Mina Loy - Stories and Essays of Mina Loy

ROSA. I am cruel but self-forgiving — — it is not every woman that can ( catching a revolver in her teeth ). . do, this!

JERABOAM. The iron is entering my brain I can feel it in my chest.

ROSA. So you believe that it is her religion that teaches a woman to speak French?

JERABOAM. You are so innocent — that is why your uncle seduced you at so early an age. ( he chokes with excitement )

ROSA. And for fifty years you have sat here kissing my hands; with the neighbours’ noses on the window.

JERABOAM. The neighbours are growing — — growing — –

ROSA. Where we have kicked the turf.

JERABOAM. We made the bed — — the neighbours lie in it—

ROSA. I have paid with fifty of the best years of my life for your one moment of absent-mindedness.

( The OAFS walk in — they all look like ROSA.)

1ST OAF.( grinning sheepishly ) I will tell my father about the swords.

( The other OAFS shuffle their feet and pull their forelocks.

Exit OAFS sheepishly.

Leaving muddy footprints on the carpet.

Enter SERAMINKA with twins at her breast. The twins look like JERABOAM.)

SERAMINKA.What are you two doing to my sons— they are three months old and they catch flies. I cannot bear it. You two are doing something to my sons. It is the quiet here — you have been so quiet for fifty years. (She begins to dust swords and pistols feverishly as they flash round each other in the air.)

JERABOAM. Seraminka — you need not dust — — now.

(A sword splits one of the twins at her breast in half. )

SERAMINKA. (vaguely) What are you two doing to my sons?

ROSA. I am a devil — I am mad. Tell me, Seraminka what does your master do to a woman?

SERAMINKA. ( disdainfully) I also have been admired.

( Exit )

JERABOAM. I am getting tired — — The neighbours are growing in the flowerbed.

(ROSA stops juggling with the swords, plucks the one out of the Madonna’s eye and lays them side by side over the Oafs ’ muddy footprints on the carpet. )

ROSA. I have made a bed for us to lie on.

(JERABOAM lays himself exhausted upon the swords.

ROSA as she prepares to lie down beside him glances at the dead baby. )

ROSA. Aah! — — it was because you were not filled with a divine hatred. ( lying down beside JERABOAM) This is not one of my sleepless nights.

JERABOAM. ( biting her breast listlessly ) My God! How you do hate me.

SOME OTHER MAN. It’s just the same with the higher qualities we hear so much about — in the comrade we hear so much about. I looked for modesty and found only fear; character and I found pigheaded- ness; intellect! It was short-hand lectures.

YOUTH. But why bother about all that when they laugh so delightfully?

THE IDEALIST. Woman for me is the maze of abortive experience deflecting me from the consummate nucleus — the unique affinity of whose existence no disappointments will ever be able to dissuade me. I went out to meet life open-handed with such good-will, without prejudice, without criticism — I scoured the streets — plunged into society—“touched pitch”—dissolved myself in amorous mysticism — yet, I have never been able to solve the problem of love. Woman!?!. . Woman must exist — is it possible she belongs to somebody else?

ANOTHER MAN. You bet she does — to some bully who beats her — the ethereal type always gets beaten — every pore of her skin cries out for it — no healthy man could resist — if only for that dumb reproachful eye — it’s like hunting!

THE IDEALIST. If women are bad, you are worse — perhaps if there were more men like me, the women would improve.

A MAN. ( disdainfully ) Improve on you ?

DON JUAN. I am said to be supremely cruel to women, but no man has ever loved them as I have — my intuitive solicitude avoided restricting them by over-valuation . I have not insulted femininity by singularising with biased selectivism — the individual for my favour— picking my way, with alert precaution through the rose-garden of Love — I enticed those sleeping-beauties from their nests of illusion — and showed them themselves. It is no fault of mine if they gave those selves to me and if, with my passing, very little was left. I played with their prejudices — I never found a prejudice that took more than twenty minutes to overcome. I squandered hours chasing their silly souls into the corners of their propitious mouths. I was gentle with them — and they fought me with the deceptive weapons of premeditated surrender. I maltreated them and they begged for more — no brutality I could invent was ever drastic enough to make them leave me of their own accord.

A MAN. The only cruelty that woman refuses to submit to through man is any cruelty she may deserve.

DON JUAN. The man who is unkind to women is the man of calculable possibilities — women feed on anticipation, race with the intractable — and are totally extinguished by the — attainable!

TEA TABLE MAN. For sophistry — that beats all I’ve ever heard — our timid companion “racing with the intractable”—why her whole conception of man is as an escort on a crowded thoroughfare; “calculable possibilities” indeed — what is the reason for our organised society? — entirely for providing a safe radius within whose precincts man exhibits only so much of his brute reality as these delicate organisms can stand — why, half my life is spent in so pruning my natural tendencies that I may arrive at the degree of self-abnegation required by the modern woman, and to that end I pass my time in places where one spends money (the things we hanker after not being on the market), where I hope, by the strictest attention to the superficial, to stifle the aboriginal that lives in the middle of me — so far, I confess, it results in a double personality. But I congratulate myself that the obverse I show to women lets nothing through of what’s on the other side.

DON JUAN. Fearing that her kitty-yawns should turn to a shriek? — of terror??

TEA TABLE MAN. Exactly. I am determined — cost me what it may — to keep her under the protection of her own innocence—

DON JUAN. Do you keep her long?

TEA TABLE MAN. There are a great many delightful women in my set, and I have the luck to be extremely popular. There isn’t a day passes that I haven’t half-a-dozen different shopping engagements. The things those women require! And they have such confidence in me. Why, I help them to buy their underclothes — all the intricacies of the feminine mind are woven into frills and there’s no limit— One day it’s cobwebs with patches of rosebuds three inches thick, plumped about on them — the next, something thick with unexpected interstices of netting you wouldn’t dare to breathe on — and through the lot, the palest ribbons chasing each other in and out, out and in. Only once, while I was absent-mindedly contemplating a vision of myself clubbing a naked woman over the head in a virgin forest on the counter, I asked my companion if this decoration wasn’t rather superfluous as no one was ever going to see it. Well, she turned quite white — I cursed myself for a clout, shocking her fragile sensibilities like that— no, woman is not constituted for knowing the truth. At night, after the theatre which allows us to brush lightly up against other people’s passions, she leaves me for her blue-silk bedroom, where Veronal will put her to sleep. What would she do —if she only knew that all I wanted was to keep her awake?