Eyeless in Gaza, Page 25

  ‘But what does she say to him?’

  ‘What indeed!’ Helen took a gulp of wine. ‘Luckily she’s inaudible. We’d better skip that chapter and come straight to the epicurean sage. With the sage, she doesn’t have to be quite so obscure. “You think you’re a man, because you happen not to be impotent.” That’s what she says to him. “But in fact you’re not a man. You’re sub-human. In spite of your sageness – because of it even. Worse than the crook in some ways.” And then, bang, like a sign from heaven, down comes the dog!’

  ‘But what dog?’

  ‘Why, the dog Father Hopkins can’t protect you from. The sort of dog that bursts like a bomb when you drop it out of an aeroplane. Bang!’ The laughing excitement seethed and bubbled within her, seeking expression, seeking an outlet; and the only possible assuagement was through some kind of outrage, some violence publicly done to her own and other people’s feelings. ‘It almost fell on Anthony and me,’ she went on, finding a strange relief in speaking thus openly and hilariously about the unmentionable event. ‘On the roof of his house it was. And we had no clothes on. Like the Garden of Eden. And then, out of the blue, down came that dog – and exploded, I tell you, literally exploded.’ She threw out her hands in a violent gesture. ‘Dog’s blood from head to foot. We were drenched – but drenched! In spite of which this imbecile goes and writes me a letter.’ She opened her bag and produced it. ‘Imagining I’d read it, I suppose. As though nothing had happened, as though we were still in the Garden of Eden. I always told him he was a fool. There!’ She handed the letter to Staithes. ‘You open it and see what the idiot has to say. Something witty, no doubt; something airy and casual; humorously wondering why I took it into my funny little head to go away.’ Then, noticing that Mark was still holding the letter unopened, ‘But why don’t you read it?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you really want me to?’

  ‘Of course. Read it aloud. Read it with expression.’ She rolled the r derisively.

  ‘Very well, then.’ He tore open the envelope and unfolded the thin sheets. ‘“I went to look for you at the hotel,”’ he read out slowly, frowning over the small and hurried script. ‘“You were gone – and it was like a kind of death.”’

  ‘Ass!’ commented Helen.

  ‘“It’s probably too late, probably useless; but I feel I must try to tell you in this letter some of the things I meant to say to you, yesterday evening, in words. In one way it’s easier – for I’m inept when it comes to establishing a purely personal contact with another human being. But in another way, it’s much more difficult; for these written words will just be words and no more, will come to you, floating in a void, unsupported, without the life of my physical presence.”’

  Helen gave a snort of contemptuous laughter. ‘As though that would have been a recommendation!’ She drank some more wine.

  ‘“Well, what I wanted to tell you,”’ Staithes read on, ‘“was this: that suddenly (it was like a conversion, like an inspiration) while you were kneeling there yesterday on the roof, after that horrible thing had happened . . .”’

  ‘He means the dog,’ said Helen. ‘Why can’t he say so?’

  ‘“. . . suddenly I realized . . .”’ Mark Staithes broke off. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I really can’t go on.’

  ‘Why not? I insist on your going on,’ she cried excitedly.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve got no right!’

  ‘But I’ve given you the right.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But he hasn’t.’

  ‘What has he got to do with it? Now that I’ve received the letter . . .’

  ‘But it’s a love-letter.’

  ‘A love-letter?’ Helen repeated incredulously, then burst out laughing. ‘That’s too good!’ she cried. ‘That’s really sublime! Here, give it to me.’ She snatched the letter out of his hand. ‘Where are we? Ah, here! “. . . kneeling on the roof after that horrible thing had happened, suddenly I realized that I’d been living a kind of outrageous lie towards you!”’ She declaimed the words rhetorically and to the accompaniment of florid gesticulations. ‘“I realized that in spite of all the elaborate pretence that it was just a kind of detached irresponsible amusement, I really loved you.” He really lo-o-oved me,’ she repeated, drawing the word into a grotesque caricature of itself. ‘Isn’t that wonderful? He really lo-o-oved me.’ Then, turning round in her chair, ‘Hugh!’ she called across the room.

  ‘Helen, be quiet!’

  But the desire, the need to consummate the outrage was urgent within her.

  She shook off the restraining hand that Staithes had laid on her arm, shouted Hugh’s name again and, when they all turned towards her, ‘I just wanted to tell you he really lo-o-oved me,’ she said, waving the letter.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up!’

  ‘I most certainly won’t shut up,’ she retorted, turning back to Mark. ‘Why shouldn’t I tell Hugh the good news? He’ll be delighted, seeing how much he lo-o-oves me himself. Don’t you, Hughie?’ She swung back again, and her face was flushed and brilliant with excitement. ‘Don’t you?’ Hugh made no answer, but sat there pale and speechless, looking at the floor.

  ‘Of course you do,’ she answered for him. ‘In spite of all appearances to the contrary. Or rather,’ she emended, uttering a little laugh, ‘in spite of all disappearances – seeing that it was always invisible, that love of yours. Oh yes, Hughie darling, definitely invisible. But still . . . still, in spite of all disappearances to the contrary, you do lo-o-ove me, don’t you? Don’t you?’ she insisted, trying to force him to answer her, ‘don’t you?’

  Hugh rose to his feet and, without speaking a word, almost ran out of the room.

  ‘Hugh!’ Caldwell shouted after him, ‘Hugh!’ There was no answer. Caldwell looked round at the others. ‘I think perhaps one ought to see that he’s all right,’ he said, with the maternal solicitude of a publisher who sees a first-rate literary property rushing perhaps towards suicide. ‘One never knows.’ And jumping up he hurried after Hugh. The door slammed.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then, startlingly, Helen broke into laughter. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Herr Giesebrecht,’ she said turning to the young German. ‘It’s just a little bit of English family life. Die Familie im Wohnzimmer, as we used to learn at school. Was tut die Mutter? Die Mutter spielt Klavier. Und was tut der Vater? Der Vater sitzt in einem Lehnstuhl und raucht seine Pfeife. Just that, Herr Giesebrecht, no more. Just a typical bourgeois family.’

  ‘Bourgeois,’ the young man repeated, and nodded gravely. ‘You say better than you know.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You are a wictim,’ he went on, very slowly, and separating word from word, ‘a wictim of capitalist society. It is full of wices . . .’

  Helen threw back her head and laughed again more loudly than before; then, controlling herself with an effort, ‘You mustn’t think I’m laughing at you,’ she gasped. ‘I think you’re being sweet to me – extraordinarily decent. And probably you’re quite right about capitalist society. Only somehow at this particular moment – I don’t know why – it seemed rather . . . rather . . .’ The laughter broke out once more. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘We must be going,’ said Mark, and rose from his chair. The young German also got up and came across the room towards them. ‘Good-night, Helen.’

  ‘Good-night, Mark. Good-night, Mr Giesebrecht. Come and see me again, will you? I’ll behave better next time.’

  He returned her smile and bowed. ‘I will come whenever you wish,’ he said.

  CHAPTER XXII

  December 8th 1926

  MARK LIVED IN a dingy house off the Fulham Road. Dark, brown brick with terra-cotta trimmings; and, within, patterned linoleum; bits of red Axminster carpet; wallpapers of ochre sprinkled with bunches of cornflowers, of green, with crimson roses; fumed oak chairs and tables; rep curtains; bamboo stands supporting glazed blue pots. The hideousness, Anthony reflected, was so complete, so absolutely unrelieved, that it could only hav
e been intentional. Mark must deliberately have chosen the ugliest surroundings he could find. To punish himself, no doubt – but why, for what offence?

  ‘Some beer?’

  Anthony nodded.

  The other opened a bottle, filled a single glass; but himself did not drink.

  ‘You still play, I see,’ said Anthony, pointing in the direction of the upright piano.

  ‘A little,’ Mark had to admit. ‘It’s a consolation.’

  The fact that the Matthew Passion, for example, the Hammerklavier Sonata, had had human authors was a source of hope. It was just conceivable that humanity might some day and somehow be made a little more John-Sebastian-like. If there were no Well-Tempered Clavichord, why should one bother even to wish for revolutionary change?

  ‘Turning one kind of common humanity into common humanity of a slightly different kind – well, if that’s all that revolution can do, the game isn’t worth the candle.’

  Anthony protested. For a sociologist it was the most fascinating of all games.

  ‘To watch or to play?’

  ‘To watch, of course.’

  A spectacle bottomlessly comic in its grotesqueness, endlessly varied. But looking closely, one could detect the uniformities under the diversity, the fixed rules of the endlessly shifting game.

  ‘A revolution to transform common humanity into common humanity of another variety. You find it horrifying. But that’s just what I’d like to live long enough to see. Theory being put to the test of practice. To detect, after your catastrophic reform of everything, the same old uniformities working themselves out in a slightly different way – I can’t imagine anything more satisfying. Like logically inferring the existence of a new planet and then discovering it with the telescope. As for producing more John Sebastians . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You might as well imagine that revolution will increase the number of Siamese twins.’

  That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to common-place people is high; in reality, very low.

  ‘Books are opium,’ said Mark.

  ‘Precisely. That’s why it’s doubtful if there’ll ever be such a thing as proletarian literature. Even proletarian books will deal with exceptional proletarians. And exceptional proletarians are no more proletarian than exceptional bourgeois are bourgeois. Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth. Hence those geniuses of fiction, those leaders and dukes and millionaires. People who are completely conditioned by circumstances – one can be desperately sorry for them; but one can’t find their lives very dramatic. Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.’

  ‘But do you really think that people with money or power are free?’

  ‘Freer than the poor, at any rate. Less completely conditioned by matter and other people’s wills.’

  Mark shook his head. ‘You don’t know my father,’ he said, ‘Or my disgusting brothers.’

  At Bulstrode, Anthony remembered, it was always, ‘My pater says . . .’ or ‘My frater at Cambridge . . .’

  ‘The whole vile brood of Staitheses,’ Mark went on.

  He described the Staithes who was now a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George and a Permanent Under-Secretary. Pleased as Punch with it all, and serenely conscious of his own extraordinary merits, adoring himself for being such a great man.

  ‘As though there were any real difficulty in getting where he’s got! Anything in the least creditable about that kind of piddling little conquest!’ Mark made a flayed grimace of contemptuous disgust. ‘He thinks he’s a marvel.’

  And the other Staitheses, the Staitheses of the younger generation – they also thought that they were marvels. There was one of them at Delhi, heroically occupied in bullying Indians who couldn’t stand up for themselves. And the other was on the Stock Exchange and highly successful. Successful as what? As a cunning exploiter of ignorance and greed and the insanity of gamblers and misers. And on top of everything the man prided himself on being an amorist, a professional Don Juan.

  (Why the poor devil shouldn’t be allowed to have a bit of fun, Anthony was unable, as he sipped his beer, to imagine.)

  One of the boys! One of the dogs! A dog among bitches – what a triumph!

  ‘And you call them free,’ Mark concluded. ‘But how can a climber be free? He’s tied to his ladder.’

  ‘But social ladders,’ Anthony objected, ‘become broader as they rise. At the bottom, you can only just get your foot on to them. At the top the rungs are twenty yards across.’

  ‘Well, perhaps it’s a wider perch than the bank clerk’s,’ Mark admitted. ‘But not wide enough for me. And not high enough; above all, not clean enough.’

  The rage they had been in when he enlisted during the war as a private! Feeling that he’d let the family down. The creatures were incapable of seeing that, if you had the choice, it was more decent to elect to be a private than a staff lieutenant.

  ‘Turds to the core,’ he said. ‘So they can’t think anything but turdish thoughts. And above all, they can’t conceive of anyone else thinking differently. Turd calls to turd; and, when it’s answered by non-turd, it’s utterly at a loss.’

  And when the war was over, there was that job his father had taken such pains to find for him in the City – with Lazarus and Coit, no less! – just waiting for him to step into the moment he was demobilized. A job with almost unlimited prospects for a young man with brains and energy – for a Staithes, in a word. ‘A five-figure income by the time you’re fifty,’ his father had insisted almost lyrically, and had been really hurt and grieved, as well as mortally offended, furiously angry, when Mark replied that he had no intention of taking it.

  ‘“But why not?” the poor old turd kept asking. “Why not?” And simply couldn’t see that it was just because it was so good that I couldn’t take his job. So unfairly good! So ignobly good! He just couldn’t see it. According to his ideas, I ought to have rushed at it, headlong, like all the Gadarene swine rolled into one. Instead of which I returned him his cow-pat and went to Mexico – to look after a coffee finca.’

  ‘But did you know anything about coffee?’

  ‘Of course not. That was one of the attractions of the job.’ He smiled. ‘When I did know something about it, I came back to see if there was anything doing here.’

  ‘And is there anything doing?’

  The other shrugged his shoulders. God only knew. One joined the Party, one distributed literature, one financed pressure-groups out of the profits on synthetic carnations, one addressed meetings and wrote articles. And perhaps it was all quite useless. Perhaps, on the contrary, the auspicious moment might some day present itself . . .

  ‘And then what?’ asked Anthony.

  ‘Ah, that’s the question. It’ll be all right at the beginning. Revolution’s delightful in the preliminary stages. So long as it’s a question of getting rid of the people at the top. But afterwards, if the thing’s a success – what then? More wireless sets, more chocolates, more beauty parlours, more girls with better contraceptives.’ He shook his head. ‘The moment you give people the chance to be piggish, they take it – thankfully. That freedom you were talking about just now, the freedom at the top of the social ladder – it’s just the licence to be a pig; or alternatively a prig, a self-satisfied pharisee like my father. Or else both at once, like my precious brother. Pig and prig simultaneously. In Russia they haven’t yet had the chance to be pigs. Circumstances have forced them to be ascetics. But suppose their economic experiment succeeds; suppose a time comes when they’re all prosperous – what’s to prevent them turning into Babbitts? Millions and millions of soft, piggish Babbitts, ruled by a small minority of ambitious Staitheses.’

  Anthony smiled. �€
˜A new phase of the game played according to the old unchanging rules.’

  ‘I’m horribly afraid you’re right,’ said the other. ‘It’s orthodox Marxism, of course. Behaviour and modes of thought are the outcome of economic circumstances. Reproduce Babbitt’s circumstances and you can’t help reproducing his manners and customs. Christ!’ He rose, walked to the piano and, drawing up a chair, sat down in front of it, ‘Let’s try to get that taste out of our mouths.’ He held his large bony hands poised for a moment above the keyboard; then began to play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D. They were in another universe, a world where Babbitts and Staitheses didn’t exist, were inconceivable.

  Mark had played for only a minute or two when the door opened and an elderly woman, thin and horse-faced, in a brown silk dress and wearing round her neck an old diseased brown fur, entered the room. She walked on tiptoe, acting in elaborate pantomime the very personification of silence, but in the process produced an extraordinary volume and variety of disturbing noises – creaking of shoes, rustling of silk, glassy clinkings of bead necklaces, jingling of the silver objects suspended by little chains from the waist. Mark went on playing without turning his head. Embarrassed, Anthony rose and bowed. The horse-faced creature waved him back to his place, and cautiously, in a final prolonged explosion of noise, sat down on the sofa.

  ‘Exquisite!’ she cried when the final chord had been struck. ‘Play us something more, Mark.’

  But Mark got up, shaking his head. ‘I want to introduce you to Miss Pendle,’ he said to Anthony; and to the old woman, ‘Anthony Beavis was at Bulstrode with me,’ he explained.

  Anthony took her hand. She gave him a smile. The teeth, which were false ones and badly fitting, were improbably too white and bright. ‘So you were at Bulstrode with Mark!’ she cried. ‘Isn’t that extraordinary!’

  ‘Extraordinary that we should still be on speaking terms?’ said Mark.