The Tunnel Read online

  They ate by a window, looking out at the fishing boats rubbing shoulders with gray P-T boats moored to docks walled off with barbed wire.

  They were married two weeks later.

  Down in the valley, the train whistled again. Her feet felt cold, and she ran to the window. Thick as the fog that had shut out San Francisco, a mist had closed in over the orchard, and she couldn’t see. It was difficult to find the cups and spoons and teapot in the dusk of the cluttered kitchen.

  The memory of the crabs had frightened her. She began to think that the train in the valley was going in the wrong direction at that time on Sunday. She tried to recall just why she had left the warmth of the living-room to enter the clinging shadows of the kitchen and make tea.

  Chapter 2

  Dr. Cameron Olessa was wrong. The difficulty wasn’t in writing your thoughts, it was knowing where to begin.…

  Natalie Sherrett was a woman with a body attractively formed, a body composed of flesh and blood, a neat, nature-manufactured composition which was capable of most peculiar pains and pleasures.

  It was easy enough to set that down, but after that point in your writing, you ran smack up against one of those barriers of which Cam had spoken. Having accepted your body as a reality, you began to wonder where that strange thing called the brain crept in. How much did it have to do with the pains and pleasures? Also, what about your soul? Were you going to travel through this thing without a soul—whatever that was—or would you take along the soul as excess baggage?

  Just let your thoughts flow free!

  Why?

  Well, principally because the officers who hung around the canteen in California had a synthetic word—snafu—which translated and cleaned up for public consumption read, “situation normal, all fouled up.”

  That stopped you, didn’t it? Just try to be honest with yourself right here. The word wasn’t “fouled” and you knew it. Also you knew equally well that if you sat at the desk for a thousand years you could never force your pen point into putting the right word down.

  What word?

  Skip it. It’s not important. It’s not a specific thought. It’s an objection to voicing certain things for one reason or another, so it will answer the purpose equally well just to voice the objections instead of saying the things.

  Pull yourself together, Nat, and let’s see what you’re trying to do.

  I am trying to achieve complete self-expression.

  Why?

  Oh, quit asking yourself silly questions! Let’s get down inside of yourself and show yourself to yourself, even if such a process does nothing more than to prove that for once in your life you’ve really done something on your own.

  Like an engineer?

  Yes, that’s a very good analogy. Like an engineer who has to understand every gadget, lever and wheel on a locomotive before he understands what parts of that locomotive are making such an infernal racket under stress and strain.

  You must write of your fantasies, past and present, and you—the writer—will know which of these things are true and which are false. Just let your thoughts flow free.

  Locomotives.… Toot—toot, whee—! Here we go now, boys and girls, speeding along on the railroad track bound from here to hell and gone and heading into another war full of filth and guts and dirt and blood, galloping along with the Gallup poll without even time for intercourse in Lower Ten.

  Listen to the commentators screaming up and down the track at a thousand dollars a minute, trying to kill my present husband as they killed my former one.

  Read the clever columnists filling my mind with I don’t know what. Is it true or false, that stuff they’ve written on the back of the menu in the dining car at a thousand dollars a column?

  My God, I can’t even find the time to learn whether they’re true or false. I have to save money. The price of food on the menu is so high. If I can’t even write the truth myself, why do I believe everything I read? I can wreck my life by believing it’s going to be wrecked. I can wreck the country by believing it’s going to be wrecked. I can wreck myself and everyone else in the country by being too lazy to think.

  Why am I believing this? Can I believe the things that I write myself? Half the time the papers are wrong when they say it’s going to rain! I’ll be detached. Let’s have truth, let’s have order, let’s look at this thing with long-range vision. Everything has a beginning. Then what’s the beginning of chaos? You’re riding with the country, Nat, and the country’s entered a tunnel. The question that must be decided is: how did you get on the train?

  Let’s start at the beginning, like the fairy stories.

  Once upon a time there was a little girl named Natalie Strong and she lived in a great big house in Washington. Her father was a famous lawyer and very rich and she had everything in the world that any little girl could want, except a mother. Her mother had run away when Natalie was very young. Consequently, Natalie was very lonely and had no one to play with, except a knight in armor named Sir Gwynneth. Listen in at the same time, kiddies, tomorrow afternoon and see how little Natalie played with Sir Gwynneth in the hall. Your correspondent would tell you how she used to be raped by a northern general, except that they’d cut us off the air.

  Just let your thoughts flow free!

  Nat went to a wonderful boarding school in La Jolla, California. She roomed with the most beautiful and talented girl in the world—a girl named Mona. And there, while she was still in school, she met a wonderful boy named Paul. She’d like to tell you how she married him and settled down and had seven children, except that it didn’t quite turn out that way. Nat found out what a stinker he was.

  Just let your thoughts flow free!

  She met another knight in armor—Robert Helms—only instead of armor he wore a uniform. He was a bit of a stinker, too, but she married him. He had a neat habit which she simply adored of getting her into a position where she was wearing nothing at all. The world was very beautiful until somebody shot through his armor and killed him in the war.

  It must have been then that she boarded the train. She was certainly on it when she heard that Bob was killed. It went through a tunnel and when it came out she met her present husband there, Trevil Sherrett. Also Trevil Sherrett’s mother.

  The trouble was easy enough to see when you put it down. He loved his mother better than Nat. When his mother died, he turned that love not to Natalie, but to Mona Desmé. Now he wanted to kill her and marry Mona. But she didn’t intend to let him. She’d kill him first and save herself for Robert Helms. They couldn’t have killed Bob—his armor was too thick.

  It was all very clear and not nearly so difficult to write as Dr. Olessa had made it out to be. She was on the train until Bob returned. The train, with the country, had gone into a tunnel of darkness. Unless Trevil killed her or she killed him or she killed herself or she found out the truth, it was in the tunnel that Natalie Sherrett intended to stay.

  The idea was to ferret out the truth. This was just a synopsis she was writing. Get away from the synopsis and she immediately ran into problems. Dig. Dig. Dig. Let loose the old stream of consciousness stuff, Nat. If you’re all tied up with a neurosis, how is it possible to think freely? Isn’t it possible that you’re trying to drive your automobile through a thick stone wall in order to get through a thick stone wall?

  How in hell did she and the country get on board the train?

  Was it early in the morning of a grayish day, or late at night when the stars seemed to light the room with unnatural brightness, driving sleep away?

  The nights, yes, that was it. You went to sleep at eleven, and then one night you woke at three; then another night you woke at two, and another night at one. Then came the nights when your mind began to function so clearly that you didn’t need to sleep for even an hour. When that grew tiresome you started the parade—seconal to nembutal to barbital. Tinkers to Evers to Chance.

  It is not necessary to take a capsule tonight because my mind is very clear. I can
get to sleep without any difficulty with the aid of thirteen ticking clocks, that star peeping through the window shade (How does it move to find that slit?) and the knowledge that somehow I must get away.

  Be a writer! Make big money! That’s what the ads have to say. It takes money to get away. The country has money. Why doesn’t it get away? My feet are cold but my neck is hot.

  Where in the dark are the cigarettes? The matches? My lighter? My slippers? Do they move like the star?

  Where is my husband? Why should I care? His hands feel clammy. He smells too clean. There’s a subject for a book that will make big money.

  Get up and start to write right now. It’s too much trouble. The room’s too cold and I’m too old. Get another flock of ideas. Mold them, melt them, write them, eat them. Throw them all away.

  You must wait two hours to take a second seconal—Warning: These may be habit forming. Nothing is more habit forming than death and the desire to get away.

  Write and make big money. More than Mona—more than Trev. Be very famous and sleep all night. Try another cigarette. You know very well that morning won’t come. What the hell are you waiting for? Get on the train with the rest of the folks. You don’t know where you’re going but you’re on your way!

  Chapter 3

  She felt the need of a drink of gin.

  Trevil had asked for another highball. The Scotch bottle was nearly empty. If Trevil was drinking too much, certainly she could have another if she wanted it. One could never become addicted to gin when gin tasted like medicine. But like medicine, gin in spite of its bad taste, had certain beneficent qualities. Those qualities were more or less new to her. Gin made her think of Bob Helms and also helped spread aside the clinging darkness of the curtains which had been recently shrouding her.

  How recently? Another question that was difficult to determine as so many other things had become difficult to determine.

  The bitter gin of Natalie Sherrett … all the elements of a new drink there, or of an old one: gin and bitters. Certainly in days gone by gin had never tasted bitter when drunk with Robert Helms—or Captain Robert Helms should she say?

  There was an air of permanency to the title, Capt. Robert Helms, denoting establishment and a firm connection with the military, that great institution that kept the country safe from too much living, but which was never quite strong enough, with all its might, to keep the women of the country safe from too much loving.

  Bob had introduced her to that circle of unfortunates who went through life understanding about martinis. To Bob, each icy, scintillating martini contained not much vermouth, but quite a portion of the soul of its maker. Together she and Bob had fought a losing battle with scores of bartenders along the Pacific coast.

  “They’re dopes,” Bob would declare when each glass of yellow, warm vermouth was placed on the table. “Every bartender figures that vermouth costs less than gin, and that when a customer asks for a dry martini, very dry and very cold, he wants four parts French vermouth to one part gin, instead of vice versa. Let’s go back to our room, Nat, and mix our own.”

  Set down coldly in retrospect, the proper mixing of the martinis might have been no more than a good excuse to get back to the room.

  Nat could still feel that first sharp tang against her tongue, sense again the surprise that any concoction which tasted so bitter in one small sip could merge, on the second sip, into a creamy nectar.

  With Bob, the first martini always called for a second. And the second, invariably, for one more.

  It was the third which brought the haze. Not an unpleasant haze, shrouding everything like the San Francisco fogs, but a haze which promoted clarity of thought and keener perception, enabling her to recognize the look she sought for in her husband’s eyes.

  Why keep on with a vicious cycle? Bob was dead. The very thought of his marital demands made her feel unfaithful to Trevil. Trev was temperate, good, kind and considerate. The more he drank, the more his latent unselfishness could be felt and seen.

  To punish him for those qualities, Nat liked to take a drink of gin, or maybe two—or sometimes more—knowing full well that soon that suffusing relaxation would loosen her limbs, slacken her mind and transport her in ecstasy away from the Sherrett house in West Kenwood, back to those days with Bob which refused to be forgotten.

  Or were the nights with Bob the more important? She had asked herself that question a thousand times and always refused to answer it honestly. No, that wasn’t true. The truth was that she fought against recognizing the honest answer, for that answer brought an engulfing sense of shame.

  Bob’s hold upon her, indefatigable through the years, lay in the fact that he knew she liked that shame. How shameful indeed to be enamored of shamefulness! Only the potency of alcohol and the fact that the truth itself was shameful enabled her to put it on paper.

  “Strip, Nat!”

  Always that sense of helplessness seized her when she heard his voice—pleasurable helplessness—weakening her resistance to a point of overwhelming happiness.

  How many times when she had undressed alone in her room at night, had she seen Bob Helms lounging in the chair, booted legs stretched out before him, a cocktail glass twirling idly between his fingers.

  “Darling, don’t be silly. We haven’t had any dinner.”

  “Every stitch, Nat. And slowly. You know I mean it.”

  Yes, she knew he meant it. There was never any laughter in his steel-blue eyes, never any hint of play. Sometimes she thought she actually knew just why she obeyed with such docility, carrying out obnoxious orders given without a trace of love or affection.

  “No, leave your shoes and stockings on. Now, turn around slowly and stand there.”

  But there was love and affection. Of that she was certain. She could always recognize traces of her father’s austerity and inflexible discipline in Bob Helms’ tone.

  Her father had reared her under a regime of cultural chastisement.

  Natalie wondered from where that phrase had popped into her head. This indeed was honesty of a searching kind. You thought of something and it flowed into your fingertips and translated itself into rounded letters and sonorous phrases which you really never used in speaking.

  “Cultural Chastisement….” It reminded her strongly of the Elsie books. How could one be honest in writing of one’s own parents? Fear of their displeasure hung over long after death had removed them from the scene. Strange now, how a connective had forged itself between her father and Robert Helms. Her father had never ordered her to strip—at least, not in the possessive tone employed by Bob.

  What horrible thoughts was she conjuring up and daring to commit to paper?

  There had been many occasions when, annoyed by her childish obstinacy, Mr. Strong had ordered her to bed in the middle of the day, sending her, not to her own chaste room, virginal with girlish frills, but ordering her into the great four-poster which dominated the somber boudoir once occupied by her mother … an efficacious punishment, indeed, and one which Mr. Strong used until Natalie was in her early teens when she was sent away to school.

  More questions came hurtling back to plague her. A writer must know what he is writing: how, in the name of decency, could she connect the pure and rarefied thoughts of her father, a sainted ascetic with thoughts of her loving and lustful first husband? Certainly events had rolled her into the dampest of tunnels, a place where blackest thoughts could sprout like fungi.

  Was it the Bible, or some writer, who had said, “Know thyself”? Probably the Bible, that platitudinous treasure-house replete with moralizing far too difficult to follow. Let her varnish her thoughts with twenty thick coats of dissimulation, and underneath it all she still was thinking of incest, a word too full of immoral connotations for any decent person to mention. The price of strict honesty seemed almost too heavy when you had to write it, but was she, Natalie Sherrett the great analyzer, really decent? Certainly she was! She would defend herself to the last.

  She ha
d hated those afternoons of cruelty and injustice when she cowered, alone and naked, between the sheets of the big four-poster.

  She had hated her father, too; despised his calm austerity.

  She wanted a drink; would take a drink; had taken a drink. She could feel the immediate tearing down of that high, spiked wall which the world called “moral fiber.” Most unpleasant. On the other side lay truthfulness, stark and bare.

  Her father was a thinker, deeply immersed in problems far beyond her immature understanding, but for all his brilliance, ill-equipped to cope with her adolescent cleverness. She had wound him around her finger at will.

  Her hand was trembling. Where would all this fantasy end? Where had it begun?

  It had begun with Bob, of course: “I don’t believe you’re too strong.” He had known the truth from the start. She never had been strong. She was pitifully weak, deriving strength from Bob Helms’ frosty martinis until somewhere in the span of her life they had become too strong. Yet she loved them as she loved Bob Helms, for they had helped her to get what she had wanted and needed—the strength to recognize that the unthought-of portion of her anatomy between her knees and her neck was part of her body.

  This was in direct defiance of God, the church, her teaching and every decent American tradition. How could she have tolerated and even have loved a man who delighted in keeping her constantly conscious of every bodily pleasure?

  He was cruel, indecent, mean.

  The martinis were precursors of his dry brittle voice, his voice the forerunner of the touch of his hands, his hands a prelude to concupiscence … and that, the gateway to living.

  No need to fool Bob Helms with her wiles; he was ahead of her all the time. He read her puny thoughts with ease, threw a searchlight on her soul, paraded her every desire. He was gone, and still she loved him.

  Comparing his actions with Trevil Sherrett’s courtly consideration, it was easy to understand how much Trevil must hate her. She knew that Trevil wasn’t drinking too much. She was the one. Drinking too much and thinking too much. Trevil Sherrett, perfectionist. Small wonder he wanted to be rid of a wife who was such a weakling. He must know how she wallowed in thoughts of Bob, yet never by so much as a flickering eyelid did emotion betray him.