Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

  I said that my understanding of it was limited to rather primitive forms.

  “It is nothing to be ashamed of. Folk music is infinitely preferable, I think, to many of the so-called ‘masters.’ How eternally the world is deluded by bombast! Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky—I would exchange them all for one Mass of Palestrina’s, or this tune which we have just heard.”

  “It was certainly beautiful,” I said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes. It has some of the loveliest phrases I’ve ever heard.”

  “Yes. I’ve always felt that communication required true simplicity and delicacy, rather than volume or virtuosity. Don’t you agree?” While she spoke she parted the anemone blossoms gently and dipped the tips of her fingers into the water. There was something in her voice and manner that I found faintly annoying and which added to my reluctance to support an opinion which seemed so arbitrarily exquisite and not entirely candid.

  “Still, I suppose it could be considered a good thing that there are many different kinds of music, since there are so many different tastes,” I said.

  “Perhaps you are right. Perhaps we are fortunate that there is such a vast audience of vulgarians for the commonplace, and that it is only we few to whom the great ones wish to speak.” She lifted one of the blossoms and fondled its stem for a moment, smiling thoughtfully. “When I was a little girl I used to go in the summertime to a lake in Austria, and there were water lilies growing along the bank. I used to lie there in the sun and pluck them up. Their stems are coated with a kind of brown slime that you can strip off in your fingers. There is no more delicious sensation in the world.” She lifted her hand to her mouth and very delicately touched the tip of her tongue to her fingers. “It is a taste you never forget: cool and dark, like olives.”

  There was an unaccountable pause, and I asked with sudden discomfort, “Would you like to play cards?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “We have time for a game of Five Hundred, if you like.”

  She turned her eyes toward me slowly and smiled. “I’m sure you think of yourself as a very persuasive young man, but I am really not inclined.”

  “As ‘persuasive’?” I said.

  “I could not help noticing that when you went on your motor trip the other day you succeeded in persuading Miss Arthur to accompany you—which is really quite remarkable, considering that she hasn’t been on such a trip in months. But I think you will find me a match for you.”

  “Well, I won’t insist, if you don’t want to. I thought you might enjoy it,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She drew a handkerchief out of her sleeve and clasped her wet fingers in it, inclining her head a little to watch. “You seem to be a very nice young man. Do you write poetry?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “May I ask why you are working here?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything else I can do,” I said. “And I enjoy it.”

  “Really? I don’t think I would enjoy it at all. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “I should think it would be a most depressing kind of work—entertaining eccentric spinsters, pushing witless girls about.”

  “That isn’t quite the way I think of it,” I said.

  “Of course it isn’t. I’m sure you are very serieux. You have that strangely anxious look about you of men of principle. You remind me, if you will forgive the comparison, of a priest.”

  “I don’t think I deserve it,” I said.

  “It is less flattering than you believe.” She finished drying her fingers and spread them out like the spines of a fan, studying them gently. “Principles will bear examining, you know. That is something the young are always too proud, and too busy trying, to practice them, to discover. There was a young nun, for example, who used to be very kind to me when I was a girl. My parents were killed in the war, and I was sent to a Catholic orphanage. I was very lonely and miserable at first, and I often used to cry all night. This nun would come into the dormitory and sit beside my bed, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning, to comfort me. But curiously enough, it seemed to cause her considerable distress. I remember once, when she took me into her arms and held my head against her breast, that she was weeping. I thought at the time that it was a religious emotion—charity, or simply pity for a lonely child—as indeed it would have been accepted by anyone who witnessed it. But not long after this she asked to be released from her vows, and left the orphanage. Do you know what it was that troubled her?” She paused, creating a deliberate and skillful suspense, to which I found myself extremely vulnerable.

  “No.”

  “She wanted a child. It was an instinct whose strength she had never fully realized until she held a lonely little girl in her arms, and which she then had desperately misinterpreted as piety for as long as she was able. But she could not continue to deceive herself.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  “Because I met her many years later, in civil life, at a little mountain village in Austria. She was happily married and had three children, to whom she was joyfully dedicated. We had tea together one afternoon in Zell-am-Zee, watching them swimming in the lake in front of us.”

  “But surely it was because of her principles that she was able to make the break,” I said.

  “Exactly. Because of her examined principles. There are forms of activity which are incompatible with certain temperaments—they are too exalted, perhaps, too disciplined, or too full of temptations for one’s nature. And the person of real integrity will be honest enough to relinquish them, rather than making a mockery of his whole life, or deforming his nature by attempting to extend it too far. It is worth remembering.”

  She tucked her handkerchief into her sleeve and, while I stared at her with a vague and confused sense of dismay, began musingly to rearrange the anemone blossoms in the blue bowl. Our conversation ended with mumbled inanities on my part and an air of courteous detachment on hers.

  What a disturbing woman she is—both for the devilish insight which she appears to have into my own misgivings and the cruelly sophisticated way in which she is able to express it. I had an impression of profound and finely controlled hostility—even of threat—from her, and am afraid that in any conflict she may choose to ordain between us I will find her more than “a match for me,” as she put it.

  I had intended to stop in and speak to Lilith for a moment, as it is several days since I have seen her, but I felt so strangely debilitated by what Mrs. Meaghan had said, and was so preoccupied with sorting out its implications, that I decided not to. I must do so tomorrow, however, or she will feel that I am deliberately avoiding her; must make some effort to show that I don’t bear her any childish ill-will for her behavior on the picnic, and try to repair the bad impression I must have made on her with my own. Also, I have not yet given her Warren’s message, which I promised to do. Every time I see him in the second-floor common room, or pass him out walking, he gives me a long anxious look of inquiry, which is beginning to get quite irritating. I think I have made a mistake in allowing myself to accept the role of confidant—even to the extent that I have—and will have to guard against this indiscretion in the future. (It seems to me I have made this resolution before!)

  I am going to find it difficult to be conscientious about keeping this journal regularly, with Jung to look forward to every evening. I have read myself to sleep with it the last two nights—and what a wonderful and illuminating experience it has been! Can’t remember being so delighted and rewarded by a book since Eric introduced me to A Passage to India. Find I can’t read more than ten or a dozen pages at a time, however, as this is enormously profound and complex writing. What an original and brilliant man he is! And how unfalteringly honest—when not inspired—in his opinions! I intend to copy down every evening a passage that has been particularly significant for me, and make it a sort of text for the day. How much I will have learned in a year’s time, if I keep this resolut
ion! Yesterday, for example, in his essay on “The Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” I found these lines:

  How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole . . . psychology has profited greatly from Freud’s pioneer work; it has learned that human nature has also a black side, and that not man alone possesses this side, but his works, his institutions, and his convictions as well. Even our purest and holiest beliefs can be traced to the crudest origins. . . . It is painful—there is no denying it—to interpret radiant things from the shadow-side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naïveté, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really “final” truth that, when carried to the extreme, opposites meet.

  Can’t explain my excitement on reading this passage. It seems to me that in every line of it there is more honor, hope and pride than in anything I have ever heard from my sweetheart, my minister, my neighbors, or my officers. Maybe if I had had a father he would have told me such things. But it doesn’t seem very likely, from the way they talk about him.

  AT the O. T. meeting the next morning Bea asked if I had seen Lilith lately.

  “Not since the picnic,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to stop in every day, but something always seems to come up.”

  “Well, I wish you would. She may be brooding about it. See if you can get her outside for a while; but if she won’t go, spend half an hour or so with her in her room, anyway. She gets herself locked in there for weeks, sometimes, and we don’t want that to happen again.”

  “I haven’t been quite certain of what attitude to take about the picnic,” I said.

  “I’m sure it will occur to you on the way up.” She smiled and clapped her hands together in a facetiously pedagogical way, as if she were quoting from a text: “Frankness, and perfect self-possession, if such a combination is possible. It’s never wise to put on a great show of magnanimity—because our feelings are involved, we do get honestly annoyed or alarmed sometimes—but on the other hand we don’t want any recriminations; that’s never the way to help, or to heal. I must have said all this before, but I know it helps to hear it again, sometimes.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  I do not think I had realized, until I was obliged by Bea’s assignment to put an end to it, that my delay in seeing Lilith again was a deliberate, if scarcely conscious, postponement on my part; but I could not any longer remain unaware of the apprehension that had produced it when I found myself muttering, as I walked toward the Lodge, imaginary lines of opening conversation, in order to practice the attitude of equanimity which Bea had recommended to me. It did not prepare me, however, for the enchanting vagary which met my eyes when I entered Lilith’s room. I found her seated at her loom in front of a half-completed tapestry, her head held close against the warp in what must have been an extraordinarily uncomfortable position, smiling dreamily while she wove into the fabric her own long yellow hair. I stood staring at her for a moment with unwilling delight at the grotesque charm of the sight, until she turned her head toward me painfully, bound, as she was, to the loom.

  “It will be very unusual cloth,” I said.

  “Yes. Do you think it’s beautiful?”

  “Very. But it seems too much of a sacrifice. What are you going to do? Cut it off?”

  “Yes. There are some scissors there on the table. Will you hand them to me?”

  “No.”

  “You won’t?”

  “Part of my duty is to protect you; and I wouldn’t be observing it if I allowed a desecration like that.”

  “You are not so stern today,” she said.

  “I was angry the last time I saw you, because I had failed at my duty.”

  “And now you are more determined than ever to succeed?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can’t make me ruin my tapestry; that would be too cruel. It was to be a present for you—a throw for your bed. I made it especially for you.”

  “Why?”

  “To make you dream.” I stood smiling at her, thinking what little avail it was to “prepare” oneself for an interview with such a creature. “What will you do, then? Leave me chained here by my hair until I starve?”

  In spite of my determined composure, her words created in my mind a weird and unpleasantly compelling image: a heap of silver bones fallen beside a moldering loom in a silent sunny room, and, hanging by its shining hair from the dusty, unfinished tapestry, a skull, to which her shriveled features had shrunken in a blind, eternal mask of pain.

  “No, I won’t do that,” I murmured. I went to the table and found her scissors among a litter of paintbrushes and jars of powdered pigments.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m going to cut the threads and set you free.”

  “Oh, that will be very difficult.”

  She turned her face toward me and watched solemnly as I knelt beside her chair and cut the warp threads one by one, prying the strands of her hair from between them.

  “You are very gentle,” she said.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  She gathered her freed hair in her hands and shook out the braided strands, looking ruefully at the clipped threads hanging in the loom.

  “Do you know how long I worked on it?” she said.

  “No.”

  “All. morning. For hours.”

  “Then it’s time you got outside for a while. Come and take a walk with me.”

  “I can’t go outside today. There were crows in the poplar trees this morning.”

  “And what does that signify?” I asked.

  “They were sent by my people to warn me. But we can go down and sit on the veranda, if you like. It’s very pleasant there.”

  “All right.”

  She followed beside me silently, barefoot, along the corridor and downstairs in the elevator to the ground floor, where, while I sat watching her from one of the wicker armchairs, she wandered quietly among the greenery, pausing sometimes to touch leaves with her finger tips and set them tremblingly astir, or to purse her lips and blow gently at the petals of begonia blossoms.

  “Is it all right for me to go on trips again?”

  “Yes, I think it would be good for you.”

  “I thought perhaps they wouldn’t let me, after the picnic.”

  “No one said anything about it,” I said.

  “And you haven’t lost your job.”

  “No. They’re very kind, wise people here.”

  “I’m very glad. You said that you might; and I would have been very sorry if you had left.”

  “Well, I haven’t,” I said. “So nothing bad has come of it at all; and the next time you can go along with an easy conscience.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “They punished me for going.”

  “They punished you?”

  “Yes. I told you they would, for disobeying them.”

  ‘What did they do to you?” I asked.

  “They wept. It’s how they always punish me; they come and kneel at my bed and make it shudder with their sobbing. Does that seem like a mild punishment to you? If it does, you have never heard anyone that you love weeping.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “I’ve heard my mother crying.”

  “Have you?” She turned toward me with a look of tenderness that I could never have imagined in her face. “Why is she unhappy?”

  “She isn’t, now,” I said. “I hope she isn’t, anyway.”

  She stood silently for a moment and then came and sat beside me, holding in her hand a little spiral of vine that she had plucked. Outside the veranda I heard Howard Thurmond shouting, “Zotz, zotz, zotz!” and shrieking with laughter. I sa
w him through the screen, running across the lawn toward the drive and stopping to fling horse chestnuts at Mandel, who ran after him, his arms lifted to protect his face. “Die!” Howard shouted. “Zotz, zotz, zotz! You’re dead! You stink! You’re rotting!”

  Lilith raised her hand and held it in front of my eyes to block my sight. “Don’t listen to them,” she said. “Give me your hand.” When I hesitated she lifted my hand from the arm of the chair and, separating my third finger, slipped the spiral of vine over it, like an old-fashioned serpent ring. I turned it idly between my thumb and finger tip, and said in a moment, “Tell me something, truthfully, will you?”