The Lydia Steptoe Stories Read online

  The Lydia Steptoe Stories

  Djuna Barnes

  Faber Stories

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Lydia Steptoe Stories

  Introduction

  The Diary of a Dangerous Child

  The Diary of a Small Boy

  Madame Grows Older: A Journal at the Dangerous Age

  About Faber Stories

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Lydia Steptoe Stories

  Djuna Barnes, the renowned author of the modernist novel Nightwood, wrote three short stories under the pseudonym ‘Lydia Steptoe’. They appeared in different periodicals over three consecutive years in the 1920s; this is the first time they have been brought together as a set.

  All written in ironic diary form, the Steptoe stories show Barnes at her wittiest and least self-consciously ‘literary’, a full decade before Nightwood was edited by T. S. Eliot and published by Faber.

  The Diary of a Dangerous Child

  September first:

  Today I am fourteen: time flies: women must grow old.

  Today I have done my hair in a different way and asked myself a question: “What shall be my destiny?”

  Because today I have placed my childhood behind me, and have faced the realities.

  My uncle from Glasgow, with the square whiskers and the dull voice, is bringing pheasants for my mother. I shall sit in silence during the meal and think. Perhaps someone, sensitive to growth, will ask in a tense voice, “What makes you look thoughtful, Olga?”

  If this should be the case, I shall tell.

  Yes, I shall break the silence.

  For sooner or later they must know that I am become furtive.

  By this I mean that I am debating with myself whether I shall place myself in some good man’s hands and become a mother, or if I shall become wanton and go out in the world and make a place for myself.

  Somehow I think I shall become a wanton.

  It is more to my taste. At least I think it is.

  I have tried to curb this inner knowledge by fighting down that bright look in my eyes as I stand before the mirror, but not ten minutes later I have been cutting into lemons for my freckles.

  “Ah woman, thy name, etc.”—

  September third:

  I could not write in my diary yesterday, my hands trembled and I started at every little thing. I think this shows that I am going to be anemic just as soon as I’m old enough to afford it.

  This is a good thing; I shall get what I want. Yes, I am glad that I tremble early. Perhaps I am getting introspective. One must not look inward too much, while the inside is yet tender. I do not wish to frighten myself until I can stand it.

  I shall think more about this tonight when mother puts the light out and I can eat a cream slowly. Some of my best thoughts have come to me this way.

  Ah! What ideas have I not had eating creams slowly, luxuriously.

  September tenth:

  Many days have passed; I have written nothing. Can it be that I have changed? I will hold this thought solitary for a day.

  September eleventh:

  Yes, I have changed. I found that I owed it to the family.

  I will explain myself. Father is a lawyer; mother is in society.

  Imagine how it might look to the outer world if I should go around looking as if I held a secret.

  If the human eye were to fall upon this page I might be so easily misunderstood.

  What shame I might bring down upon my father’s head—on my mother’s too, if you want to take the whole matter in a large sweeping way—just by my tendency to precocity.

  I should be an idiot for their sakes.

  I will be!

  October fourth:

  I have succeeded. No one guesses that my mind teems. No one suspects that I have come into my own, as they say.

  But I have. I came into it this afternoon when the diplomat from Brazil called.

  My childhood is but a memory.

  His name is Don Pasos Dilemma. He has great intelligence in one eye; the other is preoccupied with a monocle. He has comfortable spaces between his front teeth, and he talks in a soft drawl that makes one want to wear satin dresses.

  He is courting my sister.

  My sister is an extremely ordinary girl, older than I, it is true, but her spirit has no access to those things that I almost stumble over. She is not bad looking, but it is a vulgar beauty compared to mine.

  There is something timeless about me, whereas my sister is utterly ephemeral.

  I was sitting behind the victrola when he came in. I was reading Three Lives. Of course, he did not see me.

  Alas for him, poor fellow!

  My sister was there too; she kept walking up and down in the smallest sort of space, twisting her fan. He must have kissed her because she said, “Oh,” and then he must have kissed her more intensely, because she said, “Oh,” again, and drew her breath in, and in a moment she said softly, “You are a dangerous man!”

  With that I sprang up and said in a loud and firm voice:

  “Hurrah, I love danger!”

  But nobody understood me.

  I am to be put to bed on bread and milk.

  Never mind, my room in which I sleep overlooks the garden.

  October seventh:

  I have been too excited to make any entry in my diary for a few days. Everything has been going splendidly.

  I have succeeded in becoming subterranean. I have done something delightfully underhand. I bribed the butler to give a note to Don Pasos Dilemma, and I’ve frightened the groom into placing at my disposal a saddled horse. And I have a silver handled whip under my bed.

  God help all men!

  This is what I intend to do. I am going to meet Don Pasos Dilemma at midnight at the end of the arbor, and give him a whipping. For two reasons: one, because he deserves it, second, because it is Russian. After this I shall wash my hands of him, but the psychology of the family will have been raised one whole tone.

  I’m sure of this.

  Yes, at the full of the moon, Don Pasos Dilemma will be expecting me. His evil mind has already pictured me falling into his arms, a melting bit of tender and green youth.

  Instead he will have a virago on his hands! How that word makes me shiver. There’s only one other word that affects me as strongly—Vixen! These are my words!

  Oh to be a virago at fourteen! What other woman has accomplished it?

  No woman.

  October eighth:

  Last night arrived. But let me tell it as it happened.

  The moon rose at a very early hour and hung, a great cycle in the heavens. Its light fell upon the laburnum bushes and lemon trees and gave me a sense of ice up and down my spine. I thought thoughts of Duse and how she had suffered on balconies a good deal; at least I gathered that she did from most of her pictures.

  I too stood on the balcony and suffered side-face. The silver light glided over the smooth balustrade and swam in the pool of gold fishes.

  In one hand I held the silver mounted whip. On my head was a modish, glazed riding hat with a single loose feather, falling sideways.

  I could hear the tiny enamel clock on my ivory mantle ticking away the minutes. I began striking the welt of my riding boot softly. A high-strung woman must remember her duties to the malicious. I bit my under lip and thought of what I had yet to do. I leaned over the balcony and looked into the garden. There stood the stable boy in his red flannel shirt and beside him the fiery mare.

  I tried to become agitated, my bosom refused to heave. Perhaps I am too young.

  I shall leap from the balcony onto the horse’s back. I whistled to the boy, he looked up, nodding. In a m
oment the mare was beneath my window. I looked at my wrist watch, it lacked two minutes to twelve. I jumped.

  I must have miscalculated the shortness of the distance, or the horse must have moved. I landed in the stable boy’s arms.

  Oh well, from stable boy to prince, such has been the route of all fascinating women.

  I struck my heels into the horse’s side and was gone like the wind.

  I can feel it yet—the night air on my cheeks, the straining of the great beast’s muscles, the smell of autumn, the gloom, the silence. My own transcendent nature—I was coming to the man I hated—hated with a household hate. He who had kissed my sister, he who had never given me a second thought until this evening, and yet who was now all eagerness,—yes counting the minutes with thick, wicked, middle-aged poundings of a Southern heart.

  When one is standing between life and death (any moment might have been my last), they say one reviews one’s whole childhood. One’s mind is said to go back over every little detail.

  Anyway mine went back. The distance being so short it went back and forth.

  I thought of the many happy hours I had spent with my youngest sister putting spiders down her back, pulling her hair, and making her eat my crusts. I thought of the hours I had lain in the dust beneath the sofa reading Petronius and Rousseau and Glyn. I thought of my father, a great, grim fellow standing six feet two in his socks, but mostly sitting in the Morris chair. Then I remembered the day I was fourteen, only a little over a month ago.

  How old one becomes, and how suddenly!

  I grew old on horseback, between twelve and twelve one.

  For at twelve one precisely, I saw the form of Don Pasos Dilemma in the shadow of the trees, and my heart stopped beating, and I could feel all the childish uncertainties I had suffered become hard and firm, and I knew that I should never again be a child.

  I could scarcely see how the betrayer was dressed, but I sensed that he had tricked himself out for the occasion. Had I been challenged, I should have wagered that he had perfumed himself behind the ears and under the chin. That’s the kind of trick those foreign men are always up to.

  I read that somewhere in a book.

  Such men plan downfalls; they are so to speak connoisseurs of treachery; they are the virtuosi of viciousness.

  I drew rein on the full four strokes of my horse’s hoofs; I raised my silver mounted whip. I threw back my head. A laugh rang out in the stillness of midnight.

  It was my laugh, high, drenched with the scorn of life and love and men.

  It was a good laugh.

  I brought the whip down—

  October twenty-seventh:

  I have changed my mind.

  Yes, I have quite changed my mind. I am neither going to give myself into the hands of some good man, and become a mother, nor am I going to go out into the world and become a wanton. I am going to run away and become a boy.

  For this Spaniard, this Brazilian, this Don Pasos Dilemma scorned my challenge, the fine haughty challenge of a girl of youth and vigor, he scorned it, and cringing behind my mother, as it were, left me to face disillusion and chagrin at a late hour at night, when no nice girl should be out, much less facing anything.

  For as you may have guessed, it was not Don Pasos who rode to meet me, it was my mother, wearing his long Spanish cloak.

  November third:

  In another year I shall be fifteen, a woman must grow young again. I have cut off my hair and I am asking myself nothing.

  Absolutely nothing.

  The Diary of a Small Boy

  August seventh:

  I am fourteen years old. I wear long trousers and stiff collars and I no longer turn around in the road to see if I am being watched. Nevertheless, I am told that I am not old enough to make any important observations.

  I may not be old enough to put what I feel politely, but I feel what I feel, even if it is unpopular.

  One of my most unpopular feelings, for instance, is Cousin Elda. She is a tall, obnoxious woman in her twenties, with great coarse, blonde braids. She comes from a far country—England or one of the Rhine towns, I forget which; and there she leaned out of a window a long time, watching the swift-running water on its way to the sea, or she said she did. I guess it’s true, because she has a water-watching look, and she smiles all funny and interwoven and quiet.

  She is not the only unnecessary woman around our place. There are my mother’s two sisters, Clovine and Cresseda. They are insufficient as friends and practically evaporated as relatives.

  They are little and whispering, and they are always making you nervous by the number of things they put their hands on. I wouldn’t mind if they really wanted the things, or if they would only keep hold of them when then have got them. But they never do. They are always dropping them, and they are awfully sure about criminal law and how much punishment men should get.

  They sit for hours talking of ways to make bad men sorry. Sometimes I see them from afar off, dropping their knitting and working themselves up.

  Sometime I’m going to think up a brandnew crime and see what they suggest.

  I think my mother is not very partial to them. She always goes by them without stopping, even when she is talking to them, and if she has much to say, she goes by three or four times.

  I have a little sister, but she is beside the point—she is only old enough to see people’s good sides. I’m a little cool to her because she is eternally falling down and grinning about it in a way that proves her immature.

  I’m going to leave her out of this diary because she is too young to resent it.

  But wait until I get thru with the rest of them!

  August tenth:

  I have not taken my pen in hand for many days because I have been harassed.

  There have been lots of people at our house, with many different ways, and it has taken me a long time to make up an idea of each of them.

  But I’m settled about it now.

  Yesterday there was a hunting party, and all the dogs and horses assembled on the green, down the driveway, and my mother came out of the house wearing a smart little riding-habit, and swinging a small whip in tiny, dangerous circles.

  My father was there holding a gun at his side, and he kept patting it and looking it over, and locking it into second, or half-cock as it is called, and he looked very grand and handsome and superior to accident.

  He has always been a very important man, but yesterday he claimed it.

  My father is very great. He has dominating whiskers cut square for strength, and thinned out for delicacy. He wears quite a lot of rings because he is vain of his hands.

  Usually one of his hands is between the leaves of some important book. Yesterday it was War and Peace and this morning it was The Life of a Volupté, whatever kind of life that is. But I like his hands best when he is cleaning his guns, or mending a saddle, or stroking the dogs.

  He is broad-minded. He takes in all human aspects.

  I wonder when I’m going to be a human aspect?

  Anyway, they all went off, my cousin Elda looking every inch a woman in a riding-habit of gray and black.

  She rode beside my father, and my mother went on in front without turning her head.

  August twelfth:

  I’ve been silent these past two days because I could not think up a name that was both beautiful enough, and strong enough to describe my mother.

  If I say she is perilous, you get the feeling of trumpets and wars, and men riding down to doom. (Why is doom always down, and never up?) And if I say she is rare, you’ll get an idea that she hardly ever comes down for breakfast and that she is inarticulate, and that won’t do at all. If I say she is stupendous, you’ll think that she must be over six feet tall, that she speaks in a loud voice, demands Shaw at the theaters, and expects strength from men and implacable democracy from women. All these impressions would be wrong.

  She is small and dark and there is a hard softness about the place you put your head when you le
an on her. She says “Dear” in a tone that makes you want to keep it away from everyone else.

  She wears more rings than father, and her hands are kind, but they hurt if she wants them to. She wears loose clinging dresses, she walks in the garden with a hidden anger, and she cuts flowers for the house as if she were displeased, but all the time there is a smile in her face that makes you wait for something grand and terrible to occur.

  August sixteenth:

  I talked to the stable boy this morning. It seems to me that he is not so easy with me as he used to be. I must be growing up. Something is taking place in me.

  I no longer feel dislike for my cousin Elda.

  August eighteenth:

  Today I walked about the outhouses and went down to examine the pump. I saw Elda coming around from the lilac bushes, smiling out of her large ox-eyes, the two braids falling down, one in front and one in back, and she was singing and walking slow.

  She stopped a step or two away from me and said nothing for a minute, and then she asked me if I would like to go to the woods with her to gather wild flowers, and I said no, and she answered, “No?” in the same way I said it, only it sounded more hopeful.

  She put her arm around me and said “No?” again, and I felt all disintegrated then she said, “Wouldn’t you like to be a brave boy and go with me to protect me from the water snakes?”

  Then that made me think of my father, and how safe it was for a long way all around him, when he held his gun that way in his hands, and patted it or cocked it, or just swung it down beside his leg with a careless air, and I said suddenly that I would go if I had a gun, but that I would not go otherwise.