Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  As quickly as he appeared, he vanishes.

  Presently there comes a sound from faraway of young men singing. There is a cadence and a dying away to the sound. Are they marching?

  Oh Shenandoah, we long to see you

  How we love your sparkling water

  And we love your lovely daughters

  From these green hills to far away

  Across the wide Missouri

  Oh, Columbia, our blessed mother

  You know we wait until you guide us

  Give us a sign and march beside us

  From these green hills to far away

  Across the wide Missouri.

  What? What about the women?

  Women? How will it be for women?

  In order to understand that, you must first understand the strange thing that happened to the human race. It is an event which you people had an inkling of but then turned upside down and inside out for your own purposes.

  It is the secret of life, the most astounding and best-kept secret of the ages, yet it is as plain as the nose on your face, there for all to see.

  You were onto it with your doctrine of Original Sin. But you got it exactly backwards. Original Sin is not something man did to God but something God did to man, so monstrous that to this day man cannot understand what happened to him. He shakes his head groggily and rubs his eyes in disbelief.

  The great secret of the ages is that man has evolved, is born, lives, and dies for one end and one end only: to commit a sexual assault on another human or to submit to such an assault.

  Everything else man does is so much bushwa and you know it and I know it and everybody knows it.

  Women have only just now discovered the secret, or part of it, the monstrous absurdity of it. Can you blame them for being outraged? Yet even more absurd are their pathetic attempts, once having made the discovery which men are too dumb to make, to pretend it isn’t so, to cover it up, or to blame it on men.

  What the poor dears discovered is the monstrous truth lying at the very center of life: that their happiness and the meaning of life is to be assaulted by a man.

  Ah, sweet mystery of life indeed, indeed yes, exactly, yes indeed that is what it is: to be rammed, jammed, stuck, stabbed, pinned, impaled, run through, in a word:

  Raped.

  The meaning and goal and omega point of evolution is at last clear. It was obscured in past ages by the servitude of man. The poor bastard was so busy surviving and mainly not surviving, starving and dying, that only recently has it dawned on him what an extraordinary apparatus he is. He was decent because he was overworked.

  Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

  Why do you look at me like that? After all, the facts are elementary. They are as every biology student knows: of the three million species on earth the human female is the only one capable of living in a state of constant estrus; of having an orgasm; of making love face to face with her mate.

  Ha, it’s funny in a way, women liberated and educated, free at last to learn the truth, and the truth? That she is the only creature on earth in perpetual heat. What a discovery! That she is good for only one thing.

  Eye to eye, face to face, belly to belly, breast to breast, day in and day out, in heat the year round—there is the omega point of evolution! A comedy isn’t it, women trying to escape that? That’s like a hen wanting to be a hawk. A lioness, yes, a lioness can do it, for she is a lion most of the time, fighter and hunter, and only periodically hikes her tail.

  But a woman? She is your omega point. Take such a species, the human, give it a two-hour work week and a life expectancy of a hundred years and it doesn’t take a genius to see what God has in mind for man.

  What hath God wrought? Hm yes.

  Suddenly things became clear. The pornography of American life is not the work of evil men. No, it is the sensible work of clever men who have at last fathomed God’s design for man.

  By the way, it is not true that Americans are by nature the most pornographic people on earth. The Russians and the Chinese are simply behind times, busy catching up. Ha, wait till those buggers get the forty-hour week.

  THE GREAT SECRET OF LIFE

  God’s secret design for man is that man’s happiness lies for men in men practicing violence upon women and that woman’s happiness lies in submitting to it.

  The secret of life is violence and rape, and its gospel is pornography. The question is, Can we bear to discover the secret?

  Do we have to accept the verdict of evolution, that the omega point is sexual aggression, the giving of it or the taking of it?

  The Jews in the Old Testament knew the secret: that man is conceived in sin.

  Then what shall we do about it?

  You say we are redeemed. Look out there. Does it look like we are redeemed?

  The storm? You don’t like my theology. I see. Oh, you want to know what happened that night. Yes. Well, I can tell you that quickly. It doesn’t really matter now.

  When I woke, the eye had passed and the south wall slammed in with what must have been a line of tornadoes. Under the rising keening of the wind came a new sound as of a thousand diesel towboats rumbling down the river. Wind whistled through the holes of the pigeonnier like an organ loft. In a flash of lightning I saw Belle Isle. The oaks were turned inside out, white as birches, but Belle Isle stood steady and serene. I thought of the heavy old fourteen-inch attic timbers straining and creaking against their iron straps and bolts.

  The woman was still there. She stood up. I noticed without much interest that she looked different. Now she looked less like an obscure relative, a voluptuous middle-aged aunt who has survived some forgotten disgrace, than—my mother! Or rather a photograph of my mother which I remember studying as a child. She gazed at me with a mild, equable, even a slightly puckish expression. The snapshot showed some V.M.I, cadets and their dates grouped around, sitting in, leaning on, a 1925 Franklin touring car. It was after graduation and a military wedding. The bride and groom are facing the photographer. She wears a loose-fitting dress which comes exactly to her kneecaps and a wide lace collar. Her hair falls to her shoulders, where it curls up. The other girls’ mouths are painted in bows but my mother’s mouth is pale. Her wide brows are unplucked. In her prankish way she is proferring an unsheathed sword (her date’s? the groom’s?) to the photographer. The sword is upright, the blade held in her hands, the hand guard making a cross. Is she doing an imitation of Joan of Arc leading her army, cross borne aloft? Whenever my mother’s friends spoke of her, they used words like “wonderful sense of humor,” the “class clown.” “imp,” and so on. She had two close friends. They called themselves the three Musketeers.

  The woman stood. It was the same woman. She was saying something, her lips were moving, but in the storm I could not hear her. Her expression meant something routine and self-deprecating like: Thank you so much, but I don’t want to be a bother. She turned and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t open. It was then she gave me the sword—

  The sword? Ha ha. It was the Bowie knife.

  Then she looked like my mother again, and when she gave me the Bowie knife, she picked it up from the desk and thrust it at me point first in the same insistent joking way my mother would bore her sharp fist into my ribs.

  Again she tried to open the door. It must be the wind, I thought, holding it shut. But when I tried to open it. I saw that an oak limb, a thicket of leaves and branches, had blown against it.

  Ah, she gave me the knife to cut the branches and free the door.

  You can’t go now, I yelled above the shriek of the wind and the roar of the diesels on the river. Her shrug and nod I took to mean: Very well, I’ll stay at Belle Isle.

  Very well, I’ll take you over. But then I thought of something. No, you stay here, it’s safer, there are fewer trees and it’s safer here under the levee.

  Yet all the while I was doing what she asked me to
do, in the obliging way, you know, that you do something when Miss So-and-So asks you to, trying to open the door, my face down and getting my shoulder into it.

  I’m sorry, I said, but—

  But when I stood up, she was gone. Not wanting to be a bother, she must have stepped past me.

  I was standing, thinking, and looking down at the knife in my hand. It was three o’clock. There was an orange cannonade of lightning in the southern sky but you couldn’t hear the thunder. As I watched, the last bonfire blew away, a very strong symmetrical one built of heavy notched willows like a log cabin, tapering to a point, the four corners secured by thirty-foot tree trunks as straight as telephone poles. It blew away, exploded silently and slowly, the timber springing apart like a toothpick toy.

  I was sitting at my desk fiddling with the knife. My head felt light and there was the feeling of freedom you have when you recover from a high fever. It is possible, one realizes, to stand up, walk in any direction, and do anything. Did the sensation have something to do with the low pressure? The barometer Margot gave me now read 27.65 inches. That’s very low, I thought, as I fiddled with the pencil. No wonder I felt queer.

  Presently I got up and found a hunting coat with big side pockets and a pouch in the back for game. I put a flashlight in the side pocket. By opening the door a few inches, it was possible to use the knife as a machete and hack through the oak branch sprung against the door. How did the woman get out? The knife flashed gold in the lightning. I felt its edge. It was sharp as a razor. Who had sharpened it? I looked at the knife and put it in the game pouch of the hunting coat, the point of the blade stuck down in a comer, and tied the drawstring tight across the flat of the blade.

  I stepped outside. The noise was bad but the wind was not bad until I reached the corner of the pigeonnier. Then it blew my mouth open, hollowed out my cheek, and made a sound across my mouth as if I were shouting. I fell down. Above me I could hear the organ sounds of the wind in the holes of the loft. The glazing must have blown out. After several tries at getting up, I discovered it was possible to walk by turning sideways to the wind and planting a foot forward. It was like walking down a steep mountain. Something was cutting my cheek. It must have been rain because it was not cold. My mouth blew open and again I fell down but managed to crawl into the lee of a big oak stump. I didn’t remember the stump. The keening and roaring was not a sound any more. It had turned into a lack of pressure, a vacuum, a silence. I sat in the roaring silence for a while. The stump was tall. I didn’t remember the tree. It must have been one of the oaks in the alley. It looked as if it had been sheared off fifteen feet above the ground by an artillery shell. I turned on my flashlight and looked at the sign in the tourist parking area, ADMISSION $5.00. A pine needle had blown through it. I sat for some seconds trying to understand the physics of it, how a limber pine needle can blow through a board.

  The doors to the cellar were on the north lee side of the house, so it was possible to open one. I went down into the darkness, not using the flashlight at first. The two-foot brick walls were like earthworks. The storm died suddenly to a muted uproar, a long steady exhalation. But there was another sound, a creaking and groaning, like the timbers of a ship in a heavy sea. I realized it was the fourteen-by-fourteens in the attic far above.

  Walking slowly toward the Christmas tree, I felt with my foot for the recess. When I reached it. I sat on the edge of the concrete and waited, hoping that dark as it was I might still be able to see something. After a while it became possible to make out a glimmer of pipes against the dark. Standing, I felt for the top pressure gauge and held the flashlight close to it. It read 38 PSI. I closed the valve below it watching the needle fall to zero. I propped the flashlight, slanted up, in the wheel of the bypass valve. The big Stillson wrench wouldn’t move the gauge at first. I was afraid of breaking it off but finally I was able to get a purchase on the fitting below the gauge. It took all I had to start it. When it came off, I tried the three-inch Gerona nipple. That was the trouble. Naturally the plastic nipple didn’t fit the threaded metal sleeve but simply abutted it. The Gerona pipe could not be threaded so there was nothing to do but make a crude abutted joint and seal it as best I could with PBC compound and many wrappings of duct tape. A bad job but it should hold against the low pressure.

  The rest was simple: a ninety-degree elbow and three ten-foot sections of the Gerona which reached to within a foot of the main intake duct of the new fifteen-ton Carrier. Using the Bowie knife, I sliced off fiberglass insulation until metal showed. Then, using it like a chisel and the Stillson as a hammer, I made an X in the sheet metal and bent the corners in. Then drive a nipple into the opening—take care not to lose it!—and connect it with the Gerona system with a sleeve and another nipple. Slice off more fiberglass, pack it into the crude joint, seal with compound, and wrap the whole with the rest of the duct tape, perhaps fifty feet or so. The difficulty was propping the flashlight at the right angle.

  How strange memory is! Do you know what my memory records as the most unpleasant experience of that night? The damn fiberglass. Particles of it worked under my sleeve and collar. It makes my neck and arms itch just to think of it. Death’s banal, but fiberglass in the neck is serious business.

  I switched off the light and sat leaning back against the chimney gazing up into the darkness and waited for the compound to set.

  Then I opened the valve. The gas made no sound in the pipe. At least I could not hear it, but I fancied I could feel a slight shudder in the ten-foot sections of Gerona. Naturally there was no smell because the captan which gives house gas its characteristic odor had not been added.

  Sticking the knife and flashlight back in my hunting coat, I picked up the two kerosene lamps and went upstairs in the dark.

  At the top of the hanging staircase in the upper hall it was pitch black. But I knew every inch. A foot or so (I reckoned) from the cathedral chair I set down the kerosene lamps and put out my hand—yes, it was there, the chair. I listened. There was no sound but the murmur of the storm and the creak and pop of the timbers in the attic, as if Belle Isle were laboring through heavy seas. Somewhere a window glass broke. There was no sound from the bedrooms.

  I went to each door, Troy’s Margot’s, Raine’s. At Raine’s door there was a different kind of murmuring, an overtone to the storm. A weak watery light flowed through the crack in the door.

  I felt along the wall until I touched the air-conditioning register. My hand felt nothing, but when I put my face against it, there was a cool breath against my cheek. There was no odor. It could have been air.

  For a long time I stood at Raine’s door. I can’t remember whether I was listening or thinking or doing nothing. What I remember is that it was possible to stand there at least twenty minutes, hands at my sides, without fatigue, registering the sensations of my body. My heart was beating slowly, my breathing was deeper than usual—was it the low pressure of the storm? The storm roared softly like a conch shell over my ear. The fiberglass was beginning to bother my neck.

  Then, taking some thirty seconds to do so, I opened the door. So well did I know every inch and quirk of Belle Isle that without thinking I put a slight strain upwards on the silver doorknob while turning it because the heavy door had settled on its hinges and the latch did not move easily.

  The door opened at the rate perhaps of an inch every five seconds. The first thing that came into view was the curio cabinet next to the iron fireplace, then a corner of the bed. The light probably came from an electric camp lantern set on the floor. The weak light seemed to radiate in rays, like a child’s drawing of light.

  Once several years ago, passing in the hall, I heard Elgin in this bedroom conducting a tour, eight or ten Michiganers. “This cabinet was sealed up before the Civil War.” There was a marvel about it which Elgin saw and the tourists liked and I hadn’t thought of, this small volume of 1850 air trapped and sealed in glass. Elgin had a sense of the legendary. “These little bilbos you see still have General B
eauregard’s fingerprints on them.” Bilbos? Where did he get that? He must have meant bibelots, the little bric-a-brac figures.

  The door was opening without a noise. Or if there was a noise, it could not be heard. The storm beyond the shuttered widow was like a heavy surf.

  There was the Ray-O-Vac lantern, not on the floor but on the bedtable, shedding a small cone of rayed light.

  Troy Dana was lying prone on the far edge of the bed, naked, his face buried in the pillow.

  Raine was standing at the window, even though the shutters were closed and locked. Lightning made yellow stripes through the slots. She wore a short hip-length nightgown—shift?—which left her legs bare. Her legs were short but well developed. She looked like a fourteen-year-old girl who had spent twelve years dancing.

  Appearing silently beside her. I thought to startle her, but she turned to me as if I had always been there.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  “What?”

  “The hurricane.”

  “Yes.” All one could see through the shutters were the heaving and whitened oaks.

  “Look at that faggot. Passed out. OD’d. In this lovely hurricane.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  “Oh sure, unfortunately.”

  I saw too that she was drunk with something not alcohol. Her face was close under mine and her breath had a sweet chemical smell. Her voice was not slurred but low and bell-like. Her eyes winked gold in the lightning. The only sign of intoxication was her incapacity for surprise. Whatever happened was the occasion of a mild disconnected wonder, my appearing—or General Beauregard appearing.