I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories (2024)

A NIGHT AMONG THE HORSES

Toward dusk, in the summer of the year, a man in evening dress, carrying a top hat and a cane, crept on hands and knees through the underbrush bordering the pastures of the Buckler estate. His wrists hurt him from holding his weight and he sat down. Sticky ground-vines fanned out all about him; they climbed the trees, the posts of the fence, they were everywhere. He peered through the thickly tangled branches and saw, standing against the darkness, a grove of white birch shimmering like teeth in a skull.

He could hear the gate grating on its hinge as the wind clapped. His heart moved with the movement of the earth. A frog puffed forth its croaking immemorial cry; the man struggled for breath, the air was heavy and hot; he was nested in astonishment.

He wanted to drowse off; instead, he placed his hat and cane beside him, straightening his coat tails, lying out on his back, waiting. Something quick was moving the ground. It began to shake with sudden warning, and he wondered if it was his heart.

A lamp in the far away window winked as the boughs swung against the wind; the odor of crushed grasses mingling with the faint reassuring smell of dung, fanned up and drawled off to the north; he opened his mouth, drawing in the ends of his moustache.

The tremor lengthened, it ran beneath his body and tumbled away into the earth.

He sat upright. Putting on his hat, he braced his cane against the ground between his outthrust legs. Now he not only felt the trembling of the earth but caught the muffled horny sound of hooves smacking the turf, as a friend strikes the back of a friend, hard, but without malice. They were on the near side now as they took the curve of the Willow Road. He pressed his forehead against the bars of the fence.

The soft menacing sound deepened as heat deepens; the horses, head-on, roared by him, their legs rising and falling like savage needles taking purposeless stitches.

He saw their bellies pitching from side to side, racking the bars of the fence as they swung past. On his side of the barrier, he rose up running, following, gasping. His foot caught in the trailing pine, and he pitched forward, striking his head on a stump as he went down. Blood trickled from his scalp. Like a red mane it ran into his eyes, and he stroked it back with the knuckles of his hand, as he put on his hat. In this position the pounding hoofs shook him like a child on a knee.

Presently he searched for his cane; he found it snared in the fern. A wax Patrick-pipe brushed against his cheek, he ran his tongue over it, snapping it in two. Move as he would, the grass was always under him, crackling with twigs and cones. An acorn fell out of the soft dropping powders of the wood. He took it up, and as he held it between finger and thumb, his mind raced over the scene back there with the mistress of the house, for what else could one call Freda Buckler but the mistress of the house, that small fiery woman, with a battery for a heart and the body of a toy, who ran everything, who purred, saturated with impudence, with a mechanical buzz that ticked away her humanity.

He blew down his moustache. Freda, with that aggravating floating yellow veil! He told her it was aggravating, he told her that it was shameless, and stood for nothing but temptation. He puffed out his cheeks, blowing at her as she passed. She laughed, stroking his arm, throwing her head back, her nostrils scarlet to the pit. They had ended by riding out together, a boot’s length apart, she no bigger than a bee on a bonnet. In complete misery he had dug down on his spurs, and she: Gently, John, gently! showing the edges of her teeth in the wide distilling mouth. "You can’t be ostler all your life. Horses! she snorted. I like horses, but— He had lowered his crop. There are other things. You simply can’t go on being a groom forever, not with a waist like that, and you know it. I’ll make a gentleman out of you. I’ll step you up from being a ‘thing.’ You will see, you will enjoy it."

He had leaned over and lashed at her boot with his whip. It caught her at the knee, the foot flew up in its stirrup, as though she were dancing.

And the little beast was delighted! They trotted on a way, and they trotted back. He helped her to dismount, and she sailed off, trailing the yellow veil, crying back:

You’ll love it!

Before they had gone on like this for more than a month (bowling each other over in the spirit, wringing each other this way and that, hunter and hunted) it had become a game without any pleasure; debased lady, debased ostler, on the wings of vertigo.

What was she getting him into? He shouted, bawled, cracked whip—what did she figure she wanted? The kind of woman who can’t tell the truth; truth ran out and away from her as though her veins wore pipettes, stuck in by the devil; and drinking, he swelled, and pride had him, it floated him off. He saw her standing behind him in every mirror, she followed him from showpiece to showpiece, she fell in beside him, walked him, hand under elbow.

You will rise to governor-general—well, to inspector—

Inspector!

As you like, say master of the regiment—say cavalry officer. Horses, too, leather, whips—

O my God.

She almost whinnied as she circled on her heels:

With a broad, flat, noble chest, she said, you’ll become a pavement of honors… Mass yourself. You will leave affliction—

Stop it! he shouted. "I like being common."

With a quick waist like that, the horns will miss you.

What horns?

The dilemma.

"I could stop you, all over, if I wanted to."

She was amused. Man in a corner? she said.

She tormented him, she knew it. She tormented him with her objects of culture. One knee on an ottoman, she would hold up and out, the most delicate miniature, ivories cupped in her palm, tilting them from the sun, saying: But look, look!

He put his hands behind his back. She aborted that. She asked him to hold ancient missals, volumes of fairy tales, all with handsome tooling, all bound in corded russet. She spread maps, and with a long hatpin dragging across mountains and ditches, pointed to just where she had been. Like a dry snail the point wandered the coast, when abruptly, sticking the steel in, she cried "Borgia!" and stood there, jangling a circle of ancient keys.

His anxiety increased with curiosity. If he married her—after he had married her, what then? Where would he be after he had satisfied her crazy whim? What would she make of him in the end; in short, what would she leave of him? Nothing, absolutely nothing, not even his horses. He’d be a damned fool for you. He wouldn’t fit in anywhere after Freda, he’d be neither what he was nor what he had been; he’d be a thing, half standing, half crouching, like those figures under the roofs of historic buildings, the halt position of the damned.

He had looked at her often without seeing her; after a while he began to look at her with great attention. Well, well! Really a small mousy woman, with fair pretty hair that fell like an insect’s feelers into the nape of her neck, moving when the wind moved. She darted and bobbled about too much, and always with the mindless intensity of a mechanical toy kicking and raking about the floor.

And she was always a step or two ahead of him, or stroking his arm at arm’s length, or she came at him in a gust, leaning her sharp little chin on his shoulder, floating away slowly—only to be stumbled over when he turned. On this particular day he had caught her by the wrist, slewing her around. This once, he thought to himself, this once I’ll ask her straight out for truth; a direct shot might dislodge her.

"Miss Freda, just a moment. You know I haven’t a friend in the world. You know positively that I haven’t a person to whom I can go and get an answer to any question of any sort. So then, just what do you want me for?"

She blushed to the roots of her hair. Girlish! are you going to be girlish? She looked as if she were going to scream, her whole frame buzzed, but she controlled herself and drawled with lavish calm:

Don’t be nervous. Be patient. You will get used to everything. You’ll even like it. There’s nothing so enjoyable as climbing.

And then?

Then everything will slide away, stable and all. She caught the wings of her nose in the pinching folds of a lace handkerchief. Isn’t that a destination?

The worst of all had been the last night, the evening of the masked ball. She had insisted on his presence. Come, she said, just as you are, and be our whipper-in. That was the final blow, the unpardonable insult. He had obeyed, except that he did not come just as he was. He made an elaborate toilet; he dressed for evening, like any ordinary gentleman; he was the only person present therefore who was not in dress, that is, in the accepted sense.

On arrival he found most of the guests tipsy. Before long he himself was more than a little drunk and horrified to find that he was dancing a minuet, stately, slow, with a great soft puff-paste of a woman, showered with sequins, grunting in cascades of plaited tulle. Out of this embrace he extricated himself, slipping on the bare spots of the rosin-powdered floor, to find Freda coming at him with a tiny glass of cordial which she poured into his open mouth; at that point he was aware that he had been gasping for air.

He came to a sudden stop. He took in the whole room with his frantic glance. There in the corner sat Freda’s mother with her cats. She always sat in corners, and she always sat with cats. And there was the rest of the cast—cousins, nephews, uncles, aunts. The next moment, the galliard. Freda, arms up, hands, palm out, elbows buckled in at the breast, a praying mantis, was all but tooth to tooth with him. Wait! He stepped free, and with the knob end of his cane, he drew a circle in the rosin clear around her, then backward went through the French windows.

He knew nothing after that until he found himself in the shrubbery, sighing, his face close to the fence, peering in. He was with his horses again; he was where he belonged again. He could hear them tearing up the sod, galloping about as though in their own ballroom, and oddest of all, at this dark time of the night.

He began drawing himself under the lowest bar, throwing his hat and cane in before him, panting as he crawled. The black stallion was now in the lead. The horses were taking the curve in the Willow Road that ran into the farther pasture, and through the dust they looked faint and enormous.

On the top of the hill, four had drawn apart and were standing, testing the weather. He would catch one, mount one, he would escape! He was no longer afraid. He stood up, waving his hat and cane and shouting.

They did not seem to know him, and they swerved past him and away. He stared after them, almost crying. He did not think of his dress, the white shirt front, the top hat, the waving stick, his abrupt rising out of the dark, their excitement. Surely, they must know him—in a moment.

Wheeling, manes up, nostrils flaring, blasting out steam as they came on, they passed him in a whinnying flood, and he damned them in horror, but what he shouted was Bitch! and found himself swallowing fire from his heart, lying on his face, sobbing, "I can do it, damn everything, I can get on with it; I can make my mark!"

The upraised hooves of the first horse missed him, the second did not.

Presently the horses drew apart, nibbling and swishing their tails, avoiding a patch of tall grass.

THE VALET

The fields about Louis-Georges’ house grew green in very early spring, leaving the surrounding countryside to its melancholy gray, for Louis-Georges was the only farmer who sowed his fields to rye.

Louis-Georges was a small man with a dark oval face that burned like a Goya and supported a long raking nose in which an hoar-frost of hair bristled. His arms swung their stroke ahead of his legs; his whole person knew who he was—that sort.

He had fierce pride in everything he did, even when not too well executed, not too well comprehended; he himself was so involved in it.

Sometimes standing in the yard, breathing the rich air, nose up, he enjoyed his lands utterly, rubbing the fingers of one hand with the fingers of the other, or waving the hands above the horns of his cattle where, in buzzing loops, flies hung, or slapping the haunches of his racers, saying to the trainer: There’s more breeding in the rump of one of these, than any butt in the stalls of Westminster!—pretending that he understood all points from muzzle to hoof—in short, a man who all but had a hand in being.

Sometimes he and Vera Sovna would play hide-and-seek about the grain bins and through the mounds of hay, she in her long flounces and high heels, screaming and leaping among the rakes and flails.

Once Louis-Georges caught a rat, bare hand, and with such skill that it could not use its teeth. He disguised his elation, showing her how it was done, pretending it a cunning he had learned in order to protect the winter grain.

Vera Sovna was a tall creature with thin shoulders which she shrugged as if the blades were too heavy. She usually dressed in black, and she laughed a good part of the time in a rather high key.

She had been the great friend of Louis-Georges’ mother, but since the mother’s death she had, by her continued intimacy, fallen into disrepute. It was whispered that she was something to Louis-Georges. When the landholders saw her enter his house, they could not contain themselves until they saw her leave it; if she came out holding her skirts carefully above her ankles, they found the roofs of their mouths with disapproving tongues; if she walked slowly, dragging her dress, they would say: What a dust she brings up in the driveway!

If she knew anything of their feelings, she did not show it. Driving through the town, turning neither to right nor left, she passed right through the market square, looking at nobody, but obviously delighted with the rosy bunches of flowers, the bright tumble of yellow squash and green cucumbers, the fruits piled in orderly heaps on the stands. But on the rare occasions when Louis-Georges accompanied her, she would cross her legs at the knee, or lean forward, or shake a finger at him, or turn her head from side to side, or lean back laughing.

Sometimes she visited the maids’ quarters to play with Leah’s child, a little creature with bandy legs and frail neck, who thrust out his stomach for her to pat.

The maids, Berthe and Leah, were well-built complacent women with serene blue eyes, fine teeth and round firm busts that flourished like pippins. They went about their duties chewing stalks of rye and salad leaves, reefing with their tongues.

In her youth Leah had evidently done something for which she now prayed at intervals, usually before a wooden Christ, hanging from a beam in the barn, who was so familiar that she did not notice Him until, sitting down to milk, she raised her eyes; then, putting her forehead against the cow’s belly, she prayed, the milk splashing over her big knuckles and wasting into the ground, until Berthe came to help her carry the pails, when she would remark, We are going to have rain.

Vera Sovna spent hours in the garden, the child crawling after her, leaving the marks of his small hands, wet with saliva, on the dusty leaves; digging up young vegetable roots with such sudden ease that he would fall on his back, blinking up at the sun.

The two maids, the valet Vanka, and Louis-Georges were the household, except when augmented by the occasional visits of Louis-Georges’ aunts, Myra and Ella.

Vanka was Russian. He bit his nails. He wore his clothes badly, as though he had no time for more than the master’s neatness. His rich yellow hair was disheveled though pomaded, his eyebrows shaggy and white. His eyes, when he raised their heavy lids, were gentle and intelligent. He was absolutely devoted.

Louis-Georges would say to him, Now, Vanka, tell me again what it was they did to you when you were a boy.

They shot my brother, Vanka would answer, pulling at his forelock. "They shot him for a ‘red.’ They threw

I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories (2024)

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