Progress of Stories

by Laura (Riding) Jackson

  The night before the morning of his release, he was given the freedom of the prison. He thought that it would interest him to sit in the receiving-room and read the records of some of the prisoners with whom he had made friends, and as a man of superior intelligence he was permitted to do this. He settled down to study the history of his cell-mate, Jacques, a quiet, somewhat educated working-man serving a year's term for the murder of a woman whom he had loved and who had loved him, but who had wanted their relations to remain of a purely spiritual character. The jury had found him guilty of murder 'under provocation'. Jacques had been a delightful cell-mate. He had thought about everything, and come to interesting conclusions. About poetry, for example, he said that it was a mistake for poets to write as if they were happy. This misled people into looking for happiness in poetry and being puzzled by its melancholy effect upon them. All the really great poets had made it plain, he said, that poetry was something depressing. From really great poetry people expected nothing.

  Emile learned from his study of Jacques' record that his mother had been an 'entertainer', of English birth, his father a waiter in Wagons-Lits. Jacques was described as being of refined speech and behaviour and the victim of a conflict between his class and his ideas. The murder had not been characterized by exceptional brutality. His only previous offence had been a quarrel with a gendarme who had tried to separate him from a woman of the streets who seemed to be annoying him. He had taken the position that he had a right to deal with the woman himself in a rational way. In this instance he had been sentenced to ten days' imprisonment for interfering with a gendarme in the execution of his duty, but the sincerity of his motives was appreciatively noted. The record read almost like a certificate of good character. In three weeks Jacques would be free. Emile resolved not to neglect him. Jacques only needed someone to do his deeper thinking for him: he was inclined to over-simplification. He had a working-man's natural impatience with the intellectual confusion of his intellectual superiors. Emile would reconcile him to intellectual confusion. Emile was quite calm now about the change in his relations with his old friends. He knew he was dead to them. He had stood sponsor to them in the universal course; and, with the tact that inspires all guardian spirits, he now planned to withdraw and leave them to enjoy their prosperity free from any cumbrous sense of indebtedness. The last stage of his own earthly existence he would pass as inconspicuously as possible, practising his incurable virtue of patronage in obscure paths where bodily disintegration would not make him seem ridiculous.

  For Emile had begun to disintegrate. He did not walk, but rather felt himself pushed along. He looked down at his feet and turned them cruelly in absurd directions: they were only a pair of shoes. While Emile was in the midst of these almost jocular reflections, Suzanne, the famous flower-girl, was brought in. Everyone knew her from her picture. She was old, healthy and wicked, and always wore a man's hat, and always carried a large sea-side umbrella under which she sat herself in all weathers, as in a stall, and always had violets to sell at any season of the year. Along with violets she also sold drugs; indeed Suzanne had turned 'violets' into a disreputable word. She had never been arrested for selling drugs, but she was regularly arrested several times a year for concealing in the flowers slips of paper bearing indecent remarks and sketches, or messages that might be interpreted as libels against the person who bought the flowers—to present them to perhaps a mother or a wife or a fiancée or some other object of either respect or affection. In this way, of course, Suzanne established a reputation as a cynical jokester and averted suspicion from the real nature of the folded slips of paper concealed in the bouquets which she sold to habitual purchasers; and as she kept changing her pitch frequently, it was impossible for any of her purchasers to be identified as habitual. Sometimes a gendarme would catch a purchaser in the act of extracting a folded slip from his bouquet and wink knowingly at him as he put it away slyly in his pocket for future examination. Sometimes a gendarme would buy a bouquet himself and present it to some friendly young woman, just for fun. And sometimes, as has been explained, a respectable gentleman would innocently suffer embarrassment and bring a charge against her. It was in consequence of such a charge that she had been sentenced to these three weeks' imprisonment. Suzanne was thus on terms of familiarity with the police, which meant that they left her alone as much as possible, a necessary protection in her trade. While she was in prison they always treated her well. They gave her congenial, light jobs to do, such as cleaning the cells of prisoners who could afford luxuries and whose standing with the prison staff permitted them to enjoy them. Prison officers divided prisoners into two classes, those whom they liked and those whom they didn't like, and discipline was administered accordingly. Human nature, and not crime, was the chief element of prison atmosphere.

  Emile felt this strongly as he watched the behaviour of the prison officers with Suzanne and of Suzanne with them. He had heard about Suzanne from Jacques, whose mother had been one of her drug-children, as he expressed it. She had often kept his mother in 'milk', though aware that money was a somewhat romantic idea with her that might or might not materialize. She had also looked after Jacques when his mother had work or in those crazy periods when she 'got lost', taking him with her on her floral rounds. It was through her influence that he had got his apprenticeship in a lock-making establishment, and she had never held it against him that he had become a locksmith rather than a burglar. Suzanne was good. Emile, watching her, felt an almost professional bond with her. She had the same air of incurability as himself.

  They were introduced to each other in the receiving-room and seemed to understand each other at once. Her blue-eyed wickedness was merely, he argued with himself, a facial caricature of her internal goodness; and she, for her part, forgave him his soft-hearted handsomeness because he had a disagreeable speaking voice, sharp with suppressed egotism. He accompanied her to her cell together with several prison officers, old friends of hers. On the way they paid a visit to Jacques. She and Jacques would be coming out at the same time. It was like leaving Jacques in her care. Suzanne gave Emile an address at which to deliver her basket and umbrella the following morning. She had been allowed to sprinkle her flowers and cover them with a wet cloth. How happy Emile was as he walked out of the prison, carrying Suzanne's basket and umbrella, to have something new to do and somewhere new to go. Nor did he allow his mind to be weighed down by feelings of resentment towards his former protégés. He had already forgotten them. He was floating at last in a diamond-coloured sphere where nothing was of any significance except his own consciousness of his own incurable virtue. "I am immortal," Emile sang to himself. Immortality consisted of ecstatic sensations of unashamed self-love. It was like dying. After death immortality was swallowed up in eternity. Then one swam into the self- destroying spheres of a higher and more virtuous being than oneself.

  At the end of a year Emile was still dying, still in the grip of immortality. Everyone with whom he now associated had the same pride of knowing better than other people the way life yielded to higher and higher activities. They were mostly, except Jacques and Suzanne, criminals; but rather in the sense of understanding other people better than they understood themselves than of doing them harm. On the contrary, their attitude to other people was tenderly impersonal. They were the guardian spirits of their victims, educating them with the least possible violence in the larger realities. Indeed, what other people called crime was only their incurable virtue. They were good, as he was good, as Suzanne was good, as Jacques was good. They had ideas. They had liberated themselves from the crude laws of physical habit. Suzanne was not exactly a criminal; she was more like himself—a soul as well as an intellect. Jacques, on the other hand, was a simple creature who had raised himself above the common plane of life to a not much higher plane of dissatisfaction with life. Strange as it might seem, he was not a criminal because he was not good enough; he had only become good through an unnatural effort of intelligence. Criminals were natu
rally intelligent, and because they were naturally good. They were above other people by having grown tired of life before they grew dead; and this capacity for growing prematurely tired was a moral gift, not, as with Jacques, an intellectual accomplishment. Emile and Suzanne were even higher up in the sub- eternal scale than criminals. They were lovers of their own virtue; they prized themselves as well as their philosophy.

  By such reasoning Emile's new life was endeared to him. He gave up his apartments and made a cheerful home for himself, Suzanne and Jacques in another quarter. He had far more and far livelier friends than before. He was no longer called 'poor Emile'. Suzanne in her turn gave up violet-selling. Jacques studied law and achieved fame and respectability as a criminals' advocate. He won his cases by the deference with which he publicly treated the people he defended and by his ability to communicate to juries his conviction of the superiority of his clients over himself and other people in general. The coupling of crime and degeneracy was a vulgar fallacy that infuriated Jacques and Suzanne and Emile and all their circle. Emile even went so far as to assert that the spiritual mate of degeneracy was not crime but art. What shocked them most was to hear that someone was trying to go straight. For this meant moral suicide: the incurable virtue could not be plucked out without destroying the moral body. Emile, feeling towards his end an old man's sentimental indulgence towards bygone associations, hanged himself on a peg in a railway lavatory rather than violate his latter-day ethics. He had, in fact, accidentally run into one of his old friends and they had had several drinks with each other, both taking such perverse pleasure in the encounter as is natural when two people who have once been friends meet as strangers, expansively indifferent to each other's affairs. Emile had spoken with ungrudging openness of his new life, the other had discussed his work with nonchalant vigour, and they had planned to dine together in a few days, his old friend promising to hunt out in the meantime other available old friends, to join them.

  Suzanne had been upset when he told her about it. She did not scold him, which was a tragic token that he should have known better. When someone in their circle did something that he should have had sense enough not to do, he was expected to redeem himself by suicide. Otherwise they were obliged to kill him themselves, which meant damnation. Emile recognized that he was passing into eternity. He went to the dinner knowing that life was all over for him. He had not clung to life, life had clung to him. Perhaps his old friends needed him again, and perhaps it would have been gratifying to be of some use to them. But the time had come to close his heart finally and let his mind float higher, deaf to mortal appeal, deaf even to the dear private music of his own immortality—float up into the silent heavens where the individual soul melted into the nameless master-soul with whom the incurable virtue, intelligent interest in others, became that rarefied activity: merely to watch.

  At dinner with his old friends Emile spoke movingly of his criminal associates, with difficulty restraining tears. He could see that he bored them and that they thought him decrepit and silly; but it no longer mattered what people thought of him, or indeed what he said, or indeed what he did. He tottered out of the restaurant without saying good-bye, leaving them convinced of the complete disintegration of a once superior intelligence. There was nothing to say of him. He was not even 'poor Emile' to them now. He was nothing. To everyone he was nothing. He got into a taxi and drove towards the railway station. He felt full of adventure and wondered what train he should soon be riding in on his way towards nothingness and commingling with the intelligence superior to all superior intelligences. At the station he decided that a train was not necessary. It was still more exciting to let nothingness come and fetch him. He hanged himself with a fresh white neck-scarf (in the last stage of his life he had dressed even more fastidiously than before), taking off from a pipe that ran along the wall and enabled him very conveniently to reach the coat-peg as well as to miss the floor by a mere stretch of his toes. Nor did death in any way disappoint him. He was utterly dead and he knew that he was utterly dead and more sublimely incurable than he had even imagined it possible to be. In fact, the sublimity of this state would not have been endurable if he had not felt that in its loneliness he was united with the immense self of selves presiding quixotically over all wasted endeavour on behalf of others.

  DAISY AND VENISON

  DAISY was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination. She was what most people with imaginations would call still-witted. True, she had no money cares. But her life was not a monied life; her happy ways were obviously not connected with her having no money cares. She lived by herself in an abandoned house that belonged to nobody and that she had been able to take possession of without ceremony because nobody wanted it. It was somewhat in the mountains, above a small, characterless town; she had found the key in the door and walked in.

  Venison was the daughter of the once richest family in that town. This was her real name, given her by her mother because when she was born she had a freakish, gamey look, and her father had said, "She'd have an odd taste, not like ordinary meat." The name had an odd but pretty sound. And Venison had turned out odd-looking, but pretty—as a spoilt photograph is sometimes quite pretty. She spoke little, took a morbid interest in herself though she was not really a thoughtful girl, and stole from people. One day she stole from her father. When she had stolen from other people he had always laughed heartily and said, "It brings out the worst in people to have something stolen." But when she stole from him he said, "Get out of my house, I don't want to live strange!" 'Living strange' was how he described anything that made people different from animals. He didn't mind stealing in itself, but he minded problems and discussions and attitudes and in general all brain-activity. If he gave Venison a clout on the head for taking his drinking-money out of the tobacco-jar in which he concealed it from her mother, there would be talk about the propriety of a father's striking his daughter, about the merits and demerits of physical punishment for moral offences, about the propriety of concealing drinking-money in a tobacco jar— about what not? So he merely told her to get out of his house. To her mother he said, "I'm tired of that girl." Her mother gave her a hoard of gold pieces that she kept concealed in a sock in her sewing-basket, and advised her to get Daisy to take her in.

  Daisy took her in, almost without noticing that there was a new person in the house. Daisy continued to do all the work, but treating Venison less as a guest than as a flaw that had developed in her happiness, which she must accept uncomplainingly along with it. Venison spent her time sitting in comfortable positions indoors or out of doors. As she had no clothes but delicate Sunday ones, it was a pleasure to Daisy to have her about, as she liked to have illustrated magazines in different places in the house, though she never read much or bothered much to look at the pictures. Somehow, by sitting about in comfortable positions in Sunday clothes with nothing to do, Venison found herself making up stories and then writing them down daintily in her lap—as a summer visitor writes letters under a sunshade, looking as nice as possible and not really occupied. Her stories were mostly about people who did not altogether moral things that turned out well and therefore seemed, after all, right things to do. She had never travelled and so could invent all kinds of strange places without being limited, as travelled people are, by knowledge of certain places only. Nor did she know much about people. But as she was a timid, somewhat wicked person herself, she thought of other people as being like herself, only a little bolder. She did not think of wickedness as wickedness, but rather as the stuff people were made of, like flesh. Thus, without any knowledge of life or geography, she gave an impression of wide experience in her stories. With a little training in grammar and literary style she would undoubtedly have bee
n a successful author. Her one serious failing was that she could not write above love. She could not write a story with more than one important character in it, whom she thought of for the moment as herself; with love there had to be at least two important characters.

  Venison wrote story after story. For a long time this did not affect the course of her life with Daisy. The stories were packed away in the dog-basket in which she had brought all her things. There were two air spaces in the basket and Daisy filled them with putty to keep the dust out, then painting the putty over with gold paint. The dog-basket was kept in the store-room. Practically everything in the store-room had gold paint on it somewhere. Everything in Daisy's house that was not of immediate use went into the store-room; and being put into the store-room made a treasure of a thing—this is why practically everything there had gold paint on it. Venison had never been in the store-room, although it stood between her bedroom and Daisy's. Venison was not interested in the house she lived in. She was not even interested in Daisy. The house and Daisy supplied her with comforts: she was only interested in the comforts. For example, she never went into the kitchen; she did not know what the shed where the washing was done looked like inside. It did not worry her that the house or Daisy might have secrets. If it had secrets, she preferred not to know them. It was more convenient to trust Daisy. She had handed over her gold pieces to Daisy when she came. She had not allowed herself to think that Daisy would do anything else with them than spend them on her comfort. Nor did she ever wonder, during all the years she lived with Daisy, how long her money had lasted.