The Tunnel Read online

“Don’t you remember?” he asked her. “I do. At Lanky’s tea when you were in school. The very first day.”

  The ripple of muscles in his chest and arms and flat young belly, the swish of water as he kicked his feet in the ocean. Staring out at a kelp cutter ploughing along through the seaweed, she let Paul wait for her reply while she thought of many things.… How nice he would look in a uniform, gold-braided and trim. She would be a sailor’s bride, yo ho! And possibly the bride of a hero. They would be married with the movie cameras flicking, and walk together under a canopy of drawn sabers. Then, painlessly and with fortitude, she would bear him innumerable offspring and dress them all in sailor suits to play in front of the beach club. With the proper careless demeanor, she would accept the compliments of other adoring mothers, meanwhile fingering her platinum wedding ring.

  Her body thrilled and her limbs began to tremble at her own great prescience. “Yes,” she told him, blithe and gay, “I remember.”

  Remember, indeed! How unutterably silly! She could have written down in detail all the things she could not say—every kiss, every touch of his hand, every minute of the hours they had spent together, but she possessed a trait far greater than memory—insight. Oh, God, how great to be so young and know so much, to understand the complexities of all males living, to know what went on in their stubborn heads, what crass desires animated their bodies, how to win and hold them by knowing exactly what they were going to say.

  “There’s something I have to tell you, Nat.”

  From the heights she regarded his blurted efforts. How clever to be able to recognize that modem conventions dictated that every young man should utter his proposal in this casual, offhand manner.

  “What’s stopping you?” She kicked her own feet in the water, determined to match his casualness even to the point of being coy.

  “I want to get married before I go in the Navy.”

  Nat turned her head from his serious face to look at the beach. The yellowish sand was blinding white. The red-tiled roofs were dancing rubies. The umbrellas over the beach chairs were amethyst blue. She didn’t intend to capitulate too easily. Men needed the cleansing of suffering. He could pay up now for some of his marked attentions to Mona. Nat had learned well how to handle her father, by being perverse and then giving in. Such tactics were bound to work with Paul Diffenbaugh, too.

  “What’s the matter? Won’t Mona have you?” Natalie turned to face him, producing a smile she considered detached from interest.

  “You know very well it isn’t Mona!” Paul told her fiercely. “She’s engaged to Jim Hartsdale.”

  “Oh!” Nat exclaimed as though that were news. “Then who’s the lucky creature who’s marrying you?”

  “A girl in San Francisco,” Paul told her. “I met her up there a couple of months ago. Anne Grayson.”

  “Anne Grayson?” Nat inquired calmly. “I don’t believe I know her, do I?”

  “No,” said Paul. “She’s anxious to meet both Mona and you.”

  “That’s great news, sailor. The best of luck.” Nat stretched out her hand, and Paul’s hard clasp closed firmly on something inside her. She looked at the beach. The sand was gray, the tiles were blurred, the umbrellas a nasty, depressing blue. She stood up and dove deep into the covering ocean. Under the water she swam far down until the sand on the bottom scraped against her fingers.

  Sometimes you ran and ran and ran, and finally thrust yourself into darkness. Sometimes you merely sat quite still and played the fool, and the darkness came rushing from nowhere and completely enfolded you.

  Chapter 12

  It was easy for darkness to enfold you.

  When the train had left the station, it had gone into a tunnel. All tunnels were exactly alike. The train had come out of it eventually, and Natalie had been sitting by the window in Bedroom “A” holding the telegram, just as she had before.

  A man named Trevil Sherrett, wearing a Captain’s uniform, was standing at the door. He had a high forehead, an aquiline chin, and sensitive lips, and he was watching her with some concern from a pair of sympathetic gray eyes. She had never seen him before, would never see him again, and he had no right to show concern.

  Life was a train. You went whirling along through space with a lot of fellow passengers going from one place to another. The mere fact that circumstances had placed you on board with someone else certainly gave that other traveller no right to exhibit concern about your personal problems. Such mass intermingling was indecent, stripping you of all privacy.

  “Trouble?” he asked.

  It was none of his business. Natalie didn’t answer. Instead, her fingers went into a silly tremolo, and the message she was holding fluttered to the floor in a series of grotesque gyrations to land face up at the feet of Captain Sherrett. She made no move to retrieve it, so he picked it up and brazenly read it.

  “Rugged,” he said, and sat down.

  What was rugged? Only mountain peaks were rugged, and they never changed, staying throughout the ages as they had always been before. Nothing changed, except yourself. You sped along and the sun was clear and the air winey with happiness. Then after a while you went into a tunnel. When you came out, you tried to shake the blackness from you, but you had changed. Everything around you was just the same, except the winey happiness in the air had soured.

  Natalie took the telegram from him, folded it, and put it in her handbag. How did she ever get the idea that the world was sunny? Rain was beating against the Pullman windows, yet that wasn’t really any change for it had been beating there before. Only the blackness of the tunnel had stopped it momentarily. Yet in the space of a few short minutes, its cadence had ceased to be friendly and become malign. She was driving at something, working out some great miserable philosophy designed to last her throughout her journey. This man who had moved in with her, unasked and unwanted, was very annoying.

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone.”

  “I’m Trevil Sherrett, Mrs. Helms.”

  It took her some time to digest the introduction, a few long seconds of speculation before she realized he had seen her name on the telegram.

  “It’s very nice to meet you, I’m sure.” Natalie forced a brave mechanical smile because she felt it was expected of her. To smile bravely and mechanically was a code of the war. “Now please go.”

  She refused a cigarette, so he lighted one himself and said, “No.”

  “I’m quite all right,” she told him after the train had sped a mile or two.

  “I’m glad,” he said, and lighted another cigarette.

  Natalie found herself involved in a problem as to how to get rid of him. Surely she was entitled to savor her grief alone. This imperturbable officer, smoking tranquilly on the seat beside her, apparently took it for granted that she had no feelings at all.

  In her search for some rudeness strong enough to dispel him, the message in her handbag was almost forgotten. It was far too dramatic to come out flatly and say, “Look, don’t you see my heart’s breaking? Can’t you understand, Captain Sherrett, that I want to be alone?” It sounded like a line from some Russian play.

  She tried again with a plaintive, “Really, I wish you would go.”

  “I’m not going to go,” he told her.

  “I want to be alone.”

  “Certainly you do, and I’m not going to let you.” He reached across her and pushed the button for the porter, then told him, “Will you ask Mrs. Sherrett to come here, please, from Compartment ‘C’?”

  “I’m sure I appreciate it,” said Natalie, “but you really don’t need to disturb your wife for me.”

  “It’s my mother,” said Trevil, and proceeded to take Natalie’s whole life over. “I’m going to move in here and move you into Bedroom ‘B’ next door. I’m going to have the communicating door opened between that room and my mother’s room, Compartment ‘C’.”

  Natalie took a long breath and discovered she couldn’t fi
nd anything to say. For six months, Bob had arranged things with the same masterful hand. You couldn’t get off the train without killing yourself. So when you came out of the tunnel, it made it a little easier to see in the landscape some remnant of what you had seen before.

  All this had really happened. It was clear and living when you collected the fragments together and brought them into existence by setting them down. But what of other things—the intangibles—things you never saw that affected your whole existence, things such as love and war? Did one love destroy another? Did a first love die under weight of a second? It seemed unlikely, since peace had failed to eliminate the actuality of either a long-past or nearby war.

  Men who would never return had alighted from the speeding train. Kindnesses, tender moments, and the memories of happy hours together at various parties had forged themselves into a chain. Had there been a single party, leaving a cluttered kitchen, or was that party all the parties, bright and dull, good and bad, before and after Mona came?

  “Trev, I want you to meet Mona Desmé. You’ve heard me speak about her. Her father was Alfred Desmé, the portrait painter.”

  “Hmm. A beautiful girl with a beautiful name.”

  Had Trev’s enthusiasm been a warning? There had certainly been plenty of other beautiful girls with beautiful names. Yet Natalie was ready to take an oath that he treated them all the same.

  “Trev, see that girl with the red hair standing over there by the punchbowl?”

  “Sure. What about her?”

  “Isn’t she lovely?”

  “Sure. What about her? I’d rather have you.”

  What party was that? It must have been many parties over the past few years. Parties in Kenwood; California; and Washington. Parties in the Sherrett house. Trev always could be found standing close to the punchbowl talking to Mona. Conferences with Mona. Conferences in the office and at Luigi’s, and at dinner parties where he somehow always managed to be seated next to Mona.

  Yet Natalie Sherrett wasn’t the only one going through the tunnel. Fifty-six couples out of every hundred were breaking up. She had read that somewhere. Those small isolated pieces of information clung to her mind like cockleburs.

  Darkness and suspicious gloom were muddying the lives of everyone she knew. “People not only don’t know what they’re doing half the time, but they don’t know what they’re reading,” Cam Olessa had said.

  Pick up the papers any day. There had been peace before, and now there was peace again. The minds of everybody in the world were full of war. The brains of the universe were blurred by deceit, and trustful eyes blinded by the cinders of suspicion. Where nations had been close before, they were trying to feed each other poison. Everything was terribly real and nothing true. The people you loved best in the world had become the most dangerous because trust was gone from those who lived closest to you.

  Yet was it real?

  You didn’t go through a tunnel alone. There was no escaping the salient fact that everybody on the train went through it with you. So you couldn’t love and couldn’t think and couldn’t eat until you found the lights in your own compartment and turned them on. If you ate in the dark, you left the way open for poison. If you sat in the dark with wealth around you, you left the way open for thieves to break in and steal. Outside, the sun might shine as bright, the rivers might flow in unhurried beauty, the oceans might glisten, and the fields of food lie emerald and serene, but you wouldn’t know. Ignorance was darkness. Once in darkness, you refused to believe and promptly forgot the things you had actually seen.

  The man in the car who looked like Bob had been killed at the entrance to the tunnel.

  Mushrooms grew in darkness. Trevil’s obvious love for Mona was sprouting in the tunnel like a deadly amanita.

  She had to find out before the darkness killed her. She wanted to go back herself and dine with Trev at Luigi’s, hold those little private talks by the punchbowl that took in every other girl in the room and included none. She had to find the light herself and turn it on. Light was knowledge of the truth. If the light revealed that someone near was trying to kill you, the only sensible thing to do was to throw that person off the train. Otherwise, the selfsame thing seemed destined to happen to you.

  Chapter 13

  It was inconceivable that setting pen to paper could be such hell. Who was this creature, Natalie Sherrett, or Natalie Strong? Some outside person was writing. Was this struggle hers? Were her own fists bloody from beating against insensate walls? Was the goal of this struggle really worthwhile? What did this creature want to decide? She had made some progress by writing the truth, flattening her ego. Paul Diffenbaugh had shamed her. Or she had shamed herself with Paul Diffenbaugh. No matter.… She had sought revenge on herself and Paul with Robert Helms, and found it. He had turned her into a wanton, eagerly subject to Bob Helms’ whims. Unreasonably she hated Paul. Show him, Nat, what a creature you are, what a hag he has turned you into. Drink, and revel in lewdness with Robert Helms, your husband! Think how unhappy such conduct is making your father and Paul.

  God forgive her, the truth was out! Her father was in the picture, too. So she hated all men except Robert Helms, a means to an end. Then how deep must her hatred of Trevil be, for she hated all the men she had loved, and her love for Trevil Sherrett was the greatest of them all.

  But she belonged to the man who had shamed her, the man who was dead, the man who had made her beg for conquest and satisfaction, Robert Helms, who had given fulfillment by literally making her crawl.

  There was buoyancy here, for the moment, floodgates released, a temporary victory. Light showed in through an opening where a breach had been made by a scratching and scrabbling, but this opening was only a vent in the tunnel, offering light and air, insufficient for her to get through, for the opening was too small, refusing to admit her body. This was only a battle won, not the entire war. She must withdraw to marshal her forces. She couldn’t stay. The situation was untenable. She would die, encased in rocky confines with only her head stuck free above the wall. Tired as she was, she must retreat again into darkness. Run and fight and grope. Write and think. Analyze and study. Push on to the end of the labyrinthine passage. Beat the train into final daylight, even though every step meant to stumble and to fall.

  What of her body? Could the truth be written, or was background stronger than normal functions? There were barriers here, almost insurmountable. Those bawdy words beginning with B—bowels, bathrooms, breasts, bladders and babies—were deleted from the lexicon of Miss Lancaster’s disembodied school.

  Here, again, her blame was false and she knew it. She was blushing and sweating profusely, hesitating over each letter of nastiness. Prudery, superstition, and ignorance had interred all love and life in a mountain of filth, so deep and dark that her mind was cracking beneath the weight. She was buried no deeper, entrapped no more firmly, than was Miss Lancaster and her school.

  The thing that set her apart right now from her mass of foul maggots was this struggle toward the surface, this determination to find the light, and cleanse her mind of darkness. The danger was that you might be headed downward deeper into the depths of life’s unsavory cesspool. Then the only thing left was courage, determination to keep on moving. That couldn’t be beaten. The world was round. Even headed in the wrong direction, continue your efforts long enough and someday you would crawl clear through, circle every barrier, and emerge triumphant. Stop signs gave warning of momentary pauses for consideration and safety. To stay beside a stop sign throughout existence was the final, easy recourse of a fool.

  Bodies must be necessary, her own and everyone else’s. Hers, unquestionably, affected the working of her brain. It had flung a challenge at her right now, daring her to describe its feelings, or to search without emotion for the sensations it might have given her which had made the world go wrong. Certainly the statement could never be questioned that God had supplied a body to everyone. Then why through the ages had bodies fallen into disrepute?
It was alarming to think that in fairness to bodies, the spirit might have decayed instead of the temporal. It was heresy to think that man had grown so dumb that he could shy away from thoughts of the joys of living and the ecstasies of love, meanwhile concentrating on newer and better means of destroying the structures which housed both mind and soul.

  She was conscious of Trevil’s body, even to a point of seeking absurdly to end its usefulness by laying it beside his mother’s, dead and gone. She was conscious of Mona’s body, envying its seductiveness. She was conscious of Paul Diffenbaugh’s, remembering too well her desire to caress it as he sat on the raft beside her, telling her with youthful brutality that she would never feel his flesh against her own.

  The thoughts of other bodies couldn’t help her. Such thoughts were imagination, not truth, the writer writing fiction when escape could only be found in autobiography. She was married to Trevil in the room down-stairs. How long ago didn’t matter. It required all of her courage to write the truth of that Saturday afternoon. How easy it was to dodge it, to picture all the people there, the presents, and the uniforms, and Mrs. Sherrett being courageous, and reminding Nat of nothing so much as an overripe plum. The windows were open, the day was warm. The orchard, despite its lack of care, was heavy with a recriminating bloom. What was so rare as that day in June when heaven tried earth, if it be in tune?

  “Do you, Natalie Helms, take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? To honor and obey his mother ‘til death do them part?”

  “I do, I do! I’ll promise anything, if I can get away from the sweet champagne and mix a shaker of cold martinis.”

  “And do you, Trevil Sherrett, take this woman, your mother, to be your lawful wedded wife? To have and to hold, and to live in the house with, and to run to forever for comfort and advice, including your sex life and children, and how many times a day you go to the bath room, excluding all others, including Natalie, your wife, even after death does not you part?”