The Lydia Steptoe Stories

by Djuna Barnes

  She laughed and said, “Very well, I know where there is a beauty, and if you’ll go with me I’ll get it for you, but you must not tell, because you are your mother’s darling and hope, and,” she added suddenly, leaning down and looking into my face, “you are the link that binds them together, forever and ever.” And I said I guessed so, and I felt all hot and excited and fearless.

  She went away then to the house, and I stood by the trough dipping my hand in, so anyone seeing me would think me careless and occupied and would not question me.

  The stable boy went by. “Growing up, kid?” he said, but I did not answer him. Presently she came out of the house carrying a basket on her arm. She came up to me and I looked in it and there lay one of father’s South American pistols—one he had used when he was in charge of one of the more important of the canals; the pistol with the dull, dangerous, smoldering look of passion. And then we walked toward the woods saying nothing. Presently she gave me the pistol. “Now remember, be careful, and shoot only if there is danger.”

  She went on ahead of me, singing under her breath, the two braids thrown back where I could see them, going down, down beyond the place for braids.

  Presently she began turning the moss over with a stick and picking up things, green and damp and pretty, but nameless. The swamp water was black and thick. She went nearer and nearer, holding her blue dress up about her ankles, stepping over the black, wet stones—her feet kept sinking in, and she moved them softly and quickly. The skunk-cabbages were standing up out of the swamp angrily, all colored a boastful green.

  “Do you love your mother?” she asked soon, and I answered:

  “Yes. My father is a great man—”

  She said: “Do you want to grow up some day like your father, and marry a beautiful woman and have a son to tie you together forever and forever, so no other beautiful woman can tear you apart?”

  I said: “No beautiful woman could make me lose my head.”

  She laughed right out loud and stood up, looking at me, and said: “You are a baby—younger than I had imagined—”

  “I’m old when I’m alone.”

  Then somehow, all of a sudden, everything got tangled up. She turned her head toward the swamp, screamed and slipped, and I saw a little water snake leaning over a rock, turning his tail around in a curl, and I saw the two yellow braids bent and funny and not straight as they always were and she fell against me, the gun went off, and the snake disappeared and I heard people shouting and running and my mother’s voice high above everything: “Now she is trying those tricks on your son!” And her face was over me, looking as if the something terrible and tremendous that I had been waiting for, had happened—then I forgot—

  October second:

  We are not going to have hunting parties anymore. My father has put away all the guns and he sits on the porch for hours staring at the sun. My mother walks in the garden cutting flowers for the house.

  Cousin Elda is gone. I guess she is leaning out of her window again, watching the water on its way to the sea.

  I am not going to write any more in my diary, it is a girl’s pastime—besides it hurts the wound in my side.

  P. S. My mother’s sisters talk more than ever about punishment for men—and it seems to be some man near the house here.

  Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age

  September seventh:

  I must face the fact that I am no longer a young woman. I am a widow, mother of two thoroughly dressed, handsomely educated, spiteful daughters. Nevertheless I am starved. I am starved for youth. There must be, I tell myself, new worlds to conquer; there simply must be. It’s only right.

  When I was a child, and had curls down my back, I realized that it was horrible to be a child. Now that I am a matron, I realize that its horrible to be a matron. But I must not admit it, even to myself, I’m so volatile. In this year alone I’ve read Frühlings Erwachen, A Night in the Luxembourg and Salomé in Greek. Successively I’ve burned, buried and mutilated them, but their message flames in my soul, only I can’t read the message until the fire burns down. I must have patience.

  September eighth:

  I am about to confess in a big way. This is my confession. I have an unsatisfied, insubordinate gland somewhere about me, the same identical gland, I’m convinced, that produced the Blue Bird and gave that determined look of cheerfulness to the Hapsburgs. I think it is called the infantile gland; any way, there it is. It must have its day.

  September ninth:

  I have been all around the border of my lake. Leaning down I drew ever so many water lilies to me, crushing them against my heart—but my better nature bid me let them go. Then I gathered a handful of gravel and started tossing it at the goldfish, until it dawned upon me that I was satisfying an impulse to cruelty in a small way. Now I am resting under the sun-dial trying to calm my riotous nerves. As I sit I toy with a fallen maple leaf. Life and the seasons are so implacable, aren’t they? They are here today and gone tomorrow, it’s so splendid and heartless!

  My God, as I sit here I realize that I am perishable! O if that brute of an Einstein had only taken a fancy to my relativity! Time and space are my enemies. If it were not for time, I should not be dangerous, and if it were not for space, I should not feel so limited! How cruel is reason! How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is meditation! How subtle is the lack of reason!

  September tenth:

  I said that I had made what was possibly my greatest confession. I lied! This is it: I am a girl, a mere child, amid my years. I have a sweet, forgiving nature, and I long to exert it, the trouble is that I’ve forgiven everything and everybody three or four times. I want to exert my womanly impulses, but there are so many womenly women exerting theirs, what chance have I who am no longer what I was?

  On the other hand, of course, I have my feline qualities. I long to stretch out, at full length, on a couch, and hear men moaning about the corridors because I am indisposed. Ah how charming! I yearn to take up art. I feel, with my natural untrained instinct, I could mean a great deal to some new movement if I could only get it before it had moved much.

  Then I want to be a psychic. I think there are ever so many messages just lost in space, waiting for a friend. For instance, I get a number of undefined feelings in a single day. Only yesterday I was mute with a sense of impending doom. The sense, or the doom, I don’t know which, ran right through me. It was colossal! Might it not have heralded something of import? Perhaps it meant that red shoes were giving way to green; perhaps it presaged new dimensions; perhaps it meant there will be no more war. How can one tell? And I must know. I’m that way.

  September eleventh:

  Today I went driving. I got down at the park and went among those strangely innocent children one always sees in parks, pulling the swans about by their tails, sticking pins into the fish, and sitting on dogs. My arms were full of Little Elsie books, and a few copies of the Story of Mankind for those who are interested in retaliation. But no one seemed to want them.

  I had half a dozen of those little rubber balls on elastic that come back at you, no matter what you do. These were for children at the breast. I sat a long time by the duck pond watching my reflection in the water, thinking on the inhumanity of man.

  I was about to reenter my carriage, still thinking it, when my attention was attracted by a very young man. He could not have been over twenty-five. He had that peculiar dazed expression seen on the faces of immigrants who have been stunned in a foreign country. He might have been a Russian, a Swede, a Pole, an Italian, a Frenchman, he might have been anything. I did not know. I got hurriedly into my carriage and, directing the coachman to the Shelborne for tea, kept my eyes firmly fixed on the middle of his back.

  September twelfth:

  Today I returned to the park. I came empty handed, to be free, untroubled. “Alice,” I said, “be vibrant, you are still young, you love life. A woman is as young as she looks, a man as young as he feels.” “Alice,” I said,
“be a man, pull yourself together. You still pulse with the eternal scheme of things. You know you do.” But my pulse tires me!

  September thirteenth:

  I cannot leave the park alone. I have become passionately attached to it. I sit by the pond and my thoughts revert to the young man of a day or two back. He was so manly. The perfect gentleman, so experienced without having learned anything, so tender and yet so racial. I think he would make my daughter Mariann, a fate second to none. I must meet him socially.

  September fourteenth:

  The welfare of my daughter is close to me—he is sitting on the bench just opposite. He is reading something. Is it Lettish, Finnish, Swedish? How beautiful is uncertainty!

  September fifteenth:

  All is well. My brother Alex happened to know the young man. He had no sooner set eyes on him than he exclaimed: “As I live, Prendaville Jones!” Imagine my delight. Prendaville Jones! The name is alive with possibilities!

  September seventeenth:

  The whole family has met him. Mariann has lost her appetite, she avoids me. Can it be that her heart has learned that secret gesture called love?

  September eighteenth:

  I have made a perfectly ghastly discovery! Oh, I can’t write it! It has sent me to bed where I now lie writing it. The ink has dried on my pen for the hundredth time. I cannot put pen to paper. I am wrapped up in arnica and my head is done up in towels. Near at hand are the smelling salts, the Social Register and a guide to Monte Carlo. I am not myself.

  I light cigarette after cigarette, and cast them all into that space outside my window that I used to call nature. Now I will not recognize nature. I have turned the lights off and on twenty times trying to calm myself. In vain! I am a moral and physical menace to human nature. This is it: I am in love with Prendaville Jones! I, a woman of forty, know once again the anguish of spring, the torture of love! I sleep badly, I scorn food. The fires of jealousy leap through me. I thirst for my daughter’s life! My own daughter! And now I know what I must do. I don’t want youth. I don’t want passion. I want those dear, dead days that I used to spend thinking of my lost youth, imagining I wanted it back. I want those long, pleasant, unproductive moments with my Elsie books and my water lilies. I want those hours spent in mild, unfertile thoughts of danger. I want those basking, middle-years among my beautifully worn out acquaintances. I long for rest and the non-eventful forties. I tell you, I want to be untroubled once more.

  This is what I am going to do. At midnight, on the hour, I shall dress myself in my lace dressing gown, and, taking the paper weight with the picture of St. George driving out the dragons on the reverse side, I shall go down though the tall grasses, as a matron should, who is encased in her implacable years, and there, at the pond’s edge, cast myself in. No one shall know that I blossomed again at the age of discretion.

  For I cannot bear the return of youth. It’s too much, I am too tired. I shall kill myself!

  September nineteenth:

  I have killed myself!

  About Faber Stories

  Faber Stories, a landmark series of gem-like volumes, presents masters of the short-story form at work in a range of genres and styles. From precious rediscoveries to gender-playful fictions, fabular futurism to uncanny imaginings, there are stories by a new generation of Faber authors alongside Faber classics. Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

  Robert Aickman: The Inner Room

  Brian Aldiss: Three Types of Solitude

  Djuna Barnes: The Lydia Steptoe Stories

  Samuel Beckett: Dante and the Lobster

  Alan Bennett: The Shielding of Mrs Forbes

  Petina Gappah: An Elegy for Easterly

  Sarah Hall: Mrs Fox

  Kazuo Ishiguro: Come Rain or Come Shine

  P. D. James: The Victim

  Thom Jones: Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine

  Claire Keegan: The Forester’s Daughter

  David Means: A River in Egypt

  John McGahern: The Country Funeral

  Lorrie Moore: Terrific Mother

  Edna O’Brien: Paradise

  Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man Is Hard to Find

  Julia O’Faolain: Daughters of Passion

  Sylvia Plath: Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom

  Sally Rooney: Mr Salary

  Akhil Sharma: Cosmopolitan

  About the Author

  Djuna Barnes was born in 1892 in Cornwall-on-Hudson in New York State. In 1912 she enrolled as a student at Pratt Institute and then at the Art Students’ League, and while she was there she started to work as a reporter and illustrator for the Brooklyn Eagle. In 1921 she moved to Paris, where she lived for almost twenty years and wrote for such publications as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Nightwood, written in 1936, was her second novel. It is now considered a masterpiece, praised by T. S. Eliot for its ‘great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy’. Her other works include A Book, a collection of short stories, poems and one-act plays; a satirical novel, Ladies Almanack; and a verse play, The Antiphon. She died in New York in 1982.

  Copyright

  First published in this single edition in 2019

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  ‘The Diary of a Dangerous Child’ first published in Vanity Fair, 1922

  ‘The Diary of a Small Boy’ first published in Shadowland, 1923

  ‘Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age’ first published in Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, 1924

  This ebook edition first published in 2019

  All rights reserved

  © The Estate of Djuna Barnes, 2019

  Series design by Faber

  Cover illustration © Sophy Hollington

  The right of Djuna Barnes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–35467–2