ETHICS
ETHEL CURN was an acrobat with Hearn’s Twelve Ring Circus, but her bones were riveted together by a precariously brittle dignity as she paraded down the field of daisies to a cliff at the edge of the sea. Perhaps acrobats walk stiffly during their leisure hours because their bodies become ascetic when released from an unreal, sensual agility. Ethel Curn sometimes stooped to pick a daisy and her body received motion in a deliberately ungallant manner, as though greeting an unwelcome mistress. Her face was an indiscreetly torn screen for emotions that had been dead for many years; her low forehead broke into the tinily pointed lustres of her features; her body was as slim as a symbolised cricket’s lament. She crossed the field of daisies intensely dissolved into a forethought of afternoon and stood underneath a tree at the edge of the cliff. As she leaned against the tree it seemed as if a giant had courteously lent his umbrella to a rudely unresponsive dwarf. Below her the sea grunted with automatic fury and receded, like a pleased actor. Winds threw their weird applause against the blue and gray rocks. The calmer air underneath the tree was not unlike a distressed mind caught between the noises.
Ethel Curn seated herself beneath the tree and read a paper-bound novel entitled, “The Fate of Eleanor Martin,” but the sea and the rocks interfered too effectively with Eleanor and her pretended life slid into the reality at the foot of the tree, while Ethel peered aggressively down at the waves. A whim winked its narcotic eye at her mind—the waves became fellow-workers and she was an audience critically examining their turns. “A little higher with that green somersault! Come on, old chicken, you can do a longer slide if you try!” her mind cried amiably. Lost in the syncopation of admiration her body swayed with the waves and her brown hair went adventuring. Then, like a jilted servant, her mood ran from her, brandishing its abashed haste over her body. Sorrow struck her face with a crazily gay second that extinguished her eyes. Her body improvised its lines into a wilted sexlessness that made her black skirt and pink waist mysterious. The torture of a lost love had feasted upon her flesh and reduced it to an abstraction. Hearn, the circus-master, presided over the feast like a chilly urbane magician. Without a trace of sensual longing she recalled his little black moustache, standing like a curt intrigue over his lips, and the way in which it had bitten into her mouth became the unreal memento of something she had never possessed. Like all women gazing back at a departed love, she felt a swindled poverty that could not quite decide whether it had once owned wealth or not. This feeling translated itself in exclamatory vowels that could not find the consonants of her past passion. She smiled like a bedraggled, masquerading tragedy. It takes women years to perfect this masquerade, but they win a distracted pleasure that guards them from haggling memories. To generalize about women is to broaden our hope that one woman may serve for the rest. Philosophers disappointed in love often do this, though the man on the street is a fairly adept mimic. Ethel Curn’s bosom lightly scolded her pink waist and her poignantly devilish smile almost persuaded her that it was real. All the tragedy on her face spent itself in a distressed question. In unison with this proceeding a perturbed monologue within her addressed her vanity which was silkily perched upon an emotional balcony.
“Hearn treated me white—blue garters with a real diamond in the center—he never smiled when he kissed me—God, why couldn’t I keep him?—He stayed with me a year and there’s not a woman in the troupe who’s had him more than a month—he’s a lying rat, but he never smiled when he kissed me—I wonder whether he’d smile if I slit his throat?—what did I ever see in that fat face—he’ll be a joke in a few years—they all throw you down unless you get in ahead of them—If I broke a bottle against his mug I’d only make him happy—it had blue silk tassles and he paid three hundred for it—I drank too much—blue silk tassles—He’s better than most of them—I knew what he wanted and I’m bawling him out because he got it—He treated me white—blue silk garters with real diamonds that would make the Queen of England wink—”
The devilishly poignant smile and the monologue met each other within her, while fleeing back to their graves, and their unpremeditated clash illuminated the renunciation upon her face. She looked into her upturned, yellow turban as though it held elusive dregs. Brooding experimented with her head and suddenly threw it to the ground, dissatisfied. She lay there like the impoverished effigy of a far off love—her black skirt revealed her slim legs, with gloomy discourtesy, and her fluffy pink waist gave its babyish sympathy to the sharpness of her back. Her slender but muscular arms, stretching over the grass, were senseless branches touching the shoulders of the armless effigy. The wind trifled with her loose brown hair and incited it to ironically flitting imitations of life. Dead thoughts and emotions united upon her hidden face and gripped it with decayed finesse. She rested, perilously unconcerned, upon the sloping edge of the cliff. Suddenly, in a sibilant prank, the earth fled beneath her body and she disappeared.
They knelt around her prostrate figure hugged by the pale blue indelicacy of tights and the scant impudence of her yellow bodice. High above her a little wooden board dangled helplessly from a long wire, while another wire hung loosely above it. She opened her eyes and stared, with a lustreless disbelief, at the people who were like a tension ready to snap.
“Damn him, he did me dirty!” she cried to the amazed, painted faces above her.