Djuna Barnes - Ladies Almanack

“Where!” exclaimed Nip, looking about her with a touch of kindly Apprehension.

“The Night-Light of Love,” said Saint Musset, “burns I think me in the slightly muted Crevices of all Women who have been a little sprung with continual playing of the Spring Song, though I may be mistaken, for be it known, I have not yet made certain on this Point. There is one such in our midst on whom I have had a Weather Eye these many Years. She is a little concocted of one bad night in Venice and one sly Woman going to morning Mass, her Name is writ from here to Sicily, as Cynic Sal. She dressed like a Coachman of the period of Pecksniff, but she drives an empty Hack. And that is one Woman,” she said, “who shall yet find me as Fare, and if at the Journey’s end, she still cracks as sharp a Whip, and has never once descended the Drivers’s Seat to put her Head within to see what rumpled meaning there sits, why she may sing for her Pains, I shall get off at London and find me another who has somewhat of a budding Care for a Passenger.”

“Be she not the Woman,” said Nip flightily, “who is of so vain and jealous a Nature that do what you will you cannot please her, and mention this or that, she is not contented? For if it be the one, she has passed through my ken as Timid Tom, or Most-Infirm-of-Purpose.”

“It may be,” said Dame Musset, “and it may not.”

“How true that is when ’tis said of a Woman,” acknowledged Nip; “no Man could be both one and neither like to us, and now,” she said “I see Miss Tuck this way wending, hot and hunting, and I think me she stands in Need of a fal-lal or two in the shape of a Sandwich, and a dish of Tea, for she has the look to me of one who has laid Waste a barren Land. That pathetic Expression one occasionally observes on the Faces of our younger, less acute Generation; her under Lip doth hang with a Dexterity that has found no Thanks.”

“Ah Woe is me!” sighed Miss Tuck, seating herself at the Table, and leaning upon a tiny pocket Handkerchief, “you, my dear Musset were, as always, quite right. She thaws nothing but Facts, do what I would, nor one unfathomed Mystery in the Lot! Nor alas, one gentle Fancy. such as sends the Pigeon up among his Feathers, nay, nor one Crumb untabulated, be it ever so infinitesimal. For no matter what I came upon but that Wench had some Word for it! Now it was Horace, now it was Spinoza, and yet again it was the Descent of Man,” she shuddered, “and that Descent,” said she in a dreadful Whisper, “I will have nothing to do with, here or then! When a Woman is as well seasoned in her every Joint as she, with exact and enduring Knowledge, there is nothing for it but to let her add herself up to an impossible Zero, and so come to her Death of that premeditated Accuracy, but then,” she said, putting a soft little Hand into that of Miss Nip, “you know how fast I recover, and how many Hours there are in a Day.”

“Some women”, said Dame Musset, “are Sea-Cattle, and some are Land-Hogs, and yet others are Worms crawling about our Almanacks, but some,” she said, “are Sisters of Heaven, and these we must follow and not be side-tracked.”

“How am I to help it if I go astray,” cried Miss Tuck, “when every Law of Love and Desire was long ago as mixed as a Contortion of Traffic? I do not know a blind Alley from a Boulevard, nor a Cross-Road to what it may be running to, and Sign-Posts never serve for anything but unsettling my Mind!”

“You,” cut in Miss Nip, “would follow, all panting and blind with good Intentions, the Trail of a Field Mouse! There is no Land so uncharterd of Trails but you would find a Ribbon of Comfort even in the Desert, and lead yourself, by your very Fury of Willingness, into a Wallow of Trouble before Sundown!” “Oh God, don’t I know it!” sobbed Tuck.

PORTENTS, SIGNS AND OMENS

WHEN Infant Grundy rises like the Sickle The dying Grundy will her nothing stickle, But wane upon this World of Odds and Omen,

The newer Prudy waxing for the Women,

For to a Woman shall a Woman stoop

When she had birched them well about the Coop,

And nowhere else, as they have done ere this;

No Man shall nip them, and no Boy shall kiss,

No Lad shall hoist them gaily Heels o’er Head

Nor lay them ’twixt his Breast-bone and his Bed.

Nor flay them with sweet Portent and with Sign.

Nor reap their Image tiny in this Eyen.

Nay, this shall never be their earthly Cost

But, all unlike the Bird of Memory lost,

Late roosting on the Hollow tree of Time,

Which only backward can the Scaler climb,

They by themselves mislaid shall be, God wot,

Binding this Nonsense to a finer Knot,

Casting to the Winds all common Care

Like a Bell that throws its Nature to the Air.

Of such is then the high and gaming Pride

Of Woman by a Woman’s girlish Side!

IN the time of Heat, when the Flowers bloom and the Birds sing and the Squirrels burn, and Man turns inside out for Love, Dame Musset, like many a Dandy with his Candytufts of Hope and his Gallipots of Love, or like a Grig of a Rip with his Foxglove and Fustian, had also an Eye when she went out for a Walk.

The Luxembourg boasted no Hedge or Statue that had proportions or density sufficient to make Hide of a Petticoat, for Musset knew them to a Turn and a Twig. Therefore she was no little surprised when one mellow Sunday, she in walking out with Doll on her Arm (Musset deeming indeed that she had managed most neatly this matter of Bushes and Nooks), heard Doll going about it thus: “My most Darling, but now has come the Time when you must listen to the fourth great Moment of History (having undoubtedly heard the other three), which is of Sheba and Jezebel. So though I be neither Sheba nor you good Jezebel, we are exactly lesser, so but give Ear.

“Jezebel, that flighty forthright, used to spend much of her Time in angling from her Window and crying ’Uoo Hoo!’ to the Kings that way wending to War and to Death. And some turned in at her Door, and others went on, though not a many ’tis true. Thus was Jezebel employed, when the Queen of Sheba passed beneath her Window, and Jezebel leaning outward called ‘Uoo Hooo!’

“ And that was Jezebel’s last “Uoo Hoo !”

Musset’s Eyes fell.

THE Time has come, when, with unwilling Hand, I must set down what a woman says to a Woman and she be up to her Ears in Love’s Acre. Should we not like to think it, at least if not of poetic Value, then strophed to a Romanesque Fortitude, as clipped of Foliage as a British Hedge, or at least as fitting to the thing it covers as an Infant’s Cap, which even when frilled to the very frontal Bone, and taking into account the most pulsing Suture, is somewhat of a Head’s proportion, nor flows and drips away and adown, as if it were no Covering for probability?

Nay, nowhere, in all the fulsome data of most uncovered and naked backrunning of Nature, nor in the Columns of our most jaundiced Journals, can be gathered the vaguest Idea of the Means by which she puts her Heart from her Mouth to her Sleeve, and from her Sleeve into Rhetorick, and from that into the Ear of her beloved. To the Ancients, Love Letters and Love Hearsay (though how much Luck and how much Cunning this was on the part of the Outrunners in the Thickets of prehistoric proability, none can say, for doubt me not but from Fish to Man there has been much Back-mating and Front to Front, though only a Twitter of it comes out of the Past) were from like to unlike. Our own Journals teem with Maids and their Beards, whose very highest encomiums reach no more glorious Foothold than “Honey Lou”, or “Snooky dear”, or “my great big, beautiful bedridden Doll,” whose Turnabout it would seem, is only one side proper to the Lord. But hear how a Maid goes at a Maid: “And are you well my own? But tell me hastily, are you well? for I am well, oh most newly well, and well again. And if all’s well, then ends well all ends up! But if you be about to be nowise probable, but tell me, and I will burst my Gussets with hereditary Weeping, that we be not dated to a Moon and are apart by dint of diddling Nature, and parting is such sweet Sorrow! How all too oft are we but one in our Team! So tell me if you but be well for well I be!”