day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool
yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness
was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an
individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with
and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was
just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then
left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you
were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.
All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism: and in that there was
a certain pleasure. In the very experience of the nothingness of life, phase
after phase, čtape after čtape, there was a certain grisly satisfaction. So
that's that! Always this was the last utterance: home, love, marriage,
Michaelis: So that's that! And when one died, the last words to life would
be: So that's that!
Money? Perhaps one couldn't say the same there. Money one always
wanted. Money, Success, the bitch-goddess, as Tommy Dukes persisted in
calling it, after Henry James, that was a permanent necessity. You couldn't
spend your last sou, and say finally: So that's that! No, if you lived even
another ten minutes, you wanted a few more sous for something or other. Just
to keep the business mechanically going, you needed money. You had to have
it. Money you have to have. You needn't really have anything else. So that's
that!
Since, of course, it's not your own fault you are alive. Once you are
alive, money is a necessity, and the only absolute necessity. All the rest
you can get along without, at a pinch. But not money. Emphatically, that's
that!
She thought of Michaelis, and the money she might have had with him;
and even that she didn't want. She preferred the lesser amount which she
helped Clifford to make by his writing. That she actually helped to
make.---`Clifford and I together, we make twelve hundred a year out of
writing'; so she put it to herself. Make money! Make it! Out of nowhere.
Wring it out of the thin air! The last feat to be humanly proud of! The rest
all-my-eye-Betty-Martin.
So she plodded home to Clifford, to join forces with him again, to make
another story out of nothingness: and a story meant money. Clifford seemed
to care very much whether his stories were considered first-class literature
or not. Strictly, she didn't care. Nothing in it! said her father. Twelve
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>