi-socialist, self-dependent artistic communities.

  The brothers, Frederick and Walter Imber, high-school teachers, aged thirty-four and thirty-two, were indistinguishable at a distance, of great breadth and density, large limbed, moving heavily, vain of their strength. They were good-natured men, timid about their neighbours, about infringements. They did their own housework, and spent the day outside idly, but with an innocent pretence of hard work, while they agreed with each other in long discussions of political theory. They were vegetarians, abstainers and, untrained as engineers or architects or cooks or farmers, they attempted to supply their needs and their friends’ needs with their own hands. They made plans for a dam and a waterwall to proceed from the dam and protect the house. But, they said, this water-wall would have to be well based in the earth, rocks at the creek’s right angle would have to be blasted, the whole creek would have to be dug deeper, thus ruining the charm of its rocky shells and saucers dipping down and the first heavy rain turning the trickle into a torrent would probably flood the road. The whole thing needed planning, not to mention permission from Mr. Dilley, and the Township.

  The Imbers decided to go ahead with it at once. They began to dig a new channel for the creek through the old berry patch. The trench filled with water and they were pleased. At once they had another idea. “Broaden and deepen the creek bed all the way along: you’ll lose some three hundred square feet of land, but the rest will never be flooded and the track will be safe from flooding.” They began on this immense project, with picks and shovels, and at once faced the tangle of elderberry, poison ivy and poison oak and other weeds whose strong woven roots held the soil together. “The creek will be the natural barrier, though we don’t want a barrier. The water will keep the Strassers’ chickens and stray cattle and dogs away. So we’ll get rid of all this spinach,” said Fred Imber, sweeping a hand over the vines and bending and thrusting the other hand into the deep tangled green.

  “Be careful: you’re in poison ivy!” said Clare. At this both the brothers burst out laughing. Walter came running up and Frederick said, “Surely an intelligent woman like you doesn’t believe that superstition! It’s created by the imagination: it’s psychosomatic. You fear it, so you get a rash, or whatever you want to get.”

  “Well, the country people and the farmers believe it,” said Clare: “and I believe it, I’ve had it.” “Yes, they’ve talked it into you. Surely you know there’s no one more ignorant than yokels and farmers. I’ve heard country people say the mushrooms all disappeared because they were pulled up by the roots.” Frederick laughed. “I’ll show you,” he said. He threw himself down into the poison ivy and rolled about in it. “You’ll see, I won’t get a spot.” He took handfuls of the bright ivy-shaped leaves and rubbed them over his face and neck, laughing, bathed his hands and arms in it, opened his shirt and rolled his barrel chest in the leaves, face and palms down, embracing the ground. “See, see!” he cried; “I feel nothing. You’ll find out it’s pure superstition. I don’t believe in it, so I won’t suffer from it.” He turned over laughing and lay back among the plants. All around the poisonous plants moved softly, shone about him. “I’m going to sleep in it, let me have forty winks,” he said smiling. “To sleep, perchance to dream!”

  “Good excuse, isn’t it?” said Walter. Clare looked, “Don’t lie there!” Frederick reached out, plucked branches of the vine and twined them around his neck and face, and put a twig in his mouth. “Now under the vine, in the arms of the vine I sleep,” he said.

  Sam Parsons could not stir him. An hour or so later, his brother, who had kept on with the trench, brought him in to the house, uneasy and somewhat ill. His skin everywhere was marked with a crowded red rash, trails of pinpoint spots marking the places of sprays and lengths of vine that he had worn.

  “Don’t send for the quack,” he said; “I’ve heard he’s an old alcoholic; all he ever knew was washed out long ago; and besides this is a psychosomatic rash, not a real one. What can he do? Let me sit inside for a while till the sun goes down; then the rash will go away; it was brought on by the sun. If you have some water, a fruit drink.” He drank and began to walk up and down, through the house, standing in the three porches to get the cool air, keeping out of the sun. “At sunset it will go. I am just dyed by the sun. I’m flushed, I have a sensitive nervous skin,” he said.

  At night, they sent for the doctor; and that night too, the light was on many hours in the glen, till the ambulance came for the sick man. He died a few days later. His brother went back to the city distraught and deeply puzzled.

  One day in September, they posted a letter to Mr. Dilley asking his price for the place. “We may as well have a refuge somewhere.”

  That evening she was at the leaky pump pumping water into the kitchen sink when she trod on something that felt like a mouse or bird. She moved hastily, slipped in a pool of water and fell, breaking her arm.

  “Look at my funny arm,” she called out to Sam Parsons who was in the stone house. He did not reply. She got up and walked to the door of the stone house. “Sam, I’m afraid you’ll have to go for the doctor.”

  Sam set out. It was a dark starry night, slightly windy, the full treetops moving. Animals moved, the owls screeched. Sam with the lantern, an uncertain firefly on the track, stumbled and wove his way from the patch to the bridge, from the bridge past lower fields to the hilly track and so to Thornton’s. Thornton took him to town and from town he came back with the doctor. All this took two hours. Meanwhile Clare with her arm suspended from the neck in a scarf, walked around the house putting on all the lights: the many bright windows of the cottage shone out like a lighthouse to all sides of the glen; and she sat and drank a bottle of wine. Presently, the doctor came. “And tomorrow you must go into town for an X-ray,” he said. He was drunk, but he operated quickly, smartly. The patient was drunk too, and the whole thing passed off very well.

  In the morning they sent for a taxi and went to the station with their luggage. Mr. Thornton came early in the morning, a bright warm morning, for the keys. “You can have them any time; I’ll keep them up at home,” he said cheerfully.

  “Thank you. I don’t think we’ll be back this year,” said Sam Parsons.

  On the track at the bridge, they turned and looked; the cottage, copper-rose, brick-red, nested close in the green, spellbound, smiling. “Oh, what an enchanting place. We must come back next summer,” said Clare. “Look, that is where poor Fred Imber dug his trench.” The trench was still there, with a little water in it. “It looks horrible,” said Parsons. “Let’s get out of here. We are not coming back next summer.”

  “Look at it now! Oh, how lovely.”

  “Let the little brass guitar sing to someone else next summer.”

  “Oh, how superstitious you are, after all.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Every summer the cottage enticed some new transient. The Thorntons, mother and daughter, laughed at the strange people; and talked about what they would do with the cottage when it became Maureen’s, when she married. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I’ll see,” said Thornton. “Remember that poor girl is still alive. We won’t touch it yet.”

  Girl from the Beach

  NEW YORK: LATE FOR
TIES

  George Paul came to see the Deans, man and wife, soon after dinner. Tall, ample, muscular, blue eyes in a red boyish face, thick bronze hair in a brush, he was fifty years old, but walking like a young man from the exercises he did to keep fit; and energetic, a restless worker. He looked tired and anxious.

  “No, no food, no drink. I am on a diet my Paris friend Bercovici gives me. Coffee, tea and wine keep me awake. I take them if I must sit up all night to finish an article, but they give me a headache. I always have headaches,” he murmured, looking towards Laura.

  He sat down in an armchair, clutching the arms and looking about as if ready to jump up; he did jump up and walked about.

  “I told Martin,” he said to Laura, excusing himself. “I explained that it was a long story and if you hadn’t the time, I wouldn’t come at all. But I’m in trouble—and it’s one of those times when it’s better to tell someone. I’m in love, madly in love—with this girl Renee, and I’m miserable, wretched; I don’t see a solution. She promised to marry me, but I’m afraid I can’t hold her. It’s this woman she’s living with; an invalid with the clutch of an invalid and an ugly woman. When an ugly woman gets hold of something, she sticks to it. You begin by pitying her; you’re lost. Every defect, every flaw and every weakness has its cunning. You know that?” he said violently. “We say the handsome use their looks. The ugly use their looks; and the sick use their sickness; and old age uses its age. Don’t pity anyone. I wake up every night at two or three o’clock. I think, I’ll do some work. I jump up, drink some milk and start to work. I never lie there and torture myself. I work. If there’s a solution, it will come to me while I’m working. But that’s enough! I must get back to normal. My friend Bercovici gave me some pills. He understands me. I take one of these pills; I feel better. I think, That’s it. It was nonsense; I’m out of it. I start my work. An hour later, my face feels wet, it’s like rain. The stars are out, it’s fine weather, the moon is up. It’s so bright that I can work by moonlight. The rain is tears. I’m crying for her without thinking of her at all. I can’t say to her, My mind’s breaking up—I’m wasting months: one word from you and I’d be well. I can’t ask for sympathy. Besides, I think she guesses; she says she suffers too. I can’t beg! I can’t do it to her.

  “I woke up suddenly last night, after about two hours’ sleep. The sheet’s torn right down the middle. I mended it myself, but it keeps ripping. I tossed about pulling up the sheet, but I couldn’t make it come up; and I said to myself, There’s such a fighting in my heart. It came to me, out of my trouble. But isn’t that from Hamlet? Yes, but it came to me, in the silence. I live in silence; but with me there’s no real silence. Either I’m working out one of my stories, or I’m talking to her. I tell her everything. I explain everything to her. Everything she says start up an idea in me, a complete idea; it spreads out on both sides, like a landscape. That’s the effect she has on me. And in silence, I explain all this to her. I talk to her in silence. I love her so deeply: in silence.

  “No, it can’t go on,” he said, pulling out a handkerchief and wiping his eyes. “My eyes water. It’s an injection I had against tetanus. I go to places—there are dogs.” He put away the handkerchief. “I fought it for months. One day I said to myself, it’s love and I’ve loved her since the first time I saw her. I stopped short and thought about it. There’s a time when you do that. You stand at a signpost: Danger. After this, no going back.

  “Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen,

  Und ich lache mit—und sterbe.”

  George turned around, stood in front of the couple and smiled, “I was happy! I was happy. You know I’m irritable—I don’t like ugly old men and women. I hate old age. When I was a child, not four, my grandfather and grandmother came to see me. I was a favourite child. They sat near me, bent over in dark clothes, and they smelled of old clothes, old bodies, old hair, old snuff. They had red eyes, hands with brown spots, hairy nostrils. They tried to sing old songs to amuse me. My grandfather even had a fiddle with a thin squeak and he would caper; while my grandmother had a mannish laugh and wore starched white lace round her thick neck. They invited me to dinner and tied round my neck a stiff damask napkin that smelled of the cupboards and old oranges stuck with cloves they kept there; and their house too smelled of mould. I used to run out of the house and halloo, pretending to be a lively boy; and I ran in at the last moment to kiss their dry cheeks. When they died, I was relieved. I was not cruel. I was a kind boy. Well—last year I was kind to old men and women who annoyed me, even to an aggressive waitress in a café I go to. I can’t stand her: I’m always rude to her. But last year I was nice to her, I was so happy. I didn’t ask anything of Renee at first. I was in love and I was thinking of all I could do to help her. And I thought, I have never been in love before, never with the sweet feeling of forgiveness and trying to understand everything.”

  He walked up and down. “And now! What I have been through! What I have suspected her of! And it’s I who suffer. She has her own troubles. Too many to think of me. Then I spend days forgiving her for what she never did, for the insults and mean things I invented in my trouble. I shall go mad; I believe I shall go mad. I go on inventing things about her—why she stays away from me, why she hesitates. And the situation is simple. I know what it is. I told you it was a long story. Do you mind? I can go.”

  “No, no.”

  The couple, a short dark man and a middle-sized fair woman were about George Paul’s age; and they had met years before.

  George Paul took a deep breath, then said, “What is it, I wonder? A deep breath is like drinking the lake, it gives you happiness. I was so happy last year, like a boy—but as a boy,” he said angrily, “I was not happy. Now I have had a year of torment. My head thumps, the nerves in my brain are on fire; I can feel where they run and see them, thin red-hot wires. I know where they go, I can see the pattern, I can see their fiery tracks! I sleep an hour and wake up to feel them burning all round my brain. Perhaps I’m on the verge of brain-fever? I have been so bad for six months, up half the night, working in the daytime; and she doesn’t get in touch with me or write to me, she puts me off. She says, I’ll see you in two weeks. I jump and I shout, Two weeks! I’m angry and stamp off. Next time I see her, she says, I’ll see you in two weeks, and watches me, to see what I will do. I smile, Yes, all right. I go back home and smile. I fooled her. I didn’t stamp and shout. I am quite happy and calm. Then I begin to suffer. I suffer horribly. It goes on and on, week after week, month after month. I can’t afford it. I had grippe. I got well. I had grippe again. It took me longer to get well and I am weak. Look at me,” he said, turning to them. “I look strong? I’m weak. My work’s slipping. I have too much to do and everyone wants work or money from me.”

  “But why does she torture you?” asked Laura.

  “She doesn’t know she’s torturing me. She’s only a girl. She’s being tortured too. She sent me a letter—that’s why I came—I have it, I brought it. I suppose the woman has been at her. See what she says.”

  He gave Laura the letter and took a few steps away and back, ruffling his hair with one hand.

  It was a small sheet of fine-grained paper on which the words were written in an imposing girl’s script.

  Dear George, The woman who married you would be a miserable wife. You have been married before. You never made a woman happy. Where’s the hope? I’m sorry. I’m not happy now, but what have you to offer me? I couldn’t bear any more wandering. That’s over for me. I have a home and a job. lt’s over.

  Renee.

  “Those are not her words,” said George. “And now I have to go through the whole thing again, argue with her, argue her out of her fears, tear her away from that vulture. Again and again. I don’t mind. At least I see her, talk to her and win her. But as soon as I go away, she turns from me. I’m exhausted. It’s her goodness. She’s sorry for that invalid. I never could endure invalids. They live on others. They’re not ashamed of anything; they beg, lie, che
at, fake; and everyone is taken in. Because,” he shouted, “because we have an instinct, look after the weak, an instinct which betrays us to them. She is being betrayed into a life of degrading servitude, a bond-woman. She’ll regret it. She’ll end in suicide. She never had anything. Her mother was selfish. Renee says she led a selfish life and now she wants to be of use, and she doesn’t mind if it’s degrading servitude. It’s abominable. I can’t stand a domestic drudge. Renee wants to do everything for the woman. She cleans up after her. I saw a spoiled carpet—Renee tried to wash it. I ran out of the house. She says to me, I can’t live for myself, as my mother and I did before. If I could have a child, children, she says, she’d be happy. If she could have children without marrying, she’d just bring them up, she says; and she might be happy. If I could forget myself, entirely, have no future for myself. That is what has been talked into her. I won’t have children. It’s the big illusion of every woman. As soon as she has a child she lives only for it; the husband doesn’t count. I said, If you have children, you won’t love me as much, you won’t love me at all. She said, Oh, what a terrible life, what a terrible empty life. If she loves me why does she want children? If she can live for this warped invalid, why not for me? It’s these formulas women learn; obey your parents, a woman can love only one man, a woman must have children. I won’t have it, I told her. The night is for work or love or talk, not for squealing brats. And I am sure no charming refined girl like her—how could she want disorder and wet laundry everywhere? Marriage is different, marriage is passion; it’s between a man and a woman. If a woman wants children, she doesn’t love the man.”

  “There’s truth in that,” said Martin Dean.

  “She loves me, she said so,” said George.

  He stood in front of them again, searching their faces. “I must tell you everything; it has come to the point where I must or go mad. I’ve waited months and months, seven months, a cruel tease, a tease,” he said vehemently, “and she doesn’t mean it, I know, although I accuse her to myself. What am I to do? What can I do? She promises and promises and then they get her—it is like someone calling out from a wood; a trapped girl. She calls, she comes half out, she is called back again. And she is in the wood, this mythical wood, with that woman. I need you, the woman says. Her name’s Ray. I have nothing, Ray says; all my life I have been a burden. I had infantile paralysis and I wish my parents had let me die. You are all I ever had. It disgusts Renee, but it calls her back.”