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iseALDERMAN LIBRARYEUROPE AT LOVEPAUL MORAND

NEW YORK
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
oh D2COPYRIGHT 1927 :: BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATESCONTENTS

THE TRIPLE MIRROR
THE ROGATKINE MUSEUM
DIVINE JULIE

WAVE OF INDOLENCE
NEW FRIENDS

NICO PETRESCO

ECHO, REPLY!
LORENZACCIO

THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
THE CIRCUM-ETNA RUN
MADAME FREDDA

IN PRAISE OF THE MARQUISE DE BEAUSEMBLANT .

I SET MOSCOW AFIRE

RHINELAND PLEASURES

THE AMUSING SCIENCE
INTER-ALLIED BARCAROLLE

THE DOUBLE FLOWER

THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEARS OLD .

PAGE

23
32
37
40
52
64
69
90
104
110
118
130
165
EOS
203
207
240BraThis edition of Europe
at Love is limited to
1,050 copies. This is
Copy NovoEUROPE AT LOVEn
MesTHE TRIPLE MIRROR
I

We slipped into a little salon, away from both the ball
and the supper. I spread out the cards fanwise on a
table. As lovely and as tranquil as a church Pearl sat
herself down facing me and picked out first thirteen
cards, then seven more. I knew nothing whatever
about her, but she was so complete and satisfactory that,
little by little, as I went on, I invented a legendary
destiny for her. Insomuch as she barely allowed me
to speak she made my task very much easier. And to
crown all she extolled my clear insight and marvellous
gift in cartomancy.

“CSrvEN of clubs, followed by those two black knaves.
Your present station in life is really not quite worthy
of you—”

“T come of a good family,” said Pearl. “My people,
who were non-conformist manufacturing folk in Lan-
cashire, brought me up without a looking-glass, making
me think I was plain. When I was sixteen I gave my-
self to a chauffeur, and I imagined it was a poor gift
for him. I was obliged to marry him. But he drank,

9EB OO BEAT WO V-E

 

and only came into my bed to be sick in it. I divorced
him and went on the stage.”

“And then you went through hard times?”

“In 1921, four years ago, I was living in the Rue
des Martyrs, in a little hotel frequented by all the show-
dancers and jugglers of the music halls in the quarter.
Overhead there were trapeze artists continually thud-
ding to the floor while they were training. (What a
lot of heavy falls to make them light!) Performing dogs
used to bark out their lessons. In the lavatories you
would find those pure white doves that come out of
sleeves. Sometimes there would be a yellow face ap-
pearing at my window; it belonged to the smallest
girl of a clan of Japanese acrobats practising in the
courtyard; she was the topmost peak of the family
pyramid and when her little face came up to my second
storey she used to give me a smile.”

“Your position very soon improved... ?”

“In October . . . thanks to my appearance in the
third act of the Casino revue. You remember?
That famous frock of raspberry-coloured tulle, with
my torso bare and all pearl-white, with the breasts
rouged and a top-hat pulled down to my ears, with
tufts of fair hair sticking out, so fair that it was all
but white. . . . Not that I am sorry now that I’m
brown. All Paris was talking about it.”

“At this period a man comes into your life.”

10

-
ae el,

BaeDEE TD RP ICE MERERO RnR

 

“How did you know? He is in it still.”

“T was just on the point of telling you so.”

“TI love him, don’t I?”

*“Are you really sure?”

“Oh, yes, he has always behaved properly to me:
more properly than I would have expected of a for-
eigner, a Frenchman.”

‘““He’s devoted to you?”

“Tn his own fashion. But it isn’t my fashion. First
of all he thinks too much.”

“One can learn to put up with intellectual people in
the long run.”

‘You may, perhaps. Besides, he’s worse than that,
he’s a genius. A superman. Nobody can follow his
paradoxical talk. Like every genius, he is always late,
always badly dressed and not shaved properly, and the
moment he gets into bed, the telephone rings for him.
Nothing is impossible to him... he is a regular
Aladdin. His hands open just like surprise packets.
He overwhelms everybody with presents, and that
makes it just as if he gave none to me. He thinks of
unheard-of ways of sending me flowers that come
tumbling into my flat just like bombs. He’s a real
artist.”

“Eight of hearts. He is quiet and kind.”

“He can be violent and cruel. He tells me I am as
old-fashioned as my Christian name. I’m a jealous

AEUROPE AT LOVE

woman. Every time I name a girl he imagines he is
reassuring me when he says, “That’s a thing of the past.
I know the ropes.’ (He uses these sporting terms, and
yet he’s not much of a horseman.) He explains to me
that for his health and his moral balance he must have
several women. He loves nobody but everybody likes

him.”

“When he’s near you—King of hearts—he feels what
every man, even a reader of cards, cannot help feeling.”

“FTis demands are fantastic, hardly believable.
Are all Frenchmen like that? When he has time,
he will want me several times in the same day, at
impossible moments, and in impossible places and
impossible postures. I can’t think how he imagines
the things he invents. At meals he makes constantly
obscene allusions before the servants. He calls me
his bedside mat. And then in a fit of disgust he
shouts: ‘’m sick of this! for twenty years now I’ve
been living under the shadow of this tree, telling the
time by this dial spike.’ He is a vulgar fellow. I think
he is of low origin.”

“These spades coming in here mean difficulties be-
tween you.”

“Naturally. Just when everybody thinks I’m eman-
cipated I give up every scrap of freedom. I could never
have believed that a man could pay for your educa-
tion, take you to see cathedrals, give you a piece of
12THE eT ROE RAGE Mi IGRERIO UR

 

Hispano-Mauresque lustre, and yet make your life un-
bearable. Like every Englishwoman I’m supposed to
be mercenary: but he’s the one that lives at my expense
—at the expense of my health, my resignation. His
cynicism is always dead against every kind of nice
feeling.”

“Isn’t he jealous? These two clubs?”

“He swears that to be jealous means that you are
afraid. He thinks nobody could be attached to him
except from interested motives. When I say ‘I love
you’ he comes back with: ‘And what do you want
now?’ If a man or a woman takes special notice of
me in a public place, he sends the commissionaire to
them with a message like this: ‘You have taken a fancy
to Pearl? She’s yours,’ and writes out an order on
his visiting-card ‘Admit to one séance of’ (whatever
it may be) ‘with Pearl.’ And he just lays hold of my
nose with a pair of sugar-tongs and pulls me along to
a private room and stays there to see his order made
good. I submit and cry, and he laughs. You must con-
fess that a woman can’t go on loving that for ever.”

“I should be curious to hear his name.”

“Sometimes,” said Pearl, “we give somebody a sealed
letter; the bearer only knows the name of the person
it’s going to and nothing about the contents. I’ve told
you everything written inside the letter, and you are
to know nothing about the envelope.”

13EUROPE ESAT LOVE

 

“Do I know him?”
Pearl smiled.
“Ask your cards.”

II

Mlle. Athalia Roubinovitch’s Fridays. A sculptor’s
rece ptions.

A sculptor, infinitely, mysteriously so. An artist who
withdraws herself from among the herd; refuses her-
self to the beating tom-toms of criticism; flees the noisy
bustle of the Salons. A shy fastidious artificer whom
we must needs pilgrimage to find in her den at Passy;
Mlle. Roubinovitch, like all the great classics, hides her-
self to carry on her work. Let us study to be worthy
of her.

“She is a sculptor of virile power, if I may venture
the word. There is nothing anemic about those masses,
those deliberate planes, tremendously evocative. Com-
pared with her the Pelasgian era is mere rococo. Her
Fridays, Venus’ days, her womanliness, are reserved for
her friends. A suave welcome, and how distinguished
the surroundings among which we take saké—our
hostess charming in a kimono—upon a red lacquer
table by the light of seven-branched candelabra. Low
seats—a cigarette? ... We talk together— Her fa-
vourite artists? ... Giotto, Ingres, Picabia. Her
studies? . . . Towards the sphere by way of the spiral.

14DHE TRIPLE MIRROR

 

Exhibitions? . . . In spring. ... And wherer— At
Rosenberg’s.— Bravo, we shall all go! cry the intimates
of the house: Lady Deutsch, the Duc d’Armor, the
Princesse de Mésagne-Estradére, Mrs. Willy de Ploérmel,
Comtesse Pieretto, Monsieur Henri Jean-de-la-Fontaine,
Mlle. Marquita Camille-Desmoulins, Baron Brosse, etc.
5 Adee
(Signed) PENCIL.

This interesting “lightning-interview” in a smart
daily paper would not in itself have been enough to
draw me to call on Mlle. Roubinovitch, if I had not
made her acquaintance by chance. I discovered in her
a person more authentic than her sculpture, of far
more interest and value than her studio.

Athalia was obscurely engendered by wretched par-
ents. Her father lived neglected and died mad. Her
mother, who lives with her, is a rouge-besmeared old
witch, with a mouth like a poisonous fen, hair like an
old rush chair unravelling, an aiding and abetting eye,
for all her hands in the posture of prayer. You can
see just such old women in Berlin, in the fourth-class
waiting-room at the Silesian railway station. She is
always just behind the door. She opens to you with
an air of suspicion, looking you over, up and down
first, and then from right to left and, as they say in the
East of this double Jew’s look, making the sign of the

15LEU ROPE AT ILO yv E

 

Cross with her eyes. The pair came away from Stanis-
lav two years ago on their four feet. They penetrated
into France from the East, making for Paris by stages.
By day they paraded the Avenue des Gobelins in silk
attire, and at night they went back to sleep in their
soap-box hut on the outskirts. Athalia adapted her-
self lightly and easily to her surroundings. At Mont-
rouge she sold old bottles; at Denfert-Rochereau she
sold herself; at Passy she is selling sculpture, an art she
acquired at Montparnasse on her way. Behind them
in their path, and soon to rejoin them, are strung out
along the roads of Europe brothers, sisters, uncles, a
whole family tribe of brigands, hidden in the caves of
grill-rooms, armed with hypodermic syringes, the blun-
derbusses of our day.

But Athalia is no more responsible for her family
than for her vagaries.

The first time I went to call on her I found her in
tears. Calmed by her weeping, divested of her panoply
of suicides in baths, poisoned flowers, insomnias and
egregious travels, there remained 2 woman who was
well worth listening to, perhaps even deserving com-
miseration.

“Everything is at an end,” she said. “You come at
the right moment. JI am drunk with so many cups
drained to the dregs. I have broken with my lover

16

Pe SiTRE TRIPLE MIRROR

 

a dozen times. So many great love-stories begin like
that! After each time some new reason for being
cautious falls to the ground and we cling to each other
more nakedly than ever. And all the time we are
full of love for one another. Every day I have a pas-
sionate line from him, and I take it into the deepest
depths of me. The victory will be mine. He is at the
last gasp. And besides he is rather a weakling. Soon
tired in love. A kind of little puny child. ‘When it is
dark, I am more afraid in your bed than if I was
lost in a wood,’ he tells me. As he is both idle and lazy,
he stays here for whole days at a time, to say nothing
of my hospitality at night. He doesn’t find the time
hang on his hands, even though I am very boring (Oh,
yes, I am!). For my part, I could never live among
superior people. I am an Oriental; I must have para-
sites, poor relations poorer than myself in whose eyes
I can assume all the importance I have a right to. I
have great needs, and he needs nothing but me.”

“But that is in itself a great need.”

“Rather intellectual. Cultivated—ah, most fastidi-
ously cultivated! ‘The Jesuit hall-mark. He likes his
own little habits (and that’s expensive nowadays).
Whatever I tell him he believes. I have not the least
doubt that he is faithful to me.”

“Indeed, indeed, I can hardly see why you love him.”

“Because he is my opposite, everything I would like

UZEU ROPE VA LOV E

 

to be. We are as different from one another as a
grin and a smile. I am his superior in everything that
can be acquired; but what about all the other things?
He is kind, he is sensitive, he is sentimental like any
Parisian. He is quiet, master of himself, proud of his
‘reflexes’-—his own word—he has nothing to be uneasy
about in his family history, he is upheld by his caste.
I think he is of high birth. Not over rich, handsome
and elegant. A brilliant horseman. He needn’t hide
his nationality. He doesn’t understand my sculpture
at all. There has never been a single case of insanity in
his family. He can go forward without seeing an-
tipathies springing up all around him. Everything in
him has its limits except his conscience. He is neither
blasphemous nor seditious nor tyrannical. His heart is
not divided, like ours, between a gross king wallowing
in worldly pleasures and a prophet with curses in his
mouth. I feel already that I forgive him...

‘Tell me more about him.”

She narrowed her eyes till they were mere slits.

“What is it to you, seeing that you don’t know him,
and seeing that I may perhaps be going to give myself
tO. you. =. .-

33

It

There are women who never give anything of them-
selves. Physically they are ceremonious and constrained,
18

_— —— ryeTHE TRIPLE MIRROR

 

their toes turn inwards, their thumbs lie inside their
palms, they have tragedy noses and mouths narrow as
the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur.

Lucie is plump, voluptuous, sociable, succulent to the
eye and so yielding-soft that at every moment you
have the impression of possessing her. When she an-
swers you she moves her legs apart. And for all this
it is impossible to get anything out of her. She is
more reticent than a girl, than a priest. Professional
secrecy. She keeps her dreams under lock and key.
No one has ever marshalled against her either proofs
or the shadow of the beginning of a proof. She lies
when she has to. When she does not wish to speak, she
produces a laugh that grates like a pulley block.
Neither post nor telephone nor dismissed servant nor
a most bosom friend has ever betrayed her. She yields
to no tears, to no moonlight, to no desire. She lives
alone and poor in a suburb, in a house that smells of
stew—a sitting-room furnished in walnut of the Louis
XV style and with slipper-shaped pockets made of shell-
work round the walls. She has an affection of the
lung that will kill her sooner or later. Just a little
French working-girl, simple, modest, prim. When she
has a little snack she breaks her biscuit neatly over
her cup; she lifts up her little finger as she drinks. She
bids you good-bye with an “au plaisir,” and as she reads
a novel she thinks “How well put that is.”

19nae Oo NE eS a a eT Sa e = sy = =

 

 

PURORE A TenhOV E

 

As for me, who attract to myself confessions—with
nothing to account for it except my long ears—and
who by the favour of age have become a kind of muse
of avowals, from Lucie I get not a sound or a syllable.
There is nothing to match these open countenances,
these malleable yielding bodies for never giving them-
selves away. Women, women are the triumph, the
acme, the last word in soft submissiveness. And yet
one day I took her and held her so closely that to free
herself she confessed the sweetness she found in remain-
ing faithful.

“To whom? Why do you never tell me about him?”

“Because I know nothing about him. I met him in
the street by chance. He is my master. I am always
waiting for him. He wears silk shirts, all silk, not just
the fronts. He doesn’t make love with his hat on his
head. He wears chamois gloves. He doesn’t smoke in
bed. He has a pale complexion, like rich people. He
wants clean towels always when he is here. He tells me
I am not poor now: I would like to believe him, but I
have been poor so long and so bitterly that I shall never
feel anything else; when I am ill, in spite of myself I
go to hospital. Sometimes he goes for months with-
out coming to me. His will be done; his dreadful will.”

“Why did you yield to him?”

“Why? He desired me so strongly that it exhausted

20

ia
a3

ps

oak
=

Prt

)
insTHE TRIPLE MIRROR

 

me to resist him. You don’t know what to say to him;
he has an answer for everything.”

“And then?”

“Nothing. Sometimes I sing Quand on est amoureux,
on est toujours heureux. We have sworn each to belong
absolutely to the other. There is only one thing I know
for certain, and that is that in all his life there is no
one, and always will be no one but me. Yes, I am
happy. My instinct never deceives me. My poor...

33

IV. EPILOGUE

He had been my friend, but I had not seen him for
years.

I found him, that morning in December, lying at
the side of the Quarante-Sous Road. A low flying
swift swallow had struck him between the eyes like a
flung stone. Driving at eighty miles an hour, he had
been stunned and let go the steering-wheel. Now he
was dying. The streaming blood was being sucked up
by the black autumn tilth. for the broken wind-screen
had torn his throat open. Before he died, he begged me,
in quick panting words, to take the news to the three
women whose names he gave me: Pearl, Athalia, and
Lucie.

And thus I learned, at one stroke, that behind these
confessions from three separate women there was only
one man, and that he was the man. To these three arias

21. £
— EE — —— — = = “3. Mt Ech

 

 

EURQPRE AT ELOV £

 

sung into the void one single tenor replied: three plaints
so diverse that you must needs have deemed them rather
addressed to different lovers, as unlike one another as
possible, than to one and the same.

And to-day, remembering those stories, the thought
comes to me that I had three friends, and that they
were all three killed by a swallow.

22

% > x m ~ 1 CT
4 : f ) slghblel viet elpetes
“ © , ‘ SeTHE ROGATKINE MUSEUM

Like the Savoy in Moscow, the Hotel de l'Europe in
Leningrad is almost the only house reserved for for-
eign visitors. In old-time Russia every foreigner was
called a German, to-day it would be enough to say “a
European.” And we on our side, from all countries
as we were, we recognized in ourselves a kind of family
likeness—the capitalist family, of which we are no
longer particularly proud, but on the whole rather glad
to belong to, in spite of everything; we were known by
a certain gusto in living, unembarrassed voices, laughter,
perhaps less of the future in our eyes, but more of the
spirit of enterprise in our hands. If the struggle
slackens and the two systems come to live side by side,
it can well be imagined—-so irreconcilable are they—that
one day the foreigners will have their own quarters
in Russian cities, their concessions, their own purveyors
round about their Legations.

The waiters in the Hotel de l’Europe have retained
the old white uniform; only it is not quite so white,
and they have lost their handsome girdle of cherry-
coloured silk, that made them look like gondoliers of
the snows. ‘The bar is empty, and if by some chance
a really choice meal is served, it is in a bedroom, shel-

2EUROPE AT LOVE

 

tered from the eyes of the police or the tax-collector.
The only outward sign is the ice-pail in the corridor.
Such as it was, this hostelry was our refuge. We were
bent on sticking close to the last surviving cellar of a
city that once had the most prodigious stocks of wine
in the world; even those of the Café Royal in London
or the Café Lafayette in New York only took second
place to them.

Boulard, whose mission of enquiry into the economic
state of Russia left him at leisure this morning, came
into my room to make the announcement that the night
before he had discovered some old Médoc that would
go excellently with luncheon and would cost no
more than a hundred francs a bottle. We must not
let such a chance be wasted.

We strolled out to get an appetite. Under the mel-
low breath of a wind from the Baltic it was thawing;
water was oozing all along the walls and dripping from
the roofs. ‘The very ground underfoot was turning
‘nto slush and this universal deliquescence added still
more to the vasty desolation of this city, perhaps the
most beautiful in Europe.

Away from the former Nevsky Prospekt, which still
retained a little life, at least at certain hours, the canal-
bordered avenues of Leningrad succeeded to the squares,
and the squares gave way to strects with never a shop,
or shops with nothing to attract customers except

24

meeFHE ROGATKINE MUSEUM

propaganda books and pamphlets. Everywhere those
receding vistas, parallels underlined in snow, those rows
of almond-green Empire palaces, “decorated,” as Sten-
dhal said, “with a charming note of sensuousness,”’ those
golden-yellow temples, polar Parthenons set off with
pale stucco in the frozen Thorwaldsen manner, those
tall edifices in the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna style,
stately Italian rococo, those sang de baeuf chanceries
standing mutually at the salute, those raspberry-hued
academies of Catherine, the pink-washed petrified graces
of Swedish Berninis, government offices deserted for ever
by the Czarist bureaucracy and by the still more sov-
ereign communist administration installed in Moscow
now and henceforward. ‘Triumphal arches all agape,
looking like bridges ruined by excessive tolls. Shiver-
ing curs defiled the Corinthian pillars; white stars stood
out on all acanthus carvings, mangled by machine-gun
bullets; passers-by, mottled with cold, noiseless shadows
in india-rubber boots, lashed by the driving snow,
seemed made of the same stuff as walls. The plaster
was coming away to the height of a man and the houses,
dripping wet like sluice-gates, were left without their
facing or, as the Russians say, ““without re-mountings.”
The chimneys sent up nothing now but the charred
paper of burned letters, doors were lined with dull iron
and were loath to open, condemned to death as soon
as night came down—all talk carried on only behind
25oa eeaener eters eS ————— —

 

 

 

EUROPE AT LOVE

 

closed doors. Under a lowering sky the equestrian
statues, turning green like so many Stilton cheeses,
reared up at the far horizons but never succeeded in
leaping beyond them.

We were going as far as the old low-level quarter
on the other side of the Neva—which seemed in ruins
too with its broken ice—the quarter where Leningrad
has the air of a Hanseatic city deserted by the sea. No
one now troubled to clean the panes of this “window
upon Europe.” One felt it slowly rotting away on its
hundred thousand piles, even as the hundred thousand
workmen that Peter the Great had once sacrificed there
had rotted away, this tormented city crumbling down
into the muddy grave of the delta.

“This isn’t another Venice,” said Boulard, “it’s Ra-
venna.”

“Say Pestum, with H. G. Wells.”

We consoled ourselves with “Where did Babylon
stand, that was greater than Paris in its day?”

“The Médoc isn’t the only thing,” said Boulard. “I
have discovered an amazing museum as well; on the
quays near Vasili Ostrov Island. There is such a swarm
of new museums in Russia that nobody can hope to
know them all. Picture a ground-floor cluttered up
with Oriental divans, gold embroidery, cushions, harem

rugs, lamps taken from mosques . . . all the horrors
of the Fromentin and Verestchagin period. You are on
26THE ROGATKINE MUSEUM

 

the point of bolting from it all; but the curator is
pressing, and suddenly, in the back rooms you come
upon an astounding collection of antique gold and
silver, Greek and Greco-Scythian jewels, funeral orna-
ments, translucent enamels, weapons . . . from what
conquests?”

I let the old Slavo-maniac go on with his monologue.

“Nobody knows where this primitive art originated,
nor where it was developed. And to think that the
Goths brought it to us and that all our medieval art
descends from it—confess that there is enough in that
to inspire curiosity.

“And then what is so fascinating is to think that
between this elaborate Scythian art and the primitive
Russian art eight centuries went by of which nobody
knows anything, and from which there remains neither
document nor monument. Nothing but images, those
curious stone babas. . . . But what is a mere eight cen-
turies to Russia?”

We went on to talk of the return to paganism in
certain districts in the U.S.S.R. following upon the de-
cay of religious feeling.

“Is the golden bough about to bud once more?”

Boulard smiled and pulled two papers out of his
pocket.

“Here is your answer:

~ ‘T read in the Pravda of June 10th, 1924, the report

27,EUROPE AL LOVE

of a workman correspondent of a provincial paper called
The Soviet Steppe. He describes the way in which the
son of a peasant called Anchine was treated by a witch-
wife. The boy had fallen ill and his parents consulted
a woman who was reputed through the countryside
to be a practitioner of magic. After examining the
child, the woman declared that the only way to cure
him was to put him in a very hot oven. Going home,
the mother heated up the oven, set her son on a great
shovel and thrust him into the oven like a cake of
bread. . . . At the victim’s shrieks a sister rushed into
the kitchen, but when she opened the oven door it was
too late, the child Vaska was dead already. The mother
ran up in her turn and perceived that Vaska was
baked.’

“And that’s not all,” went on Boulard. “Here’s a
cutting from the Izvestia of August 17th, 1924:

“A colonizing expedition organized by the Soviet
government has just discovered votaries of a heathen
religion east of Leningrad on the Vologda line, and
about a hundred and fifty versts from the former
capital. In the forest zone of the Tikhvinsk district
the inhabitants offer the blood of slaughtered beasts
as a sacrifice to their idol. The chants that accompany
these sacrifices have been recorded by the ethnographers
of the Geographical Society of Leningrad.’ I must send
this to Sir James Frazer.
28THE ROGATKINE MUSEUM

 

“This roundabout brings me back direct to the Rogat-
kine Museum,” said Boulard.

~I was so much interested by this astounding collec-
tion that I asked one of my friends in the Narkompos,
which is the Board of Education, who had been the
owner of these treasures, and how it was that he had
not been able to slip them away to the United States.

“ “Apollinaire Rogatkine’ was the answer ‘is in Siberia,
condemned to a penal colony in the Omsk district.’

"Pressing my enquiries, this is what I learned. Apol-
linaire Rogatkine was an odd fellow of about sixty,
cultured, wealthy, extremely miserly, who had shut
himself away ever since 1917 in his house in the Vasjlj-
Ostrov quarter, one of the few wooden houses that are
still in perfect condition. He was vaguely known for
his excavations in the Crimea and the Chersonese, but
nobody knew that he had such treasures. He had
never been in any trouble with his Housing Committee
and as he cheerfully wore a khaki cap and showed no
outward signs of luxury or comfort, he had never been
bothered. He was looked on as very much decayed
mentally. He lived among his collections, with an old
housekeeper, a Vologda peasant, who was said to be
his mistress. She was a Finn, ugly, rotund, with high
cheekbones, wicked slitty eyes, the face of an old Shang-
hai shopkeeper. She came from the Russo-Finnish
borderland where five centuries of Christianity have

29EUROPE Al LOVE

 

hardly left a mark on the people. She went out only
by night to do her marketing, coming back with her
basket crammed, slinking along the walls and fright-
ening the children going home at that late hour from
their political clubs. The two lived in this den, crippled
with rheumatism, for the Neva runs under the foun-
dations, immovable as coral reefs.

“Tt was a charwoman who denounced them to the
Ogpu—the secret police—for a bottle of beer. Once a
week she did a day’s washing at Rogatkine’s. Staying
later than usual one evening she noticed the smell of
burning flesh, and was curious enough to make her
way into the farthest part of the house, and peep
through the keyhole of M. Rogatkine’s study, which
she had never been allowed to go into.

“According to her evidence the room was ablaze with
church candles. The master and the housekeeper were
in it and both stark naked. The old man had a
crown of thorns over his wig. In front of the blazing
fireplace she saw a dozen black cats hanging on wires,
dead, soaked in paraffin and beginning to burn from
the tail up. Each of them had a label round its neck
on which the name of one of the People’s Commissars
could be read in big letters. There was a Tchitcherin
cat and a Lenin cat. M. Rogatkine was poking up the
fire with an old sword. His companion was stamping

30

SR cm

tTHE ROGALRKINE MUSEUM

 

up and down in a savage dance and reciting incanta-
tions against the Soviet leaders.

“The charwoman confessed that of herself she would
never have dared to denounce her employers, being
terrified of witches, but as Lenin’s death followed dur-
ing the week, she had been forced by her husband to
lay this information.

“M. Rogatkine and his housekeeper were arrested,
the house was confiscated by the State and turned into
a local museum. As for the charwoman, she was repri-
manded for believing such children’s fairy tales. The
Board of Education compelled her to attend classes
where she was taught that the devil no longer exists
and that the supernatural is only the natural not yet
explained,”

31DIVINE JULIE

(We had gone through a Russian dinner, obviously not
in Russia. Everyone had sat down at table without
much conviction, as so much eating and drinking had
gone on already. Out of the dozen guests there were
never many in the dining-room at the same moment.
We began with the liqueurs. The soup full of card-
board cigarette ends.)

Over a bank of sweet-peas I considered her. She was
not really so beautiful. Her face, a charming study in
many colours, had been too much crushed against other
faces. What a mouth—a good inn, ‘good entertain-
ment— Hair like music. Demonic.

“What lovely flowers! Of course you like flowers?”

“T do like flowers,” I replied, “but I am not an
urning.”

She was a singer in the Monte Carlo opera. Her
husband, a Russian too, was a laboratory assistant in the
Prince’s Museum of Oceanography. She cross-ques-
tioned me across the table, which is always unpleasant.

‘What else do you like? From your books one would
say you like nothing.”

32

4 r
tay 9)
= deDIVINE JULIE

 

“And there was I fancying I was making such an
artless and childlike inventory of all the wonders of the
world!”

“Oh, as for wonders, you take pains to show us
nothing but the epilepsy of the Russians, the stupidity
of the English, the avarice of the French, the indolence
of the Spaniards, the vanity of the Italians, the com-
monness of the Belgians, the pettiness of the Swiss, the
fecundity of the Germans, the savagery of the Bulgari-
ans, the thick wits of the Dutch, the university airs and
graces of the Czecho-Slovakians, the blackguardism of
the Roumanians, the wiliness of the Greeks, the demo-
cratic ideals of the Portuguese, the uselessness of the
Norwegians, the gymnastics of the Swedes, the ingrati-
tude of the Jugo-Slavs, the irresponsible levity of the
Austrians, the malice of the Hungarians, the touchiness
othe Poles:.. . .”

“Or the reverse, Madame. Dreams, they say, go by
contraries. Now, all scriptures are but a dream; seek
and ye shall find. Suddenly you will see appear under
my pen the generosity of the Russians, the unflinching
perseverance of the English, the Jansenism of the
French, the good sense of the Belgians, the loftiness of
the Swiss, the vigour of the Germans, the erudition of
the Czecho-Slovaks, the courage of the Bulgarians, the
thriftiness of the Greeks, the Parisianism of the Rouma-
nians, the gift of forgetfulness of the Austrians, the

33EUROPE AT LOVE

 

Francophily of the Portuguese, the flourish of the Ital-
ians, and so forth, and soon . . . and above all else the
sympathy of an author without a heart for every living
thing, to say nothing of his admiration for you,
Madame.”

By dint of flattering speeches I succeeded in bringing
her home with me. The floor swayed beneath us. The
furniture fluttered about like bees. She never cried out:
“O what I am doing!” the way the Frenchwomen do
pretending to be yielding in a kind of delirium from
too much drink, and always with a wary eye.

“O divine Julie!” I began, “I know that you flaunt
your vices as if they were virtues. . . .”

All at once, the telephone.

Knowing well enough who is likely to be calling at
this hour, I determine to make no sign of life. Beneath
the drenching shower of the electric ringing we bend
our heads, and our caresses are interrupted.

Julie grows pale.

“That is certainly your sweetheart telephoning to
you,” she says.

“What if it is?”

“Answer her.”

““No, indeed.”

“Please, please... . She must be unhappy, poor
girl.”

34DIVINE [ULLE

 

Julie rises to her knees. The telephone continues to
call the silent house, all in vain.

“Answer, I want you to answer.”

The more I refuse, the more worked up she becomes.
Now she is clinging to me as close as a flag round its
pole.

“Please, please, please. . . . At least take down the
receiver . . . so that I can hear the voice.”

Before I could do anything to prevent her, she
snatched up a receiver. Covering up the mouthpiece,
I put the other to my ear. And now I hear the one
who rings me up every night, calling my name, over
and over my name, just as a man might stand on his
door-step and whistle for the dog lost and astray out
in the fields.

I am called more and more, and more and more Julie
grips her hands between her legs. She shudders and
shakes like a harpooned whale.

The dear voice is now hardly to be heard, so resigned
to its own grief that all reproach has gone from it.
Once more my name, once only. Then the machine
transmits nothing further, nothing but a dreadful
silence. And yet the line is still open. There is nothing
left but waiting and suspense behind the desolate blank-
ness.

Then Julie’s eyes lose themselves God knows where.

35EUROPE AT Loy E

She flings herself into the cushions and in spite of the
hair filling her mouth, utters a cry. She falls, like a
dead woman dressed up and gay with coloured ribbons.
Hurriedly I hang up the telephone. I make to take
her into my arms, but she jumps to the ground.
“You couldn’t do anything that would please me
like that,”

36

oe eure é. reed - 05 rWAVE OF INDOLENCE

AFTER dinner, everybody agreed that the taste for work
had died out. We waxed sentimental over this ““wave
of indolence,” never considering that it means that
there are murderers who can’t drag themselves out of
their beds to do their murdering, burglars who stay on
and on at watering-places, letting the house-breaking
season slip by, and professional perverts who, instead of
going where duty calls them, prefer to stay at home of

a night, playing dominoes with their wives and children.
mundas £Of spies’. . .. ?

In 1915, in London, I got to know a Dutchwoman,
born somewhere in Java. She was a dazzling crea-
ture, and wore her black plaits coiled round her ears
like the horns of Australian merino rams. She made
me think of those signs at country fairs:

FEMMES D ORIGINE
ORIENTAL ATTRACTION
BEAUTE—VOLUPTE—FEERIE—LUMIERE

Once again I saw myself obliged to turn to foreign
industry for my lovemaking.

374BURO BRE Al CLO@V-E

 

She was staying at the Ritz, on the first floor, at
the corner of Arlington Street. One night after din-
ing in the hotel and drinking a great deal, we decided
to go up to her room. Sharing the lift with us was a
kind of rabbi, all silks, with a leather portfolio bulging
with documents under his arm—<(like the members of
Parliament in Forain’s drawings in the days of the
Dreyfus Affair). He was accompanied by French and
English artillery officers. His room was next door to
the one we went into.

“That’s Albert Thomas, our Minister of Munitions,”

said I.
; “Ah,” said the lady from Java, “I didn’t know. .. .”
| They brought us up more drinks, iced and copious.
Everything in the room was white except her hair and
mine. I set full value on chance encounters and these
expeditions into unknown countries, explorings in
human skin. Nothing, I thought, is uglier than the
people one sees every day.

And so the snow of the bed dissolved.

I opened a door, thinking I was going into the
bathroom. It belonged to a cupboard. Among the
scented dresses hanging in it I thought I saw a theatro-
phone. I put it to my ear: it was a microphone.
Through the wall I heard quite clearly Albert Thomas
setting forth the amount of shells we needed for our

38

ae mama TO TN
ay

iWAVE OF INDOLENCE

 

“seventy-fives” and quoting in support the statistics of
the latest battles.

My companion saw me coming back to her and
already half asleep:

“Yes.” she said, “I know I ought to be listening to
all that, but figures bore me stiff: I get all moidered
up with their rigmaroles about munitions. And any-
how, now that my sables are paid for... I’m
SleepYs + + =

And without waking up, as she felt me beside her,
she took me to her, closing upon me at once with the
instinctive action of a clam.

Two months later I heard that our always ill-informed
Secret Service had netted her at the Swiss frontier.

39NEW FRIENDS

It seems to me that I know her better than I know
myself. Yet I have never set eyes upon her. Her
name is Paule . . . very nearly the same as my own.
Paris is a labyrinth in which sometimes our paths cross,
sometimes we are at each other’s heels—though sepa-
rated by walls thick enough to keep us from seeing one
another, thin enough for us to hear each other breathe.
I know she lives high up just under the tiles; they tell
me you can hear the birds pecking on the roof of her
bedroom. In the distance Mont Valérien floats on a
wrought-iron sea. I have tried to look up at her win-
dows, but her balcony is set back, and I saw nothing.
She doesn’t open her door. She has few friends, and
with those few her relations are so intense, so impas-
sioned, that it is more like a perpetual tender wrangle.
Seen in a photograph in the modern style, her face
with its high lights on forehead, on chin, on cheekbone,
all drowned in the rich velvety shadows of artistic in-
sinuation, is dedicated to endurance and secretiveness.
So curious have I been about her that I have gone so
far as to rummage in her dustbin for withered flowers,
bits of torn letters, the skins of fruit. I have come
40

Arn
Bc tah

.NEW FRIENDS

 

 

upon her harsh black hairs in the teeth of a comb. I
have been shown her footsteps in the sand, deeply im-
printed like the heavy soles of a deep-sea diver; yet she
is by no means like that elegiac poet who was so light
that he must needs have leaden sandals to enable him
to stand on mother earth. She is naturally weighty and
pitiless; the sworn enemy of innocence. She thrills me
like a great battle in which like another Fabricius, I
have no share, but judge its fighting fury or its political
importance from the eyes of those who come. away
from it. I have always hated her—I have all but loved
her. For that I find all my own predilections in her;
for that she is most surely like, if not me, yet like what
I am fain to be, for that like me she loves.

Agnés.

I am sitting at table alone, waiting for Agnés. She
it was who had the idea of this dinner. She fixed
our meeting here in this Dresden china restaurant on
the edge of Paris. When I was a little boy I used to
come here for my goziter; there were the same palm-
trees then and the same blue vases. It is already past
her hour to come. But time is not our common heri-
tage; it is her own peculiar property. She puts so
many things into the minutes she gives me, there is
still so much of herself in those she denies me that it is
just as if I never left her side. I love Agnés, and I

41EUROBERESAT LOVE

 

believe she loves me too in her fashion; but hers is the
fashion that I like. I believe also—not simply because
it is good to believe—that she is not like anybody else.
Other women have their continual tears, their nerves,
their periods, their laddering stockings. But to Agnés
nothing happens but what she gives leave and license
to happen, and never anything ordinary. Her life is
made up of twelve hours of transgressions and twelve
hours of oblivion, of open-pored, health-giving lustral
oblivion that purifies her and calms her to her inmost
depths, allows her to have that innocent baby-face and
that persistent taste for common ordinary pleasures
which she will never indulge. Agnés is a person of
kindly and gracious qualities, with a tip-tilted nose
which has had those giant adventures only meant for
eagle-beaks. She follows all the trails of her destiny,
never out of breath. She is full of breeding but has all
the optimism and strong vitality of people of no breed-
ing whatever, which has enabled her to accommodate
herself to the strangest turns of fortune. She perseveres
underneath all her extravagance, she takes with her in
her most tragical amusements an enormous sappy good
sense like a comedian attached to the troupe of her
picaresque days. For Agnés perpetrates more follies and
imprudences than anyone in the world although, I re-
peat, with the clearest judgment, the most correct man-
ners, the minimum of consequences. It is her choice
42NEW FRIENDS

 

to live in the thick of a racket, and what gives us a
splitting headache is an exquisite melody to here.
will give no instance here, though her life has been,
and still is, an unheard-of succession of romantical ad-
ventures. It will suffice to make you understand if
you see her come in and sit down opposite me, and
in an instant recount the calamities of a day, the lapses
she affects without a touch of hypocrisy or conceal-
ment; to observe the prompt appearance of her battery
of dangers—natural or masquerading—of distress and
merriment, that comes with her and falls upon anyone
who, like myself, comes near her unguarded and con-
fiding.

To-night I am to have Agnés to myself, a thing one
cannot always achieve. Who could claim the right to
sequestrate this treasure that properly belongs to so-
ciety? How could this rushing mighty wind be kept
under a roof, when it threatens to burst the house if it
is confined at all? For Agnés flings her doings all
around her, to explode like bombs, with complete care-
lessness and an uncommon long range. She laughs at
the women of pre-war times who used to tell men
“Pll come to your flat if you'll promise to be ever so
good.” Perhaps we shall see her arrive affectionate
and gentle: she can be both, especially if you don’t
seem to be watching her.

43EUROPE gat GOw FE

 

Agnés doesn’t come. I look up at each new arrival,
and every time the waiter lays before me a fresh knife,
another fork, to soothe my impatience. I must look
like that Restoration engraving L’ Attente de la Fiancée.
Already the diners are beginning to thaw, to become
cordial, to get under one another’s skins. ‘The tables
are taken away for dancing. The violinist spreads a
dirty handkerchief over his violin as if he was going to
spit out his teeth and runs over me a proud and unaf-
fected eye like the eyes of the stags in the lounge, until
at length happening upon his own reflection in a mirror,
he is captured for good, and his gaze forsakes me.
There is still daylight over the sky, but already further
withdrawn into the sky. Long-shaped clouds are moy-
ing to the west, as though in answer to a summons. I am
forgetting to say that Paris lies before me; between us
are pink-blossomed chestnut trees and a bend of the
Seine, lovely and shimmering in the slanting reflected
light.

“Good evening. Has Agnés not come yet?”

**Paule?”’

**Yes, Paule.”

“How did you recognize me?”

“Tt was you beyond any possible shadow of doubt.”

I was hearing her voice for the first time. “They
must lay another place,” she said; “Agnés has asked us

A4NEW FRIENDS

 

both to be her guests to-night; as she is late she begs
us to begin without her.”

And so, knowing that if we had been forewarned
each of us would have slipped away, Agnés had taken
care not to tell us we were to meet. She had convoked
us—the poorest way of bringing people together,
merely getting them in the same place at the same
time. And now there we were face to face, without
the one whose presence was the only thing that could
make us happy and at ease. Agnés had determined to
collect into a small space her two greatest blessings,
hitherto always apart, the two persons who love her
best, who are content to conform to what she wishes
or does not wish, though never failing to suffer from
it. For Paule and myself, in all frankness and sim-
plicity, have been in love with Agnés for a year.

Paule sits down opposite me without a word. We
adjust what we see to the picture we had made one
of the other: it links up to perfection. Paule is quite
white. And puts on some more. Her face is a disc
of white velvet crossed by a crimson bar, and divided
in the middle by a black ridge of eyebrow cut across
slantwise by her hat. What I see of her like this is not
very much, but it is a great revelation all the same.

Which of us could have thought it possible to come
near the other—that other always so far off, and kept
for months out of reach by Agnés’ languorous con-

45EFUR@OPRETAT LOVE

 

trivings—so near as to see the texture of each other’s
skin, to touch one another, to be within grasp... .
“T have very often longed to kill you,” said Paule.
“And at this very moment I sigh for your death.”
The danger was so slight that we ought to have
laughed over it, laughed out loud to see ourselves dining
alone together this way like a pair of lovers. But we
lack the comic sense, both of us falling short through
stoicism and stolidity of mind. Both of us are lovers
of virtue. Incurably so. And uprooted and upset be-
cause Agnés is not there. All unseen the Commendatore
of the rosy bosom has a place laid between us.
Who will be the first to utter that name!

The commissionaire is the first after all. Agnés has
just telephoned. She will not be able to join us...
she was tired and has gone to bed. Nothing is left
but for us to break our fast. Is it a trap or a well
thought-out ambush? Anyhow we both know Agnés
well enough to guess the pleasure she must be deriving
at this moment from the trick she has played on us.
“Trés sport,” she will say.

Now is Paule going to be ruthless and ensure an
initial advantage by rubbing it into me that she has
known Agnés longer than I have, and digging up
memories of sailing trips on the Lake of Geneva, kisses
in Normandy under blossomy apple boughs? Obsessed

46NEW FRIENDS

 

with precedents, is she going to force me to endure a
genealogical history of her love? I am an inflexible
democrat and set no store on old parchments. I will
spoil her effects for her. If it comes to that, I will go
so far as to hold her eye while I disclose how I was hid-
den in the village inn all through the month of August
last that Agnés spent with her. Agnés used to leave
Paule’s villa every morning at daybreak, and I hugged
her to death afterwards . . . and in those moments I
cared not a fig for their games and their false beards.

Nothing of all this happened, for Paule took her hat
off. She took her hat off and her forehead appeared
frank, approachable, kind. She was a new creature.
She has not got short hair. And her mouth too, I had
put quite a wrong construction on it. It was a Fenelon-
like spirit, of softest smoothest weaving, “sympathetic
and liberal’ that sat facing me across the table. I
never knew how much our judgments hang on the mere
accident of lighting. There was I linked to someone
as tremulous as myself, whose very soul quivered in the
emotion of being alone face to face with an enemy.
Might not Paule have some of the qualities, some of the
defects, towards which I aspired? Naive and yield-
ing to entreaty, could she be a sister soul?

And there was I caught between the politeness that
called for me to speak nicely about our common friend
47EUROPE GAD Ove

 

and the craving to establish intimacy between us by
saying something against her.

“Do we convict Agnés?” J asked.

“Alas, yes! for contempt of court.”

““Let’s lynch her.”

“T have always thought it a marvellous end to be torn
to pieces by a crowd,” said Paule, “‘and by no means
within everybody’s reach. But it is emphatically the
proper end for owr Agnés. Imagine everybody piously
carrying away some little bit of her afterwards.”

“Which bit of Agnés would you like best?”

“In popular insurrections you snatch at what you
can. I love her fingers, but it would be very hard to
get hold of them on account of her rings. . . . My
choice would fix on her mouth.”

I was just about to reply:

“Let’s fix on her mouth,” but managed to check it
before the phrase could slip out. However, at that
point the image sprang up in my mind—and in my
turn I must transmit it—the image of a threefold kiss,
a triangle as inhuman and monstrous as the three-legged
body that is the emblem of the Two Sicilies, a medley
of lips in which only corners meet corners in juxta-
position while the mouths strain forward in a void, miss
one another in the furnace of their threefold fiery
breath.

I recovered my calm and continued.

48

Sete ,
poorer rer iTS a

aNEW FRIENDS

 

“But her mouth, what would it be if it was dumb?
Is it anything else than a word surrounded by carmine?”

We broke off this Elizabethan dialogue full of blood
and euphuistic conceits, for the sound of our voices had
relieved the tension and allowed our hearts to confer.
Who does not know those silent, glittering conversations
that happen between two people meeting for the first
time, and weld them to one another while the actual
words that hold the stage strut up and down unheeded,
unbelieved?

Before long it was a simple matter for us to admit
that each of us loved Agnés for the same reasons. Does
not everybody, when it comes to bedrock, enjoy de-
lightful things in the same way as everybody else? We
could not get away from the pleasure and the vexation
we felt in realizing this. Agnés’ laughter, her ice-cold
hands, her inconstancies—she says that for pure love of
faithfulness she is faithful to everybody—her trick of
singing out everything she does, of making appoint-
ments with us publicly and at the top of her voice—
(with you, too?)—the perfume she exhales like stab
upon stab, her excesses interrupted and excused by hor-
rible physical suffering—headaches—her contempt for
comfort, which is unusual in a woman, her clownish
way of living but her high tragedy way of understand-
ing life, all this over and above the baby sweetness of

49BU ROPE Ai “iO Vy 5

 

her skin, united us to Agnés, and this evening, when
she was not there, bound us close to each other.

Over Paris hung the hollow moon. A mood of con-
tented ease, free from everything petty or ignoble, took
possession of us. We were not disturbed even at hear-
ing there were no more strawberries and cream. On
the right above the gasometers of Vanves (looking like
carcases of Coliseums half eaten by vultures): above
the market gardens of Clamart, smoke clouds were
settling to sleep. On the left this industrial fog came
to an end, and over the Bois de Boulogne began the
mist that comes from growing things. Long lines of
lights unfurled themselves like motto scrolls at the foot
of monuments that play a familiar part in the panorama
of Paris. The police went by in side-cars, intent on
their nightly labours.

Paule pointed a finger at them.

“As if anybody could police the night-time,” said
she.

“As if anybody could police an epoch like this of
ours,” I took up her word, “when everything becomes
in One moment so simple and yet so subtle that no
prison . . . In the old days we would have cut each
other’s throats, or poisoned one another. But here we
sit, you and I, bearing together the heavy load of love.
How much help is needed to get through these surgical
evening hours, so hard for all lovers? See how pleasant

50NEW FRIENDS

 

a broken appointment can be when it makes two vic-
tims at one stroke. What words are there for this new
friendship of ours? We go on using yesterday’s words,
just as we go on living in old houses, to save the trouble
of building them anew, though we no longer live in
them in the same way. But people know nothing be-
yond what their eyes behold, and nobody perceives that
underneath everything has changed.”

We got up to go and I took Paule’s arm. Our
thoughts were of Agnés. Most of all we would have
liked to know which of us two she preferred as a lover.
But ought we, this night when our heartache was like
a tamed bird sitting on our finger, ought we to set it
a-flutter again? We went down on foot towards the
Point du Jour. In silence we enjoyed our unexpected
armistice that might perhaps have no to-morrow: we
had been led with eyes unbound into each other’s camps,
permitted to go everywhere and touch with our own
hands the weapons that no longer ago than yesterday
were dealing us the deepest wounds.

51NICO PETRESCO

I

PARSONS?’ sons are not all rotters; the black brood of the
seminaries. I am an ambitious man. ‘Take orders?
Look forward to an archimandrite’s future celibacy and
poverty? No, thank you. I have too often seen my
own father asking for charity from the boyars at the
end of the month; a beggar in priest’s clothes, no more
and no less. This grinding poverty must stop. I, too,
am a Socialist.

You are not to imagine me a lazy Moldavian, sleeping
upon goose-down and tucking a silk shirt round my
tail. I am from Oltenia in Little Wallachia, in other
words, a Danube peasant, with my head well squared
and thirty-two molars in my jaws, as the proverb goes
about those of us with Bulgarian blood in us. Winning
a scholarship at the lycée, I was an ardent student. I
used to work enough to ruin my eyes like my old mother
over her embroidery. I turned my back on pleasures,
on gipsy girls—those glow-worms—on funeral proces-
sions, on all the sights of the Calea Victoria: I knew
nothing of battles of flowers nor of masked balls; I
never joined a nationalist club for boycotting Jew pro-

§2

Ga rene nn natal . —NICO PETRESCO

 

fessors, nor an anarchist group for overturning tram-
cars, although my opinions pulled me that way. In
our days philosophers no longer have their honoured
seats in the porch: they must make their way with
their elbows like other folk. And so ever since I left
school six months ago here I am in France, at the ex-
pense of the Roumanian Government. I am going to
take my degree in philosophy and then I shall go home.
My future is rosy: I shall give lessons, I shall have a
French diploma, I shall have as good standing as a
colonel, and one day I shall own a little place in the
black lands along the Danube, up above the silvery
reeds of Turnu-Severin.

II

I had my hand almost on the goal: I saw myself
driven to give up. Everything was crumbling to pieces.
For lack of money I should be driven to leave France
just before the examination. Twice already during the
year my comrades and I found ourselves left money-
less at the beginning of the month; still, we had got it
in the end. But within the last few days, when we
went to the Consulate to draw our monthly University
subsidy, we were told that in consequence of the slump
in lei the Government was unable any longer to help us
in France. All that work lost! We went back again and

53PURO? AT LOVE

 

again in the hope that in the meanwhile an official tele-
gram might have come to put things on a better footing.
We slept in the waiting-room, on the stair-case; many
other students did the same. From every corner and
nook of Paris they came down. Here were handsome
Roman legionaires studying for the Conservatoire: little
Kalmucks from the Dobrudja, only as far as their P.C.N.
Lazy Moldavians with powdered faces coming from the
terrace of the Café de la Paix (the tables closest to the
Grand Hotel), the new-made Roumanians from Tran-
sylvania, so polite and so shy, who can speak nothing
but German; and lastly the slinky Jews, the future law-
yers, with twisty ears like cats. The official in charge
came out of his room and offered to send us home third
class by sea. We threatened him, we did not hide from
him that his mother had been over-familiar with the
he-goats; then we shut him up in the kitchen, and
finally the police arrived and scattered us. It is all over,
I shall never have my degree.

I went and sat in the Luxembourg gardens. The
luncheon hour had made them as empty as an empty
stomach. My whole worldly wealth consisted of thirty-
five francs. No longer ago than yesterday I dreaded
finding myself here waiting for the examination hour
to strike, waiting to “enter the cage”; like every other
student my heart contracted at the sight of the pop-

54

msNEGO LET RE SCO

 

lars on the quays, shedding their cotton-wool—an in-
fallible augury and sign of examination time. But now
how I should bless it all. I shall have to tumble back
into my old village—down, down with a social order
that allows such things to be!—among the black pigs,
the gipsy children, the bare-bosomed distaff-carrying
women, and my father coming away in his priest’s
robes from the red church, red like a slaughter-house,
blessing the cottages and picking up halfpennies.

No.

Iil

Here is a garage. Suppose I were to offer myself as
a car-washer? You put on big rubber boots, make play
with a sponge, dry off with a chamois leather and that’s
that. And to think that I never believed in fatalism.

A young man in light grey says:

“Fave you come in answer to the line in the New
York Herald? You're in luck.”

I do not dare to answer no. He is taking me for a
chauffeur out of a place. This might be a better way
of earning my living for a few days? Might find em-
ployers who would leave me with some time for myself.
As a matter of fact I drove a Ford at Tecuci, during the
war, in a sanitary unit.

“Ts it a light car?”

“Vourre off) . its a Rolls.7

55EUROPE AT LOVE

 

He brings me up to an orange-hued locomotive, all
plate-glass, nickel and enamel, with disc wheels of white
metal, resting in its stall. I close my eyes. Then the
Roumanian in me, not easy to daunt or dazzle, takes
command again:

“That’s my form.”

“All right, then, put the gas aboard. The critters
live on the Quai des Grands Augustins. Go and make
your bow before dinner.”

Mr. and Mrs. Seymour Caress receive me in an-
cient house belonging to the France of bygone ages,
with old waxed furniture and the inevitable view out
over Notre Dame. My feet leave dusty tracks on the
black carpet adorned with signs of the Zodiac. Hus-
band and wife are both studies in pink, both wearing
the same dinner-jacket suit, both with gilded finger-
nails; they are drinking artistic drinks with bananas and
camelias soaking in them.

They rise to their feet and show a lively interest.

“Have you come in answer to the advertisement?”

Ves-sit.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes sir. ... 1 wasn’t told that a couple was
WANteG: 5. 1
They looked surprised.
mbOK Lovet.

56NEGO PER RES EG ©

 

“T don’t know, sir. I mean the advertisement in the
New York Herald for a chauffeur.”

At that they took no more heed of me, engaged me
without ever looking at me and sent me off with some
money to the Belle Jardiniére to buy a uniform. I was
to call for them in the morning.

At last I get something to eat and betake myself to
a little wine shop at Levallois where the owner fishes up
a chauffeur’s papers for me. My Pyrrhonian soul opens
itself to hope. I shall be able to wait over in Paris for
my examination, prepare my texts, revise those dreadful
equations in which our most illustrious metaphysicians
go slopping about—good lord, just like poor me—when
it comes to fortifying their arguments with a mathe-
matical proof.

IV

Neuilly, the Patte d’Oie. Pontoise. ... We are
very much belated, for my employers only got up in
time for luncheon. The car sweeps smoothly over the
road. By what miracle, I ask myself. I do not dare
cast a look in front of me, the driving board is so
dotted with manometers, black upon white like targets
at a fair, ultra perfect gauges, super-subtle indicators
with red needles, graduated scales in platinum, phos-
phorescent figures, levels filled with blue liquid.

57EUROPE Af EOVE

 

Everything is duplicated: duplicate ignition, duplicate
starter; there are very nearly brakes on the spare
wheels; a dozen pumps, and so on. . . . This is not in
the least like the old Ford, it is silent and treacherous
to the last degree; I tremble as I try each switch, each
lever. ...

This morning as I came out of my lodgings the con-
cierge handed me a paper. My summons to the exam-
ination, in the first series; and a piece of luck for me.
The written exam is to-morrow morning; the thing
starts in the dawn, at seven o’clock! If only the bosses
don’t go to the theatre this evening, so that I can run
over my metaphysics through the night and mug up
my H6ffding.

It is four in the afternoon. I feel somehow as if we
had crossed the whole of France. We must be in the
Cotentin, deep among the moorlands. We are com-
ing to the goal of our excursion, the Roman basilica of
Perilevent.

I tried to work while they were going over the
church; but I had got up so early that I went to sleep
over The Expression of the Emotions on the luxurious
Pullman suéde cushions. Mr. Seymour Caress woke me
and took me across to the transept where he stood
contemplating the broken-down nave through his tor-
toise-shell spectacles.

58

UP aNIGO PEF RESGO

 

“Everything you see here,” said he, “‘contains a secret
moral lesson. Animals—eucharistic symbols.”

‘“Totems or taboos?” rejoined Mrs. Caress smiling
behind her lorgnette. ‘Synthesis of passions or bor-
rowed decorative motives?”

“Who knows?”

Mrs. Caress turned to me for approval.

“Archzology,” said she, “is poetry.”

She explained that she is the author of the Essay on
Sixteen Symbolic Statues on the Towers of Bourges
Cathedral and that the origin of cathedrals must be
sought for in the Soudan. I took leave to gainsay this.
She replied:

“Don’t argue. See that you fill up with petrol.”

V

Night comes down more rapidly than I could have
believed. I am not accustomed to these American
headlights that swivel this way and that, like eyes. We
have a puncture . . . I change the wheel, ruining my
nails over the job. Dinner at LeMans. We shall never
get to Paris before midnight. And yet have I not got
to run through Pleasure and Pain before to-morrow?

The moon has disappeared. Maintenon . . . Ram-
bouillet. I put on full speed, the car creaks, leaps across
the culverts, the windscreen rattles, the doors shiver and
shake. At sharp corners the luggage carrier groans and

59EUROPE Ad LOVE

strains; a queer smell rises—I have forgotten to take
off the brakes. I switch on the lights: we are in the heart
of the forest and running at over seventy-five; with
these accursed modern engines you’re all at sea, you’ve no
notion what speed you’re making; along both sides of
the road the trees dash by like a stick missing you by a
hair’s breadth and swishing past your ears. Rabbits.
Saint-Cyr ... paving stones... a sudden crack
from the springs. I must have broken the master leaf.
I am not stopping for a little thing like that, if } did
I should never have time to run over the English sen-
sationalists again.

Here is the Picardy ridge . . . two in the morning.
What a crowd of cars. . . . They switch their head-
lights on and off . . . you might call it a kind of lumi-
nous conversation. Shadows are seen going by among
the trees—in couples. Flies dash against the screen, the
long beams swing this way and that, fade out, and then
the night once more wipes all away. We are running
through the woods of Saint-Cloud; Citroéns escort us,
run alongside us, almost rubbing shoulders with us;
women lean out; a big saloon car slides past us, takes
our road, sounds its siren as though to show us the way.

Mr. Seymour Caress knocks on the window.

“Stop.”

I switch off the ignition.

Through the trees I can see Paris all lit up. A liquid

60NICO PRET RESGO

 

odour of water and moonlight floats over the Stade
Francais.

“Do you see the footbridge?”

““Just there, sir.”

Thereupon my employer took a small whistle out of
the head of his walking-stick and blew three times.

“Excuse me, monsieur,” he said, ““we have come for
the garden-party.”

A man in a peaked cap, who was hanging about in
the night broke in.

““There’s been trouble to-night; everybody has sloped
off. It’s at the Fausses Reposes, prince. Second turning
on the left beyond Viroflay; you'll come on the
Lettuce, the bloke that goes round begging in a bowler;
he’ll show you.”

“Switch off the lamps.”

Richt, Sits:

Three times over we miss the way. We have turned
our backs on Paris. At length in the darkness we hit
on the Villacoublay aerodrome with its triangle of
lights for night landings. A kilometre more. Suddenly
a match is struck in front of us. My boss knocks on
the window again. I put on the brakes and wait.
When my eyes have got used to the darkness I discover
a score of cars standing beside me in a long row. There
is even a motor-coach that has brought passengers from
the Place de Opéra. Every light is out, and not a

61EURO RE ALT “LOVE

 

chauffeur is to be seen. Now who can be giving a re-
ception as late as this in such an out-of-the-way spot?
I stay in my seat without budging. My dust-coat makes
a white blotch on the night. Mr. and Mrs. Seymour
Caress do not get out of their car. But to my astonish-
ment, no sooner have we stopped than shadowy figures
come to visit them. Others follow, sometimes men,
sometimes women. My bosses know a regular horde of
people. In their turn they open the door and I see them
get into a six cylinder, which they leave a moment later
for a cycle-car that could hardly hold two, and which
starts off with a hellish racket.

Tired of waiting I switch on the lamp on the driving
board and snatch up my text-book.

But here comes a ghost hovering round the car. A
young man with nothing on under his top-coat. I have
it, it must be the starting point of a foot-race.

“Your bosses are Box 2652?”

“T don’t know.”

He then holds out to me a clipping framed in red
ink. I read: 2652 Couple étranger assoif. idéal desir.
conn. autre couple paris. ay. compreh. larg. vie pr. part.
campagne.

I hand back his scrap of paper, and take up my
Psychology again. Chapter XVIII.... The Will.
62NICO PET RESEO

 

. . . | don’t want to know anything about the pleas-
ures of the western Smart Set. I see as I sit my little
property among the reeds of the Danube, in time of
thaw, when the ice breaks up with a noise like cannon.

When Mr. and Mrs. Caress came pussyfooting back,
like violet-coloured angels, they found me dead asleep.
Through my dreams moved my professors: Brunschwig
winking and blinking but ruthless; Dumas a treacherous
conquistador to examinees; Basch from whose mouth,
instead of a lecture on zsthetics, there flowed ropes of
motor tyres; in a word, all the horrors of an “examina-
> Dawn was beginning to grow pale in the
sky and to purge and purify this suburban savannah.
On the Seine the tugs lay torpid.

I had no more than time to put my car back in the
garage and get my concierge to serve me the fry and
the quart of black coffee that every candidate carries
in his shrinking stomach as he climbs up to the Sorbonne

for his ordeal.

tion dream.’

63EGHO, REPLY!

THERE was every possible reason why I should become
a friend of Marie Louise R.... or if not really a
friend, at any rate achieve the special kind of intimacy
that one generally enjoys in a certain number of bou-
doirs in Paris, while leaving one’s heart at home. I was
on friendly terms with her family, and among her most
constant bodyguard were some of my best friends. We
had the same habits, were near neighbours, in fine we
belonged to the same generation, which is to say, the
same secret sect, the same invisible clan. So that I was
in occupation of all the approaches. In spite of all
she would never know me; I mean by that—of course
she could not in the long run prevent my being intro-
duced to her—she would never let me call on her, nor
when I met her in other people’s houses would she lay
aside a quite curt tone toward me, nor cease to display
a very determined inattention to everything I said. In
public she deliberately made it clear to the world that I
did not even exist. Never did she forget to forget me.
I enquired if I had annoyed her, if she had been warned
against me by our many mutual friends, if I had been
slandered; I could discover nothing. People talked
charmingly to her about me. She preferred to make
no reply.
64EGO, REPRE Y!

 

Marie Louise was unusually tall for a Frenchwoman,
with a skin that looked like an imitation of skin, it
was so pale, so smooth, without a blemish, without a
high light, without a hollow, its colour drained away by
town life. Underneath arching eyebrows the violet
eyes, softened by perpetually unshed tears, produced an
impression that went far beyond the eighth arrondisse-
ment. For all her affecting to disbelieve in my exist-
ence, Marie Louise could not but be aware that I
admired her. I wanted to get much farther than that.
In vain; I made no headway, for all my pains. Three
years ago I left Paris for a very long voyage, and so far
she had never changed her attitude to me.

At first I did actually dwell a good deal on my mem-
ories of her, but my visual memory—that sole crutch
and prop of my bygone adventures—itself slipped away
from me. The image of Marie Louise, as happens with
people who are going to be dropped out of our thoughts,
loomed larger, then became blurred and hazy because of
this very enlargement, then drooped and disappeared in
that viscous deliquescence, full of organic disjecta, to
which we give the needlessly abstract name of oblivion.

Two years or more after that I was at sea three thou-
sand miles from Paris. Two days earlier we had left
dry land behind us in the thick of a storm that showed
no sign of abating. As it was very hot I used to sleep

65EUROPE Ad LOVE

 

all day in my cabin and have cold soup and the wireless
bulletin brought up to me from time to time. At mid-
night I would go up on deck and stay there until the
coming of that greenish hint away to larboard that gave
the first sign of dawn. Every morning soon after three
o’clock, though without any lessening of the huge waves,
those shifting hills splashed over by the moon, the wind
would fall a little, and I would take the opportunity to
walk or run for exercise, on noiseless rubber soles. One
night I came to a stop in front of a deck cabin in which
a light was burning and the porthole not shut down.
A young woman was having a bath, evidently taking it
for granted that nobody was about. I saw her naked
and only partly wet for she was washing in sea water.
It was Marie Louise. Marie Louise herself? I ransacked
all my memories; yes, the same wide open violet eyes,
the same straight hair; no, not herself so much as some-
one reproducing her feature by feature exactly; a
sister? A replica? Everything so precisely the same.
. I stayed a long time in the shadow, by turns certain
it was she, then that it was not, so intent that my head
was swimming. Along a leaden sky the steamer swung
the black frame of its rigging. The girl held on to her
tub with both hands, while the water splashed over the
floor at each blow from the sea without.
I noted the number of the cabin . . . the owner’s
name was Mrs. Amelita W. Next day we were intro-
66B@H ©,” RE PE yal

 

duced. She was the wife of an astronomer, and was
on her way to join her husband in the South Seas. She
could not speak French and when I asked her if she was
in any way relaced to Marie Louise R. she looked at me
blankly. She had never been in France, never in
Europe even; she knew nobody on this side.

The first thing that drops into the depth of the sea
on a long voyage is time. I cannot be sure how many
hours elapsed between that first interchange of talk and
the night when Amelita ceased to struggle and I settled
her down on the deck beside me among the cushions
made of the flags of all nations. The pleasure I enjoyed
was first and foremost indirect; touching her it seemed
to me that my hand was at that moment evoking a sen-
sation in Marie Louise, three thousand five hundred miles
away in number 26 rue Miromesnil. Mystics assure me
that no prayer is lost in space; neither is a kiss. From
afar I was taking my revenge on Marie Louise; I was
casting spells upon an enemy, but instead of a waxen
image I was enjoying the most animated co-operation
for my sorceries. Naturally Amelita made things easy
for me. }

“T don’t know,” she sighed, “what it is that prevents
me from employing any subterfuge with you. I have
never been like this before. From the first moment I
felt as if I had known you for ages.”

Can we dare to say that the world is peopled with

67EUROPE At LOVE

 

 

unknown counterparts, living parallels, invisible sym-
metries? Have our acts a double effect? Or are they
mere refractions, like those rays that split in two when
they pass through certain crystals?

The steamer surrendered unconditionally to the hot
storm. Passengers came up like ourselves to sleep on
deck for the sake of a little coolness. ‘They bestrewed
the planking like the slain lying about the stage at the
end of a tragedy. Suddenly the sea would take the
place of the sky, and then the sky would fling the sea
down and rise up again. Plates were heard crashing,
and the glasses forgotten in the smoking-room smashing
like shopfronts in a riot; now and then the steward
came by on hands and knees, with a basin in his teeth.

Seventeen nights went by like this. Amelita and I
made love together as people make love when there is
absolutely nothing better to do. At the first stop she
left the steamer. I never saw her again.

I reached home as happy as a deserter pardoned.
Paris was putting on her lovely spring plumage. The
Eiffel Tower was the only thing still leafless. A day or
two after I got back I met Marie Louise. She recog-
nized me, and to my surprise sent me a smile of her own
accord; her eyes were full of soft amends.

“Now why am I pleased to see you back again?”
said she.

68LORENZACCIO

I

ALTHOUGH his waiting had endured for fifteen thou-
sand nights, in other words, some two and forty years,
Tarquinio Goncalvez was full of impatience to be in his
own country once more. Night was slow in coming.
Stretched since morning in the grass of the quarantine
station on the left bank of the Tagus opposite Lisbon,
he had now seen every effect the sun could concoct in
the course of a day with one of his most beloved cities;
impossible to describe all his pranks. Our Portuguese
had no need to twist his eyes with their yellowed whites
towards his temples to take in twenty kilometres of
shore line from the convent of the Jeronymos, Belem
and its chessboard tower of wrought ivory, to the snows
of the salt marshes of Sacavem in the north.

The old statesman had been put ashore at daybreak,
the hour when Lisbon lies asleep beneath the Atlantic
mist. Once that mosquito curtain had been flung back
the city had appeared in her flat colours, still the same as
she was in the eighteenth century, a model city in full
accord with urbanism, but with a rarer beauty too.

“Vasco da Gama,” thought Goncalvez, “spent the

69EUROPE At LOVE

 

night before he left Lisbon for the Indies on his knees.
And in like manner I will celebrate my return from
exile.”

He kneeled down and wept. Lying full length on
the cracked concrete—for he was of the true seed of
the romantic exiles—he watered with his tears the
burnt-up grass withering away around the gun-car-
riages stamped with the Braganza arms. Ships’ sirens
set the air of the harbour a-quiver with their farewells.
The day was Sunday and all the bells were chiming:
the city thrilled and rang like a glass to the rubbing of
a moistened finger. And then, his field-glasses still dim
with his tears, hanging round his neck, Tarquinio Gon-
calvez slept, with open mouth (filled with dazzling
white teeth), his dyed crispy hair growing flabby in the
sun like asphalt, his lips blue, his nostrils wide. (While
he sleeps, we may recall that his maternal grandfather
was Governor of Mozambique in his day.)

Towards evening when Tarquinio Gongalvez awoke,
Lisbon had come out in full relief. Displayed like a
picture on an easel, laid out on the mountain slope, it
climbed up to that Portuguese sky in which Auguste
Comte reigns over against the sun. Mills stood out on
the horizon; the same wind that bellies out the sails be-
low, grinds the grain on the heights. The Atlantic
slope fell away behind Lisbon, invisible, bathed in the
trade winds and other equatorial breezes. Gongalvez

70LORENZACCIO

 

had the thought that prosperous or pinched, torrid or
shaded, life also seems to obey the law that governs the
distribution of the waters. Even houses too, perhaps;
and hence on the right there was his parched city palace,
while on the left was his summer abode, south of Cintra,
behind those Ajuda mountains that thrust out to the
most westerly point of Europe like a balcony of camel-
lias and ferns flowering over the steep void down into
the sea.

And now with the coming of night, under the im-
pulse of the filling tide, the Tagus turns back and flows
inland as though to rive Portugal asunder. The town
lights up and looks like one of those transparent paint-
ings behind which you hold a candle. In the middle
of the river,.and always obedient to the stream, the
Royal Mail and the Messageries steamers and a trans-
atlantic Booth liner are caught in the conical lobster-
pot of the estuary; further away the red sails of the
Ovar fishermen are coming out of that riverine rupture
the Mar de Palha. Behind Africa the sun has set, robed
in judicial red: the world is sentenced. Smoke floats up
from the railway stations.

II

At the back of Westminster Abbey, built on damp
foundations in the most fog-ridden spot in London,
unquestionably the site of a ford where, in the days

71EURQGPE Al LOVE

 

before there were eight million inhabitants hereabouts,
the wild cattle used to come and drink the muddy water
churning round their hooves, there stand little streets of
a forlorn and specially Anglican eighteenth century,
full of furnished lodgings for graduates who have no
University future, in other words with no athletic
honours. ‘Tarquinio Goncalvez had settled in London
after his deportation to San Thomé, where he had only
remained twelve years before an amnesty set him free
to leave. And in London he had spent twenty-seven
years, never leaving it even on the sultriest days, not
even on the August Bank Holiday that always reminded
him of the worst moments of his interment; never had
he gone to his Legation on days of national commemo-
ration. Every morning at nine o’clock the Portuguese
betook himself to the British Museum reading-room.
When it was closed he stayed in bed.

Tarquinio Goncalvez. . . . Who has forgotten that
Gambetta of Portugal? His life has been a failure, of
course. Anti-dynastic under the monarchy, he paid
the penalty for that; too lukewarm in democracy, he
lost his best friends when the republicans came into
power. Isolated through having no axe of his own to
grind, and through his haughty rejection of alliances or
rich sinecures, liberal but anti-freemason (did he not
close the lodges of the Indies?) , a traditionalist and yet

FZLORENZACCIO

an enemy to the Jesuits, he was speedily hated on every
hand. His political moral code made life difficult for
him. A turn of chance alone brought him to the head
of the government under the Regency. How he be-
haved in office is a matter of history: he showed him-
self a brilliant orator, but autocratic, infuriated at the
least attack from the opposition. Accordingly—censor-
ship, suppression of newspapers, summary convictions.
Feared by the men who proclaimed the new constitution
at the city hall, suspected of being an Anglophil, mis-
doubted by those whom he dubbed ‘“‘academics who had
got above themselves over signing absurd decrees for
the pleasure of seeing their names in the “Diario do
Governo’,” a target for the hostility of the secret soci-
eties, which he accused of conspiring in the void instead
of bringing down the price of cod, before long the
whole nation was against him. He was accused in his
turn of pursuing personal ends. The monarchy had
despatched him to Fort Caxias: the Regency had the
Island of San Thomé for him; as for the Republic, it
left him in exile in London, in that narrow corridor-
like Great College Street, to which his thoughts were
taking him back this evening.

One day of Lisbon’s sunlight and all would be for-
gotten. Indeed, why was he no longer in London?
Suddenly he remembered the Reuter cable he saw last

73EUROPE AT LOVE

 

month in the Pall Mall Gazette he used to buy every
evening in the tube station:

Lisbon: Professor Amarante
Forms a Coalition Ministry.

And there was Narcisso Amarante, his schoolfellow
at the Lycée Henri IV, his boyhood friend, professor
of botanical physiology in the University of Coimbra,
now chosen as President of the Council in the hour of
stress. Goncalvez had foreseen it: the republicans had
gone too far; the war with all its winds blowing this
way and that had not spared Portugal; Bolshevism set-
tled upon it more than on any other country in Europe;
“Electricity,” thought the exile, “makes for points first
and foremost.” A coalition ministry had become
essential. But would that good-hearted, nerveless savant
Amarante act as a brake? He would groan and strain
like one, but would he bring the machine to a stand?
That generous friend who on the very night of his
accession to power sent a telegram to London inviting
him back to his native land, thanks to which he was
now home again, Goncalvez feared that he could never
hold out. ‘Those warships now asleep on the Tagus in
the gloom, like alligators, he surmised them full behind
their armourplates of seditious officers, disgruntled sea-
men, disaffected engineers. Another few months of

74LORENZACCIO

 

concessions to Moscow and the revolution would break
out; the forts of Lisbon would belch fire; the Four-
teenth of May with her twin white turrets would shell
the powder magazines, which would be blown to atoms;
the Seventeenth of September (the ex-Kronprinzessin
Cecilie) would blow up the Fifth of August, the
Twenty-second of October would dip her nose into the
Tagus, shattered by the batteries of the arsenal, and this
unfortunate country, writhing with the colic of revo-
lution (bellum intestinum) would once more take up
her cross of invasions, earthquakes and political
assassinations.
I

Such were the thoughts of Tarquinio Goncalvez as
he went down to Almada. He was returning to Lisbon
as one under ban, and in secret, for the Government
was not firm enough in the saddle to give him a trium-
phant entry. He saluted the old Portuguese mansions
with their roofs turning up at the corners like the roofs
of pagodas. He passed along by the prison with its
barred unglazed windows. It made him remember his
own prison days, the coarse felt-like trousers in which
he was dandy enough to keep a British crease; his mufile-
footed exercise in the prison yard, in prison slippers;
his cell in Pedras Tinhosas, decorated with cigar-box
pictures and a volume of the Portuguese Plautus, Gil

75EUROPE VA OVE

 

Vicente, lying on the table; or again the penitentiary of
Bombom, when in monk-like overalls he had acted as
under-mechanic in charge of the electric installation.

Tarquinio had forgotten nothing. But he was stout
and hardy, and had weathered all his jails. Through the
bars the prisoners had let down an old tin at the end
of a string, and into this he tossed a douro, which fell
into the dregs of tunny-fish oil, received a hearty bless-
ing upon his head and passed along the road edged with
prickly aloes from Africa. On the mole his boatman
was waiting for him. They tied their boat up to the
ferry for a tow, and the two made their way across
the Tagus. Once out of the stream the oars brought
them to Lisbon.

Goncalvez hardly recognized the city. In his time
it sloped down with its gardens to the very river’s edge,
for coolness. To-day it turned its back on the water,
seeking elegance in strange quarters. A harbour had
been constructed, as though the Tagus was not a har-
bour in itself. One part of it, undertaken by Spanish
contractors, had tumbled into decay and presented at
any rate a picturesque ruin, but the rest of it was a
French port, orderly, rational, aggravated by ware-
houses and every modern improvement.

Goncalvez touched land east of the Praca do Com-
mercio from which steps go down to the water. On
the least slippery of these he set his tiny foot in its grey

76LORENZACCIO

 

antelope shoe, with a high heel like a tenor. In front
of him were his one-time slaves, the Ministries drawn
up on parade, the all powerful civil service of Portu-
gal; on the right at the corner of the arcades was the
spot where assassins had struck down the King, His
Most Faithful Majesty, King of the Algarves, Lord of
the Guineas and the Conquests.

Goncalvez smiled to see himself surrounded by police
officers and old acquaintances: the opportunist Admiral
Silva da Lima, his one-time Minister of Marine, Manuel
de Lobos, a handsome fair Portuguese from Galicia, of
Celtic strain, Amandio Abreu, once the leader of the
opposition party, an olive-skinned rascal; and last of all
his faithful Rodriguez Cardoso. Every one of them,
even the traitors, even the detectives, he embraced them
all and after bidding them adieu he went on his way
heavy of heart, full of an atavistic and Moorish
melancholy.

IV

With his flat broad nose the Dictator snuffed up the
air. All the old smells of Lisbon were there, fish first
and foremost, then fresh-ground coffee. He went along
the Rua Augusta following the path of the shells hurled
from the torpedo-boats in the harbour upon the polit-
ical cafés of the Rocio in the days of the revolution.
Those cafés, as full of conspirers as in his own times—

TT,PURO PRE Aw) (OWA

 

how often had he closed down those caves of “white
ants”—opened like gaping mouths breathing Brazilian
spices. Groups of men shifted and dissolved at the
announcements of winning lottery numbers and polit-
ical news, made Chinese shadow shows in front of the
lit transparencies of the newspaper; and over all played
those tail-chasing winds that come from every point of
the compass in the course of twenty-four hours, a spe-
cial feature of the country. He made his way through
the gesticulating mass with arms clamped to his body,
very Englishified, free like a prisoner whose fetters have
been struck off. Then he came to the Avenida da Liber-
dade, and climbed a steep street to find his own mansion
in a little secluded square. Once more he beheld the
gateway charged with the arms of his house and heavy
Manueline carvings of Indian fruits, anchors, cables,
apes, a whole geography in stone. The huge palaces of
the neighbourhood, built with incredibly extravagant
luxury, told the same tale of fortunes swallowed up in
lawsuits, exile, revolution or financial scandals. Like
all the others his house had been let; he did not even
know to whom.

The great door was ajar. Gongalvez could not resist
the impulse to push it open as he used to do when a small
boy and not tall enough to reach the knocker. Behind
it was a porter in a long American frockcoat with black
silk frogs. By the way he was saluted Gongalvez per-

78LORENZAGECIO

 

ceived that this was a place open to the public. He
was directed upstairs. In the antechamber he recog-
nized the old majolica frieze, tall as a man, aubergine
colour picked out with yellow, representing a pageant
of antique wars; above this up to the beams of the ceil-
ing, the walls rose covered with gooseberry damask, the
whitewash showing through the rents. At the top of
the monumental staircase, weighted with a balustrade
of brass and steel famous throughout Lisbon, a Levan-
tine in a dinner jacket received the exile and smoothed
his way for him:

“Monsieur must have forgotten his member’s card.
That will be ten reals.”

And that was how Tarquinio Goncalvez learned that
his ancestral home had become a night club.

NA

He stayed on there, weary and tired, his feet turned
in, unable to believe that he was in his mother’s drawing-
room, the scene of so many routs and balls, triumphs
still renowned in social annals. Four other salons opened
out one from the other in a long vista, with gilded
panellings, plated with mirrors inlaid into the walls.
On the pierglasses was the Goncalvez G in massive
carven shells, and in the middle like a basket of lights,
a lustre of milky Venetian glass representing the great

72EORORE “Agi OV E

 

Bucentaur, with all its rigging of spun glass. Under it
the gaming-table. Each room had its roulette wheel,
a loaded one, and croupiers lying in wait. Here was
doubtful baccarat, there “coupe francaise’—a game
unknown in France, like nearly everything called
French in other countries. Looking down upon the
cards was a choice assembly. Deadbrokes, in dinner
jackets and grey trousers, luckless gamblers, pimps,
petty officers on stolen leave, adventurers from Angola,
girls from the brothels of Toulouse, and a few foreign-
ers, English wine-merchants, German traffickers in nar-
cotics. Amid the rattle of the counters and the plop
of lemonade corks, the number came out and was de-
clared, and the croupier’s rake described its devastating
half circle.

Tarquinio Goncalvez spat on the ground.

“Race without guts, race of suicides, of joyless art,
of sinister pleasures, in spite of so many gifts of earth
and heaven; triumph of the rabble, the mobocracy,
‘right of the lice to devour the lions’, strikes, secret soci-
eties, gerrymandered elections, budget deficits, and this
palace turned into a gambling hell.”

He raised his eyes to the ceiling with its sham pillars
and diminishing perspective soaring to a sky over which
among decorative clouds there glided goddesses in the
shameless embraces of amorous eagles.

Gaming—and what gaming!—as in every place there

80LORENZAGEGIO

 

are Portuguese, the wreckers of Guinea, the Mozam-
bique roulette tables on lease to the Burial Society, and
Macao, that gambling den of the Far East where once
upon a time the mosaic pavement in a public square was
marked out in odds and evens, so that the inhabitants
used to make their bets from their windows, letting
down their stakes in little baskets by a string.

“Lend me the price of a supper. I am cleaned out.”

Tarquinio Goncalvez screwed his eyeglass home under
a bushy eyebrow, and pivoted sharply round. The
speaker was a sailor from the torpedo-boat E. 87, a
common fellow, very young, with mutton-chop
whiskers barely sketched in on pale cheeks, greasy hair
and wolf’s teeth. In him Goncalvez saw one of those
supple dissolute scamps from the fleet, who through
their indiscipline and insolence enjoyed an unchallenged
authority in the arsenals and the dockyards. Many re-
plies were on the tip of his tongue, but he uttered none
of them. He pulled a banknote out of his case, pushed
it roughly down the sailor’s chest showing in a very low-
cut jersey, turned his back on the fellow and left the
building.

VI

In spite of his friends’ importunities, Tarquinio
Gongalvez refused to prolong his stay in Lisbon. They
offered to have his own mansion restored to him; he

81EUROPE VAgde LOVE

 

declined. In any case it was a futile offer, for the very
group that had pushed the Government into power were
drawing their percentage from the gambling and would
never have allowed the club to be shut down. Goncalvez
withdrew to his country house, his guinta an hour out
of Lisbon behind the Ajuda hills.

And there, without shedding anything of true urban
elegancy, he grew roses and might be seen in a short
coat, check trousers and English spats, with a pruning
shears in his hands cased in butter-coloured gloves; and
while he recited Camoens, he waited for the situation
to go from bad to worse. Professor Amarante very soon
gave the extremists pledges that brought him to the
utmost limit of possible concessions. In that country
where the Opposition devours Ministries before they are
more than out of the shell his turn came quickly. It
was more than the end of an administration, almost the
downfall of a régime. Moscow gold had been scattered
lavishly throughout the winter. ‘Trouble broke out.
After grenades had begun to flourish on the barricades
in reply to the waterspouts flung up by reactionary
shells in the Tagus, a Committee with Communist
leanings took possession of Lisbon.

And during all this time, nozzle in hand, Tarquinio
Goncalvez went on watering his garden, which had been
left to run wild during his exile and had turned into
jungle. He put down fertilizers, tore up the deep-

82LORENZACCIO

 

rooted darnel. The vegetation, which on this Atlantic
coast runs spilling into and over the volcanic clefts, as
luxuriant as the jungles of Ceylon or the chines of the
Isle of Wight, laden with giant rhododendrons—start-
ling bright flowers on a dark ground, like old chintzes
surrounded a Louis XV house, pink, twisted like a
shell, edged with white at the corners and the window
frames, one of the only houses in the district that had
stood up to the earthquakes. Clumsy furniture, be-
traying English influence, fetched from Oporto,
embellished it under ceilings of dainty pistachio-green
picked out with white stucco. Goncalvez had found
his old gardener there and his books shabby and foxed;
on days that were, if not cold, wind sharp, he took his
coffee, very black coffee and slowly filtered, just as he
had done in times long past, in a winter-garden dating
back to the days of Dom Pedro, in which there were
palm trees, parrakeets and Chinese jars with their land-
scapes of quaint perspective.

The beauty of the year came round once more. The
revolutionaries in power had executed or exiled the
leaders of the opposition and ruled by sheer terror.
Many of their adversaries slipped abroad in time.
Professor Amarante had fled to Brazil. Gongalvez had
not been disturbed. He thought himself secure. But
his presence was a continual silent reproach. Although

83EU RO PE VAG Ory E

 

he had turned the journalists away, closed his door
against admirers, madmen, photographers, all the ele-
ments in Portugal that loved order had their eyes turned
towards the man who had not run away. Deliverance
was looked for from the man with the ancient Roman
name. A popular ditty asked the question:

Will the old lion roar no more?

The Executive Committee was annoyed. Goncalvez’
correspondence with London was intercepted: in it he
expressed himself without reserve or circumspection
about the Government. One morning in May his elimi-
nation was decreed.

Vil

That evening Tarquinio Goncalvez had eaten in his
summer dining-room. As he drained his glass with head
thrown back his eyes could perceive a concave ceiling,
inlaid with morsels of porcelain like the odds and ends
in a swallow’s nest. It was an ancient custom in Portu-
gal that when a house had been honoured by a visit
from the King, the whole India Company service from
which the sovereign had eaten was broken up immedi-
ately after; to commemorate the occasion the pounded
china was mixed into the plaster of the vaulted ceilings.

84LORENZACCIO

 

Goncalvez recollected that his house had welcomed sev-
eral kings. In the quiet peace of the evening he judged
himself of more value than those dead or forfeited
crowns. He looked at himself in a mirror and felt no
regrets. His wrinkles, the graphic story of his life,
made him smile. Desiring little, he felt himself master
of all things. Not that he was by any means free from
danger. But he crumpled up the anonymous letters
that came to him into pellets and threw them to the
Gshes. He had lived too long on troubled waters, fought
for too many privileges of freedom for his country and
for himself to be afraid of rascally ministers. And fur-
thermore, his family plumed itself on a goodly record
of violent deaths. There was Rodriguez Goncalvez
Governor of Zanzibar, murdered in the sixteenth cen-
tury; Amandio Gongalvez mortally wounded not long
after at the siege of Malacca; his maternal grandfather,
Emanuel Paiva, one of the earliest of Portuguese jour-
nalists, editor of the Ephemerides Nauticus, assassinated
openly in a café, and Lourenco Goncalvez, Bishop of
Oporto in 1833, slain by a jealous husband in a cup-
board.

Tarquinio Goncalvez went out into the varden. Basil,
pimento, thyme, breathed their rich fragrance stimu-
lated by the warm underground springs, unseen but
everywhere at work. He took his seat on a blue earth-
enware bench and lit a cigar. It was hot and sticky

85EUROPE Al LOWE

 

and his skin with its big pores was filmy with moisture
like a lump of oil cake.

In the evening stillness a ripe magnolia fell with a
noise like a breaking pot and spilled its seeds on the
earth, releasing an odour of mingled musk and lemon.
Gongalvez turned about. Nothing more. But it was
not mere silence, it was a silence with life in it. He
got up and set his monocle in place. His hawk’s eyes
probed the thick foliage. Then he drew himself erect,
elbows back, his chest thrust out by his corset; a
Brazilian diamond on his finger shot out threatening
rays.

“Come out there, you sir

His voice made the languid valley shake.

“Come out, I tell you.”

Then from among the leaves, and smoothly, tran-
quilly, appeared a man, closing the bushes behind him
like a door. He wore the uniform of a sailor from the
navy with a khaki shirt and a check cap.

Delicately he swung hip and shoulder like the cock-
atoo swinging in his porcelain cage behind him. Gon-
calvez recognized the penniless gamester he had helped
in the club, the night he arrived in Lisbon.

“This is intolerable!” he said. ‘Yet another one com-
ing to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“You might at least say ‘yes, Your Excellency’.”

86

}??

TOSLORENZACCIO

 

The assassin grinned.

“We can’t have any more excellencies.”

“Perhaps you can’t indeed, but there will always
be excellencies. In the old days in Portugal every
sailor was an excellency. The men that conquer the
seas have always been exalted. They embarked for the
Indies barefoot and carrying votive candles, and took
the blessing of the monks of Thovar. They came back
laden with the discoveries that shook the world, and
they died poor and honoured. To-day there are no
more sailors, nothing but mechanics flung upon the sea
in iron boats like locomotives, scamps like you.”

“You’re a good talker. So’s this.”

The sailor brought out an automatic pistol.

Goncalvez drew himself up against him.

“Put your thing down there. Good. Out with the
other one too. I wouldn’t mind being killed by anyone
who likes killing, but you, you are well and truly
of your generation, there is nothing you like. You
want money, that’s all.”

“Tt was me that brought down Admiral Rosa
Barocca.”

“You ought to stick to admirals. You are not cut
out for murders on dry land. I’m not surprised that
you should have cadged the price of a supper from me.
Every time you put your foot outside your ship you
will cease to be what you are, take it from me, one of

87Ree wh. scsdione eee Ea

 

 

BOUR@QEE AW LOVE

 

fortune’s favourites, an aristocrat. You'll be nothing
better than a poor beggar driven by his lusts.”

“Why did you give me all that money that night?”

“Because you are handsome, with your white arms,
you suckling criminal, because you are eighteen and
smooth skinned, and have the Pheenician face of the
Ovar fishermen, because you are the victim of frock-
coated nobodies, because you dance divinely.

Tarquinio Goncalvez’ voice was thick and hoarse as
he said:

“T will give you far more. .

He put out his hand to the sailor’s bare neck. The
boy felt afraid, dodged and caught the statesman round
the body. In the darkness they clasped against one an-
other, there was the sound of beards rasping together,
of cuffs crackling and breaking, of buttons bursting off.
The straining embrace continued. Then there came a
groan as of a wrestler thrown to the ground, jerked out

>>

33

of the younger man.

“You are hurting me . . . stop.”

Goncalvez’ voice, thickened by a tyrannous lust, rose
up from the pomegranate trees:

“T’m going to show you what you want. es

The moon appeared and took the night by surprise.
A wave of light washed over the two men, amalgamat-
ing their two shadows into one which assumed a fantas-

88

ig a a ch ah i a rt RC SOL Ot al Si
‘

Mae?LORENZACCIO

 

tic bovine shape. The gravel shone and twinkled like a
jeweller’s counter.

Amid the innocent perfume of the limes, erect, Tar-
quinio Goncalvez held the young sailor gripped be-
tween his iron knees.

The victim picked himself up.

Motionless, in the shadows, with the dandyisms of
a cypress tree, with his Cronstadt hat still on his head,
the old exile watched him pulling himself together.
Then very drily ...

“Go back to Lisbon. Tell them that Tarquinio Gon-
calvez is not to be assassinated by the lowest or any other
tender .. . Oy! you’re forgetting this... . ”

He held out to the sailor two steel clips with all their
live cartridges intact, and added a rose.

89THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE
I

In the outskirts of a small town in the district of Bo-
godoukhovy the local Soviet’s Cadillac stopped as night
was falling. All was silence. No trains painted over
with rationalistic cartoons came out so far. Zigzagging
like shadows of bats through the trees, the dwellers in
the suburbs were making for their homes on skis. So
deeply sunk in the snow were the izbas that their win-
dow lights were no longer to be seen and their roofs
barely appeared above. The Delegate hesitated among
them, looking for the school.

The Delegate took off his astrakhan bonnet, showing
another furry crop greasier and frizzier still and went
in by the kitchen, where, as there was no moment of
transition from the frozen air, you choked with a smell
of stables and wet leather, in a kind of vapour bath. A
hundred little boots, both male and female, were set in
rows on the porch under the sheepskin coats and tunics.
The Delegate opened the door of the schoolroom and
took full in the face, hard and uncompromising
as a jet from a hosepipe, the last phrases of a hymn
to the Proletariat, shouted out by voices not yet broken.
On the right were ranged the boys, and the girls on the

90

Bre ree Se re ER mene - TEE IE OL Oa (REI AN eR et a yg aan oe

oo ee ins

 

ER aaa rea A!
, Werle Ot a OSTHE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

 

left. Seventy red faces with burning bright eyes. Tur-
bulent bodies, from about ten to thirteen years of age,
treading out the new wine. Heads all shaved, and all
but a few flaxen fair; pioneer uniforms—khaki shirts,
blue blouses, red ties. On the rough plank wall of
the Preparatory School of Agriculture were displayed,
among decorations of resin-smelling fir branches, the
practical work of the first year students and posters of
propaganda for children: one showed a “worker” break-
ing up a Calvary with a pickaxe, smashing the Holy
Cross into atoms. On the blackboard you read the
legend: “No owner but the State.” “The animals have
no God.” And a bourgeois on his appropriate gallows.
Under the bearded bust of Marx, in the place of hon-
our was Pola, standing to attention, in a red jersey, her
short hair bristling up with independence. To the Dele-
gate’s salute she replied as equal to equal, with the official
salute, raising the right arm, for the Pioneers are rigidly
forbidden to shake hands, for hygienic reasons.
“Comrade,” said the Delegate, an incorruptible with
a mop of hair like a comet, his mouth suddenly ripping
open under the weight of a jumble of nonsense, “your
sentiments are well known to the U.S.S.R.; your notes
on the A.C.V.T.H. and on the T.E.M.O.V., your en-
quiry into the children’s co-operative societies, your
report on the poultry of the district of Bogodoukhov
have been accepted as models and prove how much con-
91EW ROPE aa WO Ver

 

fidence can be placed in you. I have come to inform
you that an important mission has been entrusted to
you: you are to go into the West, to the Union of Latin
Soviet Republics, the former country of France, where
a high administrative post awaits you.”

“As always, at the service of the Proletariat, Com-
rade,” replied Pola, quite unmoved at the news.

An hour later, amid cheers, the roll of drums
and the shedding of tears, for she was the oldest
girl in the school—all the boys loved her red mouth
and her excitable young bosom—her birchwood suit-
case in her hand, Pola came away. She kissed the
white foxes brought last summer from Siberia, and dry-
eyed, in the Cadillac that started painfully in a cloud
of blue oily steam—for it was up to the axle in snow—
she set out towards her destiny in the West.

II

Transported from Switzerland in 1917, in a cap, the
Russian Revolution contrived to grow, seeing that to-
day a hundred and thirty million souls live in its shadow.
In that soft miraculous Russian soil everything ger-
minates and springs up regardless of the seasons. But
when the Dictatorship of the Proletariat spread itself,
soon after the year 192. ., over the whole of Europe, the
Universal Revolution clashed against civilizations that

92REE GHD REN (SG RUS AyD.

 

were harder by just so much as they were older. After
the terrible conflagration that we all know of, Germany
was pierced.

The red troops entered France without striking a
blow, Provence, Catalonia and Brittany having become
self-governing territories, and Paris having wakened
up one morning in the hands of the Kabyles of Leval-
lois-Perret and the Poles of les Abattoirs. But for the
first time it seemed that Moscow could make nothing
out of its victory. ‘Those conquerors, those eighteen-
year-old politicians, those beardless generals, were com-
ing into a logical and formalist country, the oldest in
the world. Gladly would they have hurled themselves
against equal forces. But nowhere did they encounter
such. The youth of France had for four years been
taken into battle in such a fashion that it simply never
came back; children were so scarce that some Bolshevik
statistics had not even mentioned them. There re-
mained therefore to face the Mongolian or Bokharan
troops nothing but old men, and it was precisely against
those old men that Moscow found itself without
effective weapons.

They remained the real masters of the country. Un-
corruptible in their scepticism, their soberness, their
avarice, their flinty self-discipline; whether they were
Jacobins or Conservatives they entrenched themselves in
the civil service, in farms, in the bosom of their families.

93EUROPE AT LOWE

 

The Russian family is madre poric: if one is broken away
all go drifting with the current; the French family dis-
plays a Latin rigidity of constitution. A guerilla war
of fine cells would have been needed to reduce them,
at so great a distance from the base of operations. ‘The
streets, the soup-kitchens, the hospitals, the Red head-
quarters, were all overrun by these old gentlemen in
black who defended their independence with drawn
umbrellas. They shouted, displayed their decorations
and turned green or violet or red like those decorations,
groused, called for treatment, next moment refused to
take medicine, and exercised towards everybody an
authority there was no way to strip them of, seeing
that it was of their own conferring. Put them in prison,
and they lodged complaints that the stew wasn’t salt
enough, the plates not hot enough, that they had been
given the wrong napkin ring; or else, going from one
extreme to the other, they would proclaim that they
had eaten rat in 1870 and that nobody could “put it
over them”. They were not actually disobedient to
the “new spirit”. But their pessimism was such that
they discouraged the most ardent. Moscow tried to buy
them—they were unbribable; to kill them off—they
had passed the age of diseases and no punishment had
any effect on their old ramrod bones. Pains were taken
to wipe out even the very memory of all the old insti-
tutions, the press, the great banks, academies, govern-
94Dt EEC HET E DREN <S: GROWS ADE

 

ment departments, whose heads they had once been;
but these heads had lived too long at the expense of
the bodies and could exist without them—they had
proved that. And what of their wives? With their lips
tight shut like purses, their eighty-year-old eyes, full of
life and full of cruelty, their wrinkled scaly devout
hands, their airs and graces, their ¢isanes, the realism of
their thinking, their juridical alertness, their biting
phrases articulated in an icy impeccable French, they
carried on against the liberators a kind of high-toned
strike in the omnibuses, a sort of matron’s combine in
the theatre boxes, and brought a whole population into
the battle for what they called reason and independence,
in other words for household traditions and cookery
recipes; as for the curiously vaunted liberty of the press
(nevertheless the French newspapers at this moment
were still reputed to be sold to the whole of Europe)
it was merely the right to find on the door-mat every
morning printed sheets full of puzzles and crimes. “It
is an easy matter,” Lenin has said, “to put the exploiting
class to flight; not so easy to keep it from rallying.”
Long consultations were held at Moscow, and finally
a solution was reached that will appear to be good polit-
ical psychology. Information reached Russia to the
effect that France was not so completely denuded of
young folk as it appeared, but that they had been con-
95BUROPE At GLOVE

 

strained to live in hiding. It was on these young folk
that the Revolution must build, and to that end their
confidence must be restored. The Soviets had brought
the class-war into France, as elsewhere; they trans-
formed it in France to a war between two generations.

That was when it was determined to hand France
over to the young, to turn that country filled with
sapless age and filled with useless works of art, into a
playground, a political nursery. A few days were
enough to nominate a little Armenian eight years old
Prefect of the North; a little Jew, Jack Kogan, ten years
of age, Administrator of the Territories of the East; a
Chinese infant Regent of the Banque de France. And
it was at this very moment that the Delegate came in
his Cadillac, one winter evening, to fetch Pola in the
deeps of the little town of the Bogodoukhoy district.
She had been appointed Military Governor of Touraine
that same morning, by decree of the Central Committee.

It

Pola has requisitioned a chateau upon a height, domi-
nating the valley of the Indre.

She gets up at dawn. Such a little thing she is, with
deep salt-cellars and thin shoulders, in the enormous
state bed, all sheathed in yellow damask, of the quon-
dam Marquises de R. . . . a sort of downy chariot for

96

TRE Tn eee
PSVSSPLESEED fos,» C4)FHE GHILDREN’ S' CRUSADE

 

the carnival of sleep. So cool and fresh, and so clean
and well tubbed-looking even before the touch of
water.

On the walls, in tall Russian letters, are pinned up
the Rules for Pioneers, between a useless pair of skis.

(1) THINK OF LENIN

(2) DO NOT LINGER IN BED
(3) WASH YOURSELF

(4) BRUSH YOUR TEETH
(5) MAKE YOUR BED, ETC,

Through the high Renaissance window Pola sees the
white photograph of Lenin that rings the donjon round
like a huge collar on a neck, visible from the viaduct.
Like the finishing point of bicycle races, between the
leafless trees that go down to the foot of the valley there
are stretched strips of red calico printed with the most
celebrated aphorisms of Lenin.

Pola, still actuated by the rhythm of school life,
jumps out of bed and gets into the cold bath. While
she washes she thinks of Mr. Judensohn, her father.
Once again she sees their clammy house in the perpen-
dicular suburbs of Chicago, the blue serpentine vases
that adorn the mantelpieces of the poor, the summer,
the stew of miserable scraps and the den to which Mr.
Judensohn, diamond-broker, returned at night, har-
assed by the long day spent on his two feet; beside him

97FAU TSOP ES cl VOW EF

 

he would set down the tools of his trade, his little carat
scales, and, in a green serge bag, his tweezers and mag-
nifying-glass; under his bolster the list of stones and in
default of the passport denied him by the Imperial Em-
bassy, his ““documents”—he still used the Russian word
in Yankee.

As soon as the doors into Russia were open, they had
left Chicago and had gone back via China, at Vladi-
vostok burying the grandfather with his shawl and his
curls. What changes in six years’ time! To-day Mr.
Judensohn was first political delegate to the armies of
the Caucasus, with the rank of general—and Pola,
after passing through her classes in Russia: embryo,
little seed, pioneers, communist youth, found herself
transported hither all alone, mistress henceforward of an
unknown country.

Suddenly Pola remembered her injured man.

At midnight the night before, in Tours, she was
coming away from a meeting of the Cercle des Limon-
adiers—no doubt something like the Cercle de la
Noblesse in Moscow—and was returning to her head-
quarters, when the red motor-cycle of the political
police that went before her had knocked over a man
who remained sprawled in the middle of the road with
a hole in his white head. In his right hand he had a

98THE CHILDREN S CRUSADE

 

bunch of petunias and in his left an umbrella, to which
he clung through everything.

They stopped.

“These old men are ungovernable,” said Pola.

Nevertheless they had brought him back and put him
to bed in the chateau. As soon as she was dressed, Pola
made enquiries about him. The wound was not serious.
The gentleman himself came in with his head bandaged.
He found Pola sitting on the floor surrounded with
papers.

“I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle,” said he, “for
having been on your road last night. But in my time
children were in bed at midnight.”

Your names

“M. Garapain, once a gentleman of estate.”

“How is it you have no pass?”

“T was in hiding, and only went out at night.”

He had big heavy cheeks, that once upon a time had
been round, and were wrinkled only from misfortune,
but meant to be plump and without a fold, square jaws
of an epicure that were now out of work, a little enter-
prising beard, contradicted by a gentle kindly air. An
old baby. Comical with his bandaged head; his soiled
and worn-out clothes must have been expensive in their
day.

Pola hunted for a few words to say to him. But she

99EUROPE Ad LOVE

 

knew very little French. Then in a Middle West
accent:

“Speak English, old boss?”

“Yes, I do,” replied M. Garapain. (Touraine is an-
other English colony.) ... ““What are you playing at
all by yourself?” he added with his childlike air, and
his eyes showing his inclination to play too.

“I am doing my deportations,” replied Pola.

M. Garapain hung his head. He belonged to a futile
generation which had spent its life in pleasure, in drink-
ing deep and playing cards. He understood his mis-
take, and that those who paid for it were the children
who must work to-day. He offered to make himself
useful.

“Well, then, sort these papers for me,” said Pola.
“The basket on the right, radios from Moscow; the bas-
ket on the left, confiscations; the big bag by the win-
dow: denunciations.”

M. Garapain sat down on the floor and addressed
himself to his task.

At noon, in spite of shame and his fear of his new
chief, moved by a true provincial reflex:

“l’m hungry,” he said.

Pola looked at him with contempt. The first meal
was at five o’clock. M. Garapain held his tongue; his
accident had weakened him. He wept. Pola shrugged
her shoulders and had milk brought for this comrade.

100

>RHE GHIELDREN S CRUSADE

 

IV

Pola applied most conscientiously to Touraine all the
knowledge of natural history she had learned at the
School of Pioneers. She had been taught to classify ani-
mals into useful species and harmful species. And so
she classified the Tourainers. The first kind were
tolerated, the others were packed off to Colomb-Bechar.
Among the useful she made a selection, as she had seen
it done for her white foxes, for the purpose of repro-
duction. There were set days for exercise, for stud, for
the cinema, for the barber. She dictated her orders in
English. M. Garapain acted as translator.

He had come back to the offices of the Military Gov-
ernor every day since his accident. Pola now could not
do without this old gentleman, so polite, so comical.
She taught the fifty-year-old idler to work. M. Gara-
pain taught his chief to play. For her he recovered the
childhood he had never quite left behind. At first Pola
rebelled:

“Aren’t you ashamed? At your age, little uncle.
What do you want to play at?”

“Everything, ‘just fun’, as the children say.”

“Tf the Proletariat were to see us. . .”

M. Garapain, who belonged to the period when people
slipped away to smoke on the quiet, explained to Pola
the delights of amusing oneself in secret. Near the con-

101EURO RE AL EOWE

 

servatory he discovered a kiosk with diamond panes of
coloured glass, where nobody would ever come to disturb
them. Pola learned to play at chat-perché, at rail-
way trains. M. Garapain made signals with his arms, and
Pola was the engine. Playing had never come her way till
now. In pitiless climates she had seen nothing but real
shipwrecks, real railway accidents, real police, real rob-
bers. She discovered the sweets of make-believe, and for
the first time her will softened. She learned what no Jew
no matter how rich, has ever learned, the delight of
relaxation—desipere in loco. Moscow might ring up
their representative, but Pola never answered now. At
the foot of the garden,—or under the table if it rained—
she was always enjoying herself in the company of M.
Garapain, whose side she never left now. No longer
was it even a definite game, she would amuse herself
screaming, whirling round and round, hopping on one
leg, running wild. She would kiss her old friend, take
his monocle, ride him pick-a-back. She was good to
see in the sun, with her eyes all shining. Her skin be-
came satiny, she grew up a year every day, like an
English girl blossoming in the tropics.

And then, and then, April came. No more requisi-
tions. The prisons opened up like the flowers. Every-
body was at play. Out came the wine from the chalky
cliffs of the Loire, where it had been hiding in holes.
Pola had never drunk anything but water. M. Gara-

102THE CHILDREN S CRUSADE

 

pain taught her to know the cloudy Vouvray, with its
immature flavour. The soup-kitchens sold no more
stew, but tarts instead. Sweets were brought up by
lorryfuls. Touraine would never leave off being what it
always has been; the most egoistic province of the most
egoistic and the happiest country in the world.

Denunciations very soon poured into Moscow. M.
Garapain was sent off to Southern Oran. The Central
Committee recalled Pola and granted her a year’s leave,
for she was going to have a baby.

103

———THE CIRCUM-ETNA RUN

ON maps towns present themselves as all very different.
Some are made up of cells tightly clustered round munic-
ipal buildings, then they break loose, moving in straight
lines towards the public gardens, the hospitals, and the
railway station in a crevasse that cleaves a whole quarter
and winds up with a flourish of railway lines. Others
are split in two by a river, by long lines of jetties that
take the sea between their outstretched arms and soothe
it to quiet. And others again are laid out in grids among
which stadiums and sports-grounds and cemeteries are
hard put to it to trace their long oval or their crosses
within the periphery of the outer boulevards, those rings
of Saturn.

In the actual streets themselves, when the light is
falling short of its promises and night that simplifies all
things comes down (darkness has more power to bring
together than light has to sunder), there is less difference
between city and city, and a traveller who has only
arrived that same evening can find his way alone, by
the light of experience, or if he has no appointed way,
his diversion. Thus it will be extraordinary if in the
post-prandial mood, set down in the heart of the town,

104

 

re eT a a 5 Mele ih! iiaHHE GLIRGCUM- ETN ASK URN

 

with all its resources of the lights at his disposal, know-
ing that nobody knows him, enticed by the immediate,
the fugitive, the unusual, taking advantage of this pro-
found isolation to love all men, the visitor does not fall
in with whatever he is looking for.

Round the Duomo are the cafés and the clubs, bediz-
ened with mirrors, which volley their reflected images
violently to and from between them like tennis rackets.
Never any women: in no country but France are there
ever women enough, especially at night. As it is Italy
and a Sunday there is a band, the last trace of the sooth-
ing ointment so long and so efficaciously applied by the
Austrian authorities to all the itchings of independence;
the lit-up dial of a great clock makes a hole in the night,
and chrome-coloured awnings stretch all along the first
floors, the aristocratic floors. On the left there set off
at full speed two streets, wealthy but already depopu-
lated, fed up with the beastly shoddy of the Swiss em-
poriums that have overrun the country ever since the
war. But on the right, where the street is a darker
corridor, rather a mere slit after poorish beginnings,
the light is warmer and mellower. And the final at-
traction is an echoing tinkle of music: the work of a
mechanical piano.

It is quite proper not to go to bed early in Syracuse,
where cocks crow under the beds, where goats browse
on fifth storey balconies, where cheeses lie hid in vine

105a

 

 

EUR ORE Aula © VE

 

leaves, just like museum phalluses. ‘There are so many
flowers here,” the people say, ‘that they kill one an-
other”; to say nothing of the medlars, khakis, pome-
granates and all the late autumn fruits, so gorgeous to
the eye and so uneatable. In the “Liberty Square”, it-
self the captive of its boundary chains, the Prison sits
asleep, with its tired sentries who call out to passers-by
to ask the time. Shops and bedchambers open on the
street level, and you can see people sitting up and people
going to bed; the shopkeepers are waiting for closing
time with heads buried in their arms. Girls are coming
from the band, in tightfitting muslin frocks. Con-
scripts pass by, holding on to the tips of their bayonets.
In all this heat chestnuts are roasting on their stoves.
And the Virgins of Victory shimmering at the street
corners—celestial accosting—under the little dazzling
blobs of their oil lamps. Around the cool little foun-
tains, fed by the waters of Mount Hybla, there are as
many people as round the fountain of Arethusa; but
not the hairy parasols of the papyrus.

The bar has an arching roof and is whitewashed.
Who could hold out against this dazzling whiteness in-
tensified by the lamp suspended from a wire? Against
this background the chalk-white uniforms of the at-
tendants disappear. Nothing can be distinguished but
heads of hair and glasses of black wine, giving the effect

106

 

Wiiehienrou. ye
setae tee rh! caeTHE CIRCUM-ETNA RUN

 

of holes in the wall; there are painted festoons under
which two women, artlessly depicted in tempera con-
front each other with cucumbers that inspire many
a jest. A Lloyd-Sabaudo poster sets out in huge letters
the four American sailings for the month, with the
emigrant fares.

Men are dancing with one another, for there are no
women here either. They take their places side to side,
hair touching hair, in a kind of march that recalls the
walk in the original tango. These are the Young Com-
munists celebrating the afternoon’s victory in the Cir-
cum-Etna bicycle race. They have red jerseys, dis-
coloured under the armpits, and on the dust can be
seen the marks of the tyres they had carried slung round
their bodies. When anyone passes in front of the piano,
all covered with crude bright-coloured pictures like the
Palermo carts, it is the thing to poke a finger through
the turkey-red cotton panel through which the waltz
is filtering; or another trick is to take a pluck at the
jute tapestry cover. There are moments of high jinks,
horseplay; without losing step the dancers grind their
wrists tightly together; they amuse themselves by click-
ing back their fingers, or else, while a partner holds
them by the waist, by jumping up to the mortadellos
or other cat’s-meat hanging from the ceiling. On the
table sits a cup—(eighty per cent silver)—this is the
Trophy.

107pT ; ee a

 

 

2 USK OPE va Tf eh OV E

 

With five hundred kilometres soaked into their legs,
and what steep gradients, and the white flour on the
road, where a scuttering chicken will raise as much dust
all by its lone self as a seven ton lorry will elsewhere,
and those lava paving blocks that break the springs in
your loins! Round and round, through those vines—
or more accurately speaking, through that vine, for
there is really only one that goes festooning all round
the island—through those smells of hot fig tree and
sulphurous railway station sent out by the volcano,
from noonday and the tremendous reflected glow of
the Ionian Sea to the hour when the sulphur-coloured
fumaroles turn rosy pink, lit up from within, and the
Angelus chimes.

Classification by teams has given victory to the
Young Communists with a lead of twenty-eight points.
The Fascist Cycling Club from Catana would infallibly
have won, so the evening papers declare, but for a sus-
picious collision that left the favourite stretched in the
dusty road. Whose favourite is Ignacio not? The
favourite of his comrades (a complexion sprinkled with
beauty spots), a one time communist boy scout gone
over to the enemy, the favourite of sultry evenings
when the volcano puffs on his pipe, bronzed favourite
of the landing stages, of the fishermen with their three-
pronged spears, the nocturnal bathers, the American
winter visitors in tussore suits, the stewards in white

108ine - OLR CU M=E TON Ar RUN

 

Eton jackets, who come ashore when their ship calls
here and make for the café terraces, where the Sicilian
bombes aux fruits blow you out.

And now the thing is to dance, to celebrate the vic-
tory, to slay the fatigue that claps leaden soles upon
the feet. As for our opponents, let them show their
noses! To prove that we hold them for no more than
women, we'll show them our hands crossed and folded
in the similitude of a fig.

Suddenly on the threshold of the blind alley named
after Diodorus, the executioners are lined up. They
have come to recapture the trophy. There is no mis-
taking them with their hair in the hottest fashion,
brushed up fanwise, their fezzes and their black shirts
tucked into green breeches of the “‘ardito” cut. It is
the psychological moment. ‘The anti-fascist sentry is
asleep over his mandoline. To-morrow authority will
thunder and the newspapers will talk of “lawless massa-
cre” or of a “punitive expedition”. There is a salvo
from old service revolvers and .45 Colts. Broken glass
hails down. Then darkness, in which the piano dies
with a noise like a falling chandelier, amid the haze of
smokeless powder and the point-blank shots that leave
a smell of singed cloth. Flight of the spectators.
Pericolo!

109MADAME FREDDA

DANIEL went down a side street, smelling of printer’s
ink and the latest stop-press gossip, and came out into
the blaze of lights. From the deep pit of memory rose
up a picture of the Paris of his childhood, when first-
rate goods were sold by gaslight right up to bed-time,
in austerely respectable shops of no outward attractive-
ness. But their inward excellences, whither have they
flown? Now Daniel was walking in the midst of a
limited liability bazaar, in which the nervous tension of
modern shop methods ceases all at once about half-past
six, like the coming of a truce, and gives place to a kind
of prostration that allows commerce to recuperate its
strength for a brazen to-morrow. And then nothing is
left along the great boulevards, but a two-coloured fer-
ment, kept going by the plain-clothes police, provin-
cials, foreigners and prostitutes under the St. Vitus’
dance of the winking blinking sky signs.

Daniel was coming away from his paper to go and
dine. He had a wilted face, a black moustache not
much heavier than an eyebrow, a mimosa walking-
stick, suéde gloves that fitted without a wrinkle, and
a handsome finely cut nose, the hooked and enterprising
nose of a Parisian of the old school. He carried with
110MADAME FREDDA

 

him a heart covered with scars as he went along that
asphalt pavement where everything springs up and
nothing grows. His friends of the bar at the Café de
la Paix had died, or been killed; the younger generation
all hated one another and were engaged in a war of
positions; the older men who used to have their table
at Larue’s now dined at home on a roll; the price of a
leading article had not doubled. As for himself, at
forty-five he was still a pleasant rhetorician and an
Opposition journalist. He continued to flagellate the
government every morning with the whiplash of words
that scared nobody now, skins have become so thick
and tough.

He felt himself the child of an under-nourished
France, exposed to foreign contagions: the pallid alo-
pecia of the Russian exiles: the uric acid of England;
the periodic eczema of Italian immigration; sinister
blotches from Roumania; colonies of American boils;
Levantine running sores, and other germs hatching be-
tween hide and flesh of the nations. More with a sense
of fatalism than with any spleen he saw all these new-
comers warming their bones in his Provencal sunshine,
taking the cream of his Picardy milk, carrying away
his Anjou furniture, ruining the Basque highways, cut-
ting the hair of the Gaulish women into the similitude
of slavery, depreciating his currency, and hunting him
down even into his very studio, which he was obliged

etEUROPE AT?’ LO VE

 

to sublet furnished. Still, in his heart of hearts the
only grudge he really bore them was for mutilating his
mother tongue and for emptying the last genuine bot-
tles of wine. He had the keenest interest in watching
this episode in the story of France, this anecdote in
action, absolutely unprecedented in history, a country
become the victim of the charms it had devised and
created for itself and of universal covetousness. There
had been of course migrations of races, political con-
fiscations of nations, military annihilations, but never
this spectacle of a people suddenly disappearing in its
own soil as though through a trapdoor. ‘Von Kluck
has won,” Daniel used to say to himself. ‘Paris is well
and truly besieged and taken.”

He wandered along the sidewalk like one of Hubert
Robert’s goats among the ruined stones of Rome. His
next day’s article should have the headline Ve Victori-
bus. He might begin it like this: “Why should not
a France bled to the bone choose Germanic or Anglo-
Saxon transfusions full of courage and honour? Why
does the ignorance of the public authorities prefer to
open the frontiers blindly and allow horrible Latin,
Levantine or negro mixtures to be poured into our
country’s veins?”

As he was coming by Olympia, he saw passing him
a woman of rather thick build, thickened still more by
heavy mossgreen tweeds, with a Tyrolean hat and shod

112MADAME FREDDA

 

with noiseless crépe rubber soles. She looked back at
Daniel, but without awakening in him an appetite that
was generally held on a very light curb; he found her
neither ugly nor pretty. Rather high coloured, with
a round face that made no impression on him. He
went down as far as the Madeleine, intending to dine
at home; but at the sight of the Boulevard Malesherbes,
as gloomy and sinister as a cesspit, his heart failed him
just as it did every evening. He decided to turn back
and go and “have a bite” at Maxim’s. As he turned
he perceived that the woman was trailing him. She
turned back also. That was a thing had never happened
to him before, to be followed by a woman. He was con-
scious of her at his heels, taking in his way of carrying
his stick and how he set down his foot. He prinked up,
straightened his tie, gave his shoes a rub against his trous-
ers. This pursuit excited him. He said to himself that a
day might come perhaps when a man would not be able
to go out alone. What could she want with him? He
was far beyond the hunting grounds of the professional
ladies. Was this a provincial who had lost her way, a
woman fence, a detective in disguise? He had a horri-
fied vision of some woman writer who might take ad-
vantage of his being alone to try to sell him some
stories. He resigned himself to going through with his
part as victim of a “pick-up”. As he got to Maxim’s
he was seized by panic that she might follow him in-
113BU ROEE, Auk OVE

 

side and turn out to be out of her wits and start taking
off her clothes. At that he decided to go up the
Champs-Elysées.

“Monsieur, will you have something to drink with
me?”

Daniel had not got past the Marly horses when he
was accosted in this way. He took the edge of his coat
between finger and thumb and adopted the air of a
girl being pestered.

“You leave me alone, Madame. You ought to be
able to see perfectly well that I’m not that sort.”

“Do please give me the pleasure of your company to
dinner. You would gladden me so much.”

She spoke French with a good deal of effort, bringing
up word upon word, like a lumpy stone, to the building
of her phrase.

“T think you look like a genuine Frenchman, like one
sees in the plays; all day long I have been looking for
one without any luck. I am staying at Claridge’s be-
cause one can have a room there at a greatly reduced
price. So do come.”

“I am coming with you, Madame,” replied Daniel,
“and may the romantic side of this adventure hide its
perils from me.”

Daniel entered the hall of the hotel, which when the
streets grew dark became in its turn populous with
clients, blazing up with glass cases like electric ovens

114MADAME FREDDA

 

with sables, doll figures, lottery tickets, pieces of moon-
coloured Sung and liqueur chocolates all cooking inside
them. After looking for a chance to escape, Daniel
resigned himself and went down into the pit, in other
words the restaurant.

“T am Madame Fredda (you must be satisfied with
this name) ; and I am a grower of tulips and flowering
bulbs. I arrived from Amsterdam to Le Bourget only
this morning to buy from the French nurseries. Since
the great war the Central Powers have been closed
against exporters; but now they have all at once been
thrown open and all my plants have been. . .”

““__cleared off.”

“Yes, The Germans came along with so much
money in their hands to repeople their gardens and
graveyards with tulips that the result is a great source
of revenue and gladness to me. And in turn I am
among the French with most profitable offers. At Ver-
sailles this morning quick flowering ordinary tulips for
garden beds, every variety from the Duc de Thole to
the Cottage, were worth eighteen francs a hundred, or
just half the price of ours in Holland; after I had gone,
Monsieur, they were asking fifty francs.”

“Tet us,” said Daniel, “admire with La Bruyére’s
‘florist’ those ‘lovely vases’ and those ‘lovely chalices’
and the prices they are to fetch.”

“Highly splendid! It gladdens me, Monsieur, that

115

SnEU RIO PAE A sO VE

 

you should understand the tulip. I invite you to come
and see my champion varieties, my bulbs for vases, and
my supercultures at the end of winter. A visit is in-
dicated. A veritable picture of beauty. It was for
that reason the august families of the Imperial Courts
of Russia and Austria honoured me, always with the
same predilection. In 1914 I even ventured to give
a nocturnal gala in honour of His Highness the Prince
Ferdinand of Coburg. The incandescent lights shone
upon the mingled hues, the red, the mauves and violets
of superchoice bulbs; the military band played its
dreamy airs, and so strange and uncommon was the
scene that my august guests could not refrain from
ejaculating words of astonishment. .. .”

The dinner presently foundered in a sea of liqueurs,
which turned in the stomach into landscapes in gold
and red. Daniel, not so thirsty now, was beginning
to find his thoughts go zigzagging.

Madame Fredda showed him her day’s purchases—
imitation pearls from the rue de Rivoli, erotic books
from the Palais Royal, perfumes, “hoaxes”, in short,
everything a foreigner’s heart could wish for in Paris.
Daniel saw that the Dutchwoman had a wholesome skin
and a bosom hard to keep within bounds. Through
his mind ran images of the canals, the meadows afloat,
the pointy roofs of the mills, the dykes, the cavaliers
of Franz Hals with hyacinths for noses. Under the
116MADAME FREDDA

 

table there developed an impulse towards uplift. He
let her talk on. His hostess became deep scarlet, a huge
blossom recommended for quick forcing.

She went on:

‘“T have not been in France since the Narcissus Con-
gress in 1908, while Excellency Falliéres was President.
I am going home to-morrow. I have too many inter-
ests in my own country. My widow’s life is spent be-
tween my experimental nurseries, my hothouses, and
my country house. I shall not come to Paris again,
although it is a city celebrated for its bright lights and
its people are full of life. This is the only evening I
shall be spending here. I spoke to you, Monsieur Hand-
some, because I should like to know what love with
a Frenchman is like. In Holland Frenchmen have a
tremendous reputation for subtle technique. Room
221. Waiter, I want to pay.”

Overburdened with weariness and favours received,
Daniel could barely contain his wrath. But he belonged
to a generation always disarmed and helpless before
flowers, and before the new Europe, and that never
knew how to say no.

117IN PRAISE OF THE MARQUISE DE
BEAUSEMBLANT

DaPHNE woke up, casually, since the arrival of night
manifests none of those disturbances that herald the
day. It was seven in the evening. This moment of
esthetic rest before dinner, this “beauty sleep” was a
regular part of the administration of her face. Then
came a searching examination of her body, coloured like
cinnamon, in the long triple mirror.

Daphne was possessed with a belief that of her own
free will she obeyed laws personal and peculiar to her-
self; she was, on the contrary, and more than others,
governed by the universal and common. A single hu-
man unit among the 1,660,000,000 that people the
world. She was a girl of to-day, which is to say more
or less a young man of yesterday. She had taken from
the males their vivacity and their petulance and thus
gave the lie to natural history, which will have females
calm, phlegmatic and stationary. She flashed like a
wild thing through the green pastures of her twen-
tieth year, which did not save her from catching her
neck in our oldest snares as she ran. Money (which
according to her, liberates from everything) was hold-
ing her for the moment at its mercy and would never

118PRAISE OF MARQUISE DE BEAUSEMBLAN ET

 

let her go. She had never had any before. And so
within a few months she had gone through all the in-
evitable ceremonies: the forty-horsepower car without
valves and with a platinum radiator, Persian cats, blue
trains, poulets Archiduc, motors with bodies of macas-
sar wood upholstered in full morocco, van Dongen
pictures, Chinese fishes, dahabeahs on the Nile, fresh
caviare brought by aeroplane, Fragonards, orchids,
twelfth century enamels, a pied-d-terre among the ruins
of Angkor, Napoleon brandies, yachts all black lacquer,
gold toilet sets, Patou frocks, the “royal suite” in the
Excelsior Lido Hotel, slippers of humming-bird feath-
ers, shagreen commodes, organs, jade mah-jong sets,
crystal bath-tubs, Fermiers-Généraux editions, watches
set into single diamonds, Japanese gardens, a chinchilla
bedspread.

To-night Daphne was dressing for the Grand Prix
ball at the Opéra. The féte was dedicated to the shades
of Paul et Virginie. Hoping to please J. G. Domergue
she put on a frock of pineapples with cockatoos, ‘con-
ventionalized,’ as she said. "Then she went into Iris’
room.

Iris was got up as a savage. On her head she wore
a diadem of electric lianas, hoping to win notice from
Beltran y Masses. Iris came from a rainy state in the
Middle West of America, and from an excellent family

tSEUROPE BAY LOY E£

 

of democrats, Lutherans, and freemasons; since 1921
her evil reputation had been advancing with mighty
strides, although she had been sent to France to acquire
the true French finish, or “French polish” (which
means that now whenever she caught her foot in a rug
she said “merde” as to the manner born)... . The
worse this extravagant angel’s behaviour, the more did
the oilwells of her dowry increase their output, for the
centre of the earth belongs to Satan. It is Iris who is
Daphne’s helper in her struggle against poverty. With
what success can be imagined.

Sufficiently excited by the wines and the laughing
voices, the two women walked here and there, linked
tightly to one another, about the corridors of the Opera
House. A negro nurse was patrolling this way and
that. Judging by her height and her way of walking,
she would be a man and even a man of years.

For Daphne the game began.

“Did you see the old boy got up in a nurse’s uni-
form? It would be more like the thing if he went
off and got fitted for his coffin!”

And she pointed to the face covered by a black stock-
inette domino, pierced by a red hole and two white
eyes, wrapped about with scarlet cotton like a colonial
standard.

“Tt’s a man for certain. What about picking him
up?”

120PRAISE OF MARQUISE DE BEAUSEMBLAWN I

 

She swooped on him.

“Hullo! Grandpa!”

The victim showed no pleasure in the game.

Then Iris in her turn hung upon the nurse’s arm,
crying out this or that, while Daphne murmured that
she was full of delightful wicked ways.

Faced with this persistence the masker stopped and
scrutinizing them:

“Blessings upon heaven, which offers me such ex-
quisite delicacies,” said he; “it is my witness that I have
done nothing to deserve them.”

The voice was masculine, with a slightly Germanic
accent. As all three paused together, an understand-
ing—indecipherable for anyone else—grew up among
them, seeming to them to go beyond the simple mean-
ing of a chance encounter. It was one o’clock in the
morning. They decided to set their teeth in other
pleasures. Iris suggested that they should go and break-
fast on Mont Saint Michel. Daphne preferred visions
of art at Anthinéa’s. The nurse remained silent till
they had finished.

“Would you like just to come home with me and have
a chat over a little champagne?”

The two friends were expecting a taxi, or a Ssix-
cylinder limousine, or a hackney cab, or a theatre bus,
anything but that astounding little one-horse coupé

MeaEURQOPEE “Al LOVE

 

dating from the end of last century, with its crackled
enamel, its interior wadded like a pouffe, covered in
deep purple stuff. On all its condemned and exhausted
springs the vehicle plunged into the streets, carrying
the Savage, the Negress, and the Basket of Pineapples.
Through the windows could be seen the Invalides and
the Santé in a June night filled with maladies and
passions. Here and there antique ruins. The most
familiar quarters of Paris were transported to San
Francisco and Bagdad.

The coupé drew up in a street not without a certain
resemblance to the rue Barbet-de-Jouy. A wall of imi-
tation stone opened into a garden. A few steps on a
gravelled walk and three up a stone stair and they were
in an ancient mansion. A little salon of the Second
Empire with black furniture covered in electric blue
damask; bound volumes of /’I/lustration lay on an
Italian table like a cake of different coloured marbles.
The walls were sheathed in raspberry plush, and the
ceiling too, where the wrinkled folds met in a kind of
rosette with the gathers bunched up in the middle.

Iris and Daphne were left for a moment alone with
two pictures in Renaissance frames, one representing
a pensive lady under a palm tree, painted by Dubufe,
the other, opposite, showed a voltigeur of the Garde
with his headgear carried away by a post-romantic
hurricane.

122PRAISE OF MARQUISE DE BEAUSEMBLANT

 

An old housekeeper came in on creaking soles. She
looked like a vaporous wraith; under the greenish light
of a cloza lamp. She placed a bottle on a table and
went out again. At the same moment a Karaman por-
tiére was drawn aside and an elderly lady, very tall,
made her appearance. She looked like Admiral Coligny.
White hair, black riband round her neck, teeth that
had been admirable in their day, but now mellowed
to yellow ivory, brown eyes full of a fire that refused to
be quenched.

“I look better this way,” said she. ‘Here is your
nurse with her face washed.”

“To think of me taking you for a man!” said Daphne.

“In my mother’s family we have all got Carolingian
feet,” explained the old lady, “‘which may take anybody

33

 

in.

“O pleasant land of France!” Iris went on: ‘‘Mad-
ame, you remind me of the Empress Tsu-Shi. In any
case for us Americans France is like China, an ancient
land that eggs us on to misbehave; that has its own
poetry, the poetry of ruins, and in which we are top
dogs. My name is Iris Sidedish. And yours is?”

The hostess eluded the question and ensconced her-
self deep in a bergére chair that sank down noiselessly
under her weight.

“And your name, child?” she said, turning to Daphne
with an air of authority.

123EUROPE Ar LOVE

The girl replied that she was called Daphne.

“O dear me,” interrupted the old lady, “you are a
nice little French girl; your real name?”

« Emilie Perrier,” confessed Daphne.

Everything came out then, without any asking.

“T was born in the rue de Rennes, at number 117.
Papa is a master in the Lycée Musset. I was studying
for the brevet Supérieur. One evening in 1921, at the
Medicis fountain, I met Olga Goldstein of Bucharest,
who was studying for the Conservatoire. She took me
to dine at the buffet of the Gare de Lyon, a magnificent
room with hand-painted ceilings representing ladies in
skirts with bustles pelting one another with hydrangeas.
After dinner we took the train for Italy. I had my
twentieth birthday at Sorrento. In 1922, at Davos,
Countess Ouffarine dressed me in boy’s clothes and then
abandoned me; then I gave French lessons at Fribourg

. that’s how we pay for long travel journeys. Jan-
uary, 1923, found me back in the rue de Rennes. Al-
ready I was being forced to study for Sévres when I
met Iris. She couldn’t bear to lie alone, for she was
frightened; I used to come every night and go off to
my lectures in the morning without waking her. One
morning I didn’t get up; she installed me in her life.
You see I might as well not be in the Faubourg—I keep
nothing from you. In a sense it’s more respectable than

it used to be.”
124PRAISE OF MARQUISE DE BEAUSEMBLANT

 

“Tt’s less trouble.”

“Well, there it is, I am quite mad; that’s why God
takes me under his protection.”

“You are not mad in the least.”

“In any case I am not afraid of anything and I am
free from shame now. ‘If you behave badly,’ my
mother used to say, ‘you’ll never get a husband.’ I
should never have got one anyhow.”

“That’s a pity. And yet that’s what you ought to
have had.”

“T only like women.”

~ You are altogether wrong,” said the old lady angrily.

“Tell us, Madame, if it is not pleasanter for Daphne
who is endowed with some degree of what distinguishes
a man, and who in any case has no money, to live with
someone of her own age and her own sex rather than
with some old colonel or heavy business man?” broke
in Iris.

“Well, you at any rate haven’t that excuse. Why
do you act in this way?”

"Because it’s the fashion,” replied Iris.

“Wretched times, when the vices themselves, the last
refuge of truth, sacrifice to vanity! Woe to those that
prostitute the loveliest thing in the world. . . .”

“And what, Madame, is the loveliest thing in the
world?”

The outraged ancient looked with no indulgent eye

125

SITE Ce LI ST i TI PI ES SIS OS amBURO PRE Ay GOVE

 

upon Iris, who was making a horrid noise gnashing her
chewing-gum, and threw her head with its white peri-
wig back upon the “‘antimacassar” of Venice point lace.

“T am the Marquise de Beausemblant. I am Han-
overian born, and French by marriage. My husband
was killed in the African wars. I have never confided
in anyone. Believe me: it is not tragedies that make
confidantes, but is the confidantes that make tragedies.
If I speak out to-night it is because there are truths
very close to my heart that you will have to listen to.
To keep company with old women is to be under the
rod. Well then! yes, the loveliest thing in the world
is the love of one woman for another woman. That
is a secret I have been keeping ever since 1866. Look
at me, look closely. Never again will you see lives
like mine. I am a sea famous for shipwrecks;
passion, madness, dramatic histories, all are there, but
all hidden. The truly great epochs are those in which
money, pleasures, the knowledge of good and lovely
things are all hidden. Frédéric Lolié indeed wrote of
me that I had ‘a bosom free from every restraint’.
What did he know of it? For the world our shoulders
sloping downwards, our round arms, our wit, but the
rest never belonged to the world. To-day, there is the
Bolshevism of manners, the communism of the skin.
And that is the reason why there are no longer—how
strikingly manifest it was to-night—any great beau-

126

vier dalieataatint ot’ -sial
ate eeteee fee! ieeePRAISE OF MARQUISE DE BEAUSEMBLANT

 

ties. In Paris there are thousands of you little lip-
sticked chickens and every single one of you alike.
Where are my beautiful friends, the Princesse de
Sélinonte, and Sophie de Canivet, and the Comtesse de
Sainte-Prune, draped in the dark velvet of Cabanel’s
portraits? Where are the others, the lovely adven-
turesses, those Spanish, Savoyard, Russian women of
whom everything could be said, even that they had an
‘air @ tout casser’, but never that they were vulgar?
When I saw you two just now, hanging on my arm,
so apt for every kind of happiness, but so incapable of
retaining it, so careless, so faithless, to our tradition,
there came upon me the necessity to tell you all you
are losing in losing reticence and modesty. Pray ex-
cuse me. I wish for your good, my dears. I have
always lived for others.”

“Beyond a doubt,” said Iris.

“If Iam lecturing you to-night, it is in the vain hope
that you will retain the lesson and pass it on to others.”

“Exactly like my family and the Reverend Sidedish
on the holy Sabbath.”

“The passions are beautiful so long as they remain
accursed and unconfessable.”

“Romanticism is testing Europe, granny. Is it not
testing Europe?”

"Since Eleusis history has always passed us over in
silence: hardly a few veiled allusions, and all our sisters’

1 747fEURO TRE Art LOW-E

 

secrets gone into the grave with them; but by whispered
word of mouth, from adept to adept the gospel con-
tinues its course; a kind of feminine folklore arises
round every civilization, teaching a perfect pleasure.
Once upon a time it was only gradually, little by little,
that we marked each other down, that we discovered in
one another a common liking for certain company,
certain flowers, certain musics. What would have been
said of these shameless modern actions of short-haired
girls, these violent joinings of animals in a casual thicket,
these pleasures enjoyed on every divan? We would
have died rather than admit men into our mysteries.
We used to run the risk, with what ecstasy! of death
often, of exile, of disgrace. a

The marquise fell silent. Night was crumbling into
decay. Iris and Daphne, each on her chair, had gone
to sleep during the sermon. The silence woke them.
Daphne thought that she must try to take a polite
leave of Madame de Beausemblant.

“T am full of admiration, Madame; you are the great
tradition.”

“Sappho’s, my dear.”

Iris rose in her turn, pulling away her chewing-gum
from where she had stuck it underneath her chair.

“Simply marvellous to be here: just like a detective
story. Who is Sappho?”

The marquise escorted them to her carriage. Then

128

ae - vi \ S MERIC PFO OST fePRAISE OF MARQUISE DE BEAUSEMBLANT

 

she went up the stone stair again, lost in thought. Now
dawn was rending the curtains apart. It was the hour
when she got to sleep every morning. The chamber-
maid came in. She aired the bed with a warming-pan,
and undressed her mistress.

“Give me my night-cap; a book. Memories of the
past. ... Here, that one... the Memoirs of Viel
Castel. I shall ring as soon as I wake.”

Madame de Beausemblant opened the Memoirs at the
date of October 16, 1853. She put on her spectacles
and read:

Madame la Marquise de B...1...b...f
and the Comtesse deG ...0... y are scandalizing
Dieppe by their doings.. The princesse Mathilde de-
clares that they get drunk, smash windows, dance the
can-can, and perpetrate other debaucheries of such a
kind that they make the bona robas ashamed. . . .

129I SET MOSCOW AFIRE
I

I was going to receive a reward, the sweetest kind of
all, the reward one has done nothing to earn. ... I
was on my way to a lovers’ meeting. I pushed open
the outside door, greasy with innumerable fingers, be-
longing to the house in which Vasilissa Abramoyna
was living, with no fear of a concierge—the concierge,
who is the last king of France, and who with us is always
there to give the cue in those simultaneous comedies
known as blocks of flats. Groping I clambered up the
nine flights that lay between me and her; which was
no particular joke. The staircase was like every other
stair in Russia since the nationalization of houses, in
other words, it had not known the flick of a broom
since October, 1917. At midday it was dark as night
there. My feet were heavy with their snow boots, and
my conscience with every one of the thirteen hundred
sins the casuists tell us a man can commit. Never
would my heart beat over the lady as it was beating
over all those weary steps.

Vasilissa was one of the most conspicuous young
women in Moscow—where for the most part one takes
particular pains not to be conspicuous. Directly I set
foot on the railway station plans were set afoot to

130SEE MOS@GOW ABTRE

 

ensure that I should fall in love with her and with no-
body else. Once more I was docile. Each country,
like each new day, is a gift: we ought to take both as
they are presented to us.

Vasilissa Abramovna was, as might be expected, com-
pletely unlike her reputation for being strange and

 

original. Is there any woman who wouldn’t look on
it as a slur to be too publicly and universally proclaimed
charming? Not that she omitted to be a little extrava-
gant and wild—in this respect as in others there are
certain women who affect what least becomes them—
but she was wild without being brazen, with personal
discreetness and respect for the Spartan austerity all
about us. I was expecting something far more highly
coloured. I was delighted to find myself mistaken.
Events had meant neither emancipation nor death for
her, and to her own constant circle she continued the
gift of her primitive easy-going good nature. She was
no creature of modernity. And in troublous times that
seemed to me the most precious thing of all. This
was what made her a real “national treasure”, 2 work
of art that one was bound to give back to the public
when one had finished with it. I amused myself with
thinking of how the Proletariat would refuse to let
Vasilissa (like this celebrated singer or that great
dancer) leave Russian territory when and as she pleased
without exacting hostages as surety for her return.
131EU ROPE GA HOVE

 

I had made her acquaintance at the races, the Great
Red Derby, though I did not actually see her then.
Winter race meetings have a way of finishing at night
and by artificial light, for it is hard to get the indolent
Moscow sportsman out of his bed before the early after-
noon. The starter had just given the signal with his
lantern, like a stationmaster, and up went a cloud of
panic-stricken crows. The electric globes lit up only
the immaculate racing track. The sky was heavy with
fat pastry-like clouds sailing over the moon. It was
thawing, and wheel to wheel—it was buggy racing—
among the smoke of braziers, snow, mud, shouting, the
leading jockeys were already showing up, urging on
their horses whose hoofs were beating up a liquid ice.

As I said, I trusted blindly to the gracious inter-
mediary who had brought me to her side, no other than
M. Ivan Moussine, the Red Master of Ceremonies, one
of the few renegades, a diplomat under the old régime,
vain of his open handsome face, his exquisite manners,
and an astounding fancy Red Army uniform, whose
friendly services foreigners are always glad to find at
their disposal. It was on his word and Walving my
right to verification that I paid my compliments to a
sack strangulated round the waist, motionless in felt
boots trimmed with fur on the front, hermetically
sealed in a leather helmet, stopped up with a red scarf
round the neck, which stood in front of me that eve-

132tL SEr MOSCOW. ARTRE

 

ning in the weighing enclosure, and this was nothing
less than Vasilissa Abramovna.

 

It was not until the next day but one, in the Baum-
berg Theatre, that I was able to repeat my compliments
in all sincerity. Where is sincerity to be found if not
in a pioneer theatre? The house was packed; men in
sweater, khaki shirt and black tie, the women in dark
blouses. All those faces, bony, shadow-filled, or round
and youthful, seemed to belong to the Rembrandts
set free from the Hermitage, thanks to the days of
October.

It was a first night.

I found Vasilissa Abramovna’s box by her perfume,
which was plain vanilla.

She presented me to her guests: a little girl with
plaits tied up with red ribbons, a general of the Cau-
casian “Pioneers,” a “gentleman from Paris” who was
selling tractors to the Tchouvaches with a letter from
Anatole France, a comrade with shaven head and a Mon-
golian officer in black American cloth, who had just re-
pudiated the living God to enter the Party, and whose
hair was growing again and was already more than an
inch long. I was given a chair beside her and while she
was explaining as much as I had missed of the new play
which was, I perceived, no other than La Dame aux
Cameélias, 1 could get a better look at her. So indolent

133EURO TEE ArT 0 VE

 

was Vasilissa that even when she was on her feet she
seemed to be lying down. Like certain of her African
sisters, one guessed her to be a Jewess more by her fleshi-
ness than by her features. Although she called herself
a Communist and could on occasion go through her
catechism, her complexion was too pink for her to
have many political convictions. She was of a type so
ordinary that every man imagined he had possessed
her: doubtless that is what ensured her indulgence and
sympathy from all men.

The stage was split up into several storeys and by
the help of outside stairs the actors with blood-red
cheeks and eyes charred with kohl whipped from one
to another acting and speaking frenziedly and all at
the same time. In the flies under a gold cupola there
was ensconced, like a figure in a mosaic, a pianist who
made accompanying noises for the most pathetic mo-
ments. This simultaneousness ought to have allowed
the play to come to its end speedily. But the action
jumped off again, multiplane—and thence forward was
very far from the play we call La Dame aux Cameélias.
Duval senior, in order to console himself for his son’s
capers, suddenly determined to take up his abode among
the negroes. So he made his entry into Timbuctoo in
the middle of a great powder play. I was ready to
show my amusement, but I observed for the first time
what has always struck me since in the new Russia, that

134I SET MOSCOW AFIRE

 

no one was laughing. A thing that gives the crowds, the
shows, the street, a joylessness not wholly devoid of
grandeur.

The play soon reached the borders of expressionism.
Everybody concerned, actors and authors, had wrought
in ugliness and violence, and the result was this elfish
nightmare. A donkey came into Margaret Gautier’s
room and ate all the flowers on her deathbed. When
Armand Duval tried to drive it off, it began to kick,
emitted a malodorous blast and took refuge in the flies
near the pianist and nibbled at his hair.

Without a hint of flagging the play entered on its
fifth hour. .

When it was all over, Vasilissa Abramovna bade her
friends good-bye, declined the offer of a glass of tea
in the director’s room in honour of the young author,
M. Koenigsberg, and we went home in the company of
a communist friend of hers, dumb but visibly in love.

That night it was freezing bitterly. I suggested one
of those American cars that are the unconsidered trifles
from the Murmansk loot, and cost a fortune. But
Vasilissa preferred to walk back, unquestionably to
avoid attracting attention by extravagant spending—
who will recognize the Russian in that trait? We each
took her by an arm.

We were walking now in a stained snow that had
turned into a thick icy yellow powder. There was

135BURORE Ar TO V £

 

no end to this coffee cream until we came to the Red
Square. The Lombardic wall of the Kremlin cast the
shadows of its two-horned battlements, its watchtow-
ers, its turrets to the foot of the bright new barracks—
the Nicholases triumphing over the Ivans—or over the
golden bulbs and the green delft of the steeples lit from
below like an actor in the footlights. Lording it over
this Italianate acropolis, a banner kept in motion by
an unseen fire down below thrust a silent theatrical
scarlet tongue flickering into the night. Already we
were passing Lenin’s mausoleum, itself draped in red,
with a photographic enlargement of the dead hero
twenty feet high pasted on the wall. On each side
of the entrance to the tomb two soldiers kept watch, as
motionless and rigid as the frozen sturgeons on the fish-
hawker’s trays.

I was proud of my new grey astrakhan cap, which
made me look like a Nepman, a regular profiteer, and I
suggested that we should pay a visit to the gipsy quar-
ter. I was begged not to speak so loud, and my com-
panions kept looking round to see if we were being
followed. They refused to go, in view of the late hour
and the streets, which according to them were danger-
ous. As I went on insisting, so that I might get some-
thing to eat—for even if there are meals in Russia
there is no fixed time for any meal—the black-bloused
comrade with us was seized with panic. He dropped

136[SEI MOG © Way Aten Ee

 

his apostolic expression and I saw his murderer’s eyes.
An incorruptible—one of these modern Templars—must
not be seen at any price and above all in the company of
women or foreigners in a cabaret, and the censorship
bans the very word foxtrot, which in Russia is the
synonym of capitalistic and Occidental debauchery.

Our companion having bolted, with his bursting
portfolio under his arm, he had left us to be in ourselves
what eternal happiness was about to make us.

All at once my appetite died away, or a different
one took its place. I took Vasilissa Abramovna home
to her own place. We hailed a sleigh. Under the fur
rug my leg nestled over hers. I put my arm round
her waist, behind the sky-blue back of the driver, and
we went gliding on without light, and without noise,
over the filmy hoar frost that crackled like the sugar
icing on a cake. Everybody has read that to drive
back at night in a troika with a Russian girl is a divine
intoxicant. Alas, the troikas have all gone with the
excursions to the Islands, the watering-places in the
Caucasus, the handkiss after meals and the uniforms
of General Dourakine. We contented ourselves with
an istvostchik at two roubles.

Claude Anet tells us that Russian women surrender
themselves at the very beginning: the difficulties only
come later. It was always possible to begin with the
beginning. I proposed to “test our souls”. Hence-

U7,ee

SO RR pm me ang —

ee

 

 

BORO REGAL LOVE

 

forth I knew the Slav heart and had no fear of any
of those contradictions that are so many wonderful
surprises for the traveller. I kissed Vasilissa Abramovna.

“What ... more?” she said reproachfully, as I
turned to her again.

Her mouth was such a long one that a single kiss
had not been enough to deal with it. I made my
excuse:

“Distances in Russia are so great.”

After this kiss the next thing that came from her
lips was a rendezvous at her place for seven o’clock
next evening.

“You won’t invite anybody else?”

“TI promise you not,” said she.

The trams were passing along the Tverskaia with big
flashes, that flung a green light over the snow. On the
tramcars were painted revolutionary cartoons. You
saw a black ship labelled Lenin ploughing through the
ocean of Bourgeoisie. The air of this city innocent of
smoke, the sort of air you find on a glacier, entered to
the very bottom of the lungs with no effort of the
chest to breathe it.

“In love to be French is half the battle, isn’t it? I
would adore Frenchmen if I was a girl of any other
country,” said I.

(Did our fathers ever dream that they were endow-
ing us with such a.tool for propaganda?)

138I SEF MOSCOW AFIRE

 

I slipped my hand into the most satiny muff in the
world.
“How very old-fashioned you are,” she replied.

II

Vasilissa Abramovna is specially favoured. In a
roomy elegant flat she has an apartment nearly four
metres square all to herself, at a time when the short-
age of living accommodation in Moscow has forced
the authorities to limit each person to two and one-
fifth cubic metres of air space. As all the wooden
houses have been used up for fuel there has been estab-
lished what has been labelled compression. And that
is why in the hall I found eighteen pairs of boots or
galoshes belonging to the various lodgers on this floor.
I put mine with the others, which by the good help of
the warmth made a regular pool, and I left my fur
coat in the arms of the maid.

Over the flowered cretonne of the screen I beheld
Vasilissa, with her eyes like bruised anemones. She was
certainly brooding and waiting for love. She was fin-
ishing her toilette, and I felt myself eloquent and stupid
enough to munch thistles. I told her I had had mis-
tresses before her, but that I should have no more. I
am not one to acknowledge the debts of régimes that
have passed into oblivion.

139BUROPE ArT GOVE

 

>

“T don’t like presents,” she replied as she washed her
hands.

She showed me her leather waistcoat and a woollen
frock hanging from the meat safe.

“Tt only remains for you to say that you'll ‘guide
me in choosing my frocks’ or that ‘we shall be true and
trusty partners’; and to call me ‘chére amie’; then
everything will be just right.”

She added:

“I told you already—you belong to an old-fashioned
country.”

Against the uniform background of the tall earthen-
ware stove she stood out in hard clear outline, like the
bas-reliefs Messrs. Dieulafoy dug up at Susa.

“Vasilissa, my little atsin, I love you.”

“But I can’t care about you.”

I was about to take her in my arms.

Soundlessly, like the flight of a vampire, in came
the maid. If I was not mistaken she was asking for
money. She was a big heavy creature with a forelock
falling down her nose, just like the Russian horses.
While Vasilissa Abramovna disappeared behind the
screen I cast my eyes round her home. The chief piece
of furniture was—a telephone. The telephone plays a
tremendous part ever since the Revolution. It has
taken the place of the samovar, the ikons, the tame

140TSEF MOSCOW AFTRE

 

ravens. It is common property. It is continually car-
ried here and there through the flat for the use of the
various tenants. On a low chair stood the basin with
the water in which she had just washed her hands.
Standing by the piano was a bicycle. On the piano,
dishes; a table ringed about with stools; books on the
floor; a good many trunks; a bust of Lenin.

The maid had gone, and there would be no more
interruptions.

“What are your ideas on l’amour?”

“Le Mour, the criminal police?”

“No, ’amour ... love.”

“Tam no theorician. Look up Lenin, volume nine,
page eleven-twenty-five.”

I perceive that Lenin is their Confucius.

“But seriously, if a foreigner who is in love with
VOURe <<
The door opened halfway. No one came in. Va-
silissa Abramovna answered an unseen interlocutor. I
heard her being asked to use her influence with an im-
portant person so as to procure a passport. She prom-
ised, saying:

“Come some other day and see me. We'll give you a
sucking-pig.”

The telephone rang.
“This is 30-32-64.”
141PU ROLE Ar LOVE

 

Oh; please. +3."

Pethank you. : . <7

While she was answering (it was somebody hunting
for the telephone number of a friend’s sister) there came
into the room without knocking a tall, red-haired, di-
lapidated fellow, looking like a C.3 recruit, with a jaw
eaten away by scurvy, and with the usual portfolio
under his arm. This was a contraband dealer, selling
platinum teeth, corpses’ teeth. He explained that the
coffins at Leningrad raised by the floods had just taken
their departure from their cemetery of their own ac-
cord, and that they had sailed down to the Gulf of
Finland giving up their occupants. He was making
a fortune and wanted us to make a bit out of this

windfall.

Vasilissa stroked my cheeks.

“Please, please don’t be cross. It is so difficult to
manage to be alone with somebody. And in any case
why, why? Did a Russian girl ever dream of sup-
pressing her feelings before other people?”

“I am tired out with waiting. Let me have my
overtime pay. You won’t answer, Vasilissa? For you
know perfectly well what I mean. I’ve set something
very clear and definite before me.”

“It’s very difficult. It has to be arranged for a long
time ahead. One must buy theatre tickets for one’s

142ESEE MOSCOW AFILRE

 

39>

neighbours, and send the maid to her union... .
“What about a private room in a restaurant?”
“There aren’t any now. One might go to some

library, but there’s a great run on them. In summer

there are the woods . . . but you have come in the
wintertime. ...”

The door banged open. In came a boy, ancient and
already broken-down, a little Oriental full of insolence
and humility together.

With no word of apology:

““Goldvasser, is Goldvasser coming?”

“Yes, he will be back for dinner,” replied Vasilissa
Abramovna.

“T looked in as I was passing. In that case [ll wait
for him.”

“If you like. Sit down. Have some tea.”

With her wisps of hair, her dirty apron rounding
over a belly like a doe rabbit’s, in came the maid again.
Once more she spoke into her comrade-mistress’ ear,
and once more her mistress gave her money.

Through the window I watched the downcoming of
the night. The sky suddenly became brighter than
the earth. Night here has ways that are not our
ways. From this ninth storey flat Moscow lay clear
to the view as far as the Sparrow Hills, a concentric
city, in which the foreigner wanders round and round

143

Pe isBUR OPREGAL AL OVE

 

as one does in a Russian heart; skyscrapers, golden
domes, Greek crosses hung with chains, and the Moskva
river with its ice etched and cross-etched by the chil-
dren’s skates. The double windows, plastered with
putty and stuffed with cottonwool, stopped every
draught, but the snow was driving horizontally before
a wind straight from Siberia. It clung to the trees and
the fronts of the houses, duplicating their lines in white.
I felt cosy and at ease. It was as warm as in the heart
of a bed.

Vasilissa took the plates from the piano, the knives
and forks and so on out of a trunk and laid the table.
She brought out some Chambertin, grown in the Cau-
casus, preserves, and little terra cotta pots with grapes
pickled in vinegar and mushrooms in sugar. The newly
adopted child watched all the time . . . he wanted her
far more than a meal. He was young and withered;
his nose and mouth a good ten years older than the
rest of his face. He didn’t understand when we spoke
French, but I saw in his eyes that he had taken every-
thing in. In any case Vasilissa was so transparent that
night that you could read her watermark. (Not my
initials.) I could not refrain from telling her that
I knew she had two lovers.

“Three,” she rejoined.

“Are men a necessity to you or a passion?”

144PSE MOSCOW ABRINE

 

Cleaving through this important conversation en-
tered a giant with a round bag in his hand, like a man
coming into his own home. Without a word of greet-
ing he made for the screen, undressed and got into the
basin, standing up in it with nothing on. He let the
water from the samovar run over his head and over
his belly.

“Vasilissa, just look at these fleas! to say nothing
of anything else. I shouldn’t be surprised if I’ve
brought typhus back with me. I read my poems in
the Minsk synagogue yesterday; there’s the result.”

Strong and stark naked as his own images, this is
Mordecai Goldvasser the Red poet. He has the face
of a prize-fighter—the American-Jew prize-fighters
that have just dawned upon the ring—an open, attrac-
tive face, a mouth both delicate and wicked, clear eyes
and clear-cut movements. He is violent in his way of
writing, with an exquisitely studied negligence. His
type has been seen of old in Bloomsbury and at the
Café de la Rotonde. Towards 1914 Goldvasser pub-
lished poems influenced by Apollinaire. Coming back
to Russia from Switzerland about 1917, he set to work
writing propaganda. His poems were printed in several
colours with cut-out photographs in the middle. He
gave the world political plays, atheistical songs for chil-
dren, patriotic hymns, odes to fertilizers, calligrams
in the shape of hammer and sickle, puffs for the State

145

CUTTER RY
d UAT IU
Biase any 4 7 " ie re -BUROPE AE LOVE

 

industries. Ruthlessly, remorselessly, he put into verses
the marching songs of the Red Army, the new Code,
the prices of commodities, the metric system for the
peasants and the regulations for factories. He was
active, official, overflowing. And the first man in
Russia I have seen smiling, or talking without dropping
his voice. He is supposed to have an original style.
He does all the right things to achieve this. He knocks
words about, makes use of puns, indecencies, popular
images, monologues of madmen, folklore, peasant dia-
lects, allogeneous dialects, studio slang; all illumi-
nated from behind by a portentous erudition under-
neath. Rather than any really profound invention it
is a refocussing, a projection of the modern spirit upon
things that makes them seem new. He continually
talks about “redistributing the past”. Like many young
Germans and young Russians his admiration turns to
Maupassant.

"He was a great writer,” said he, “but naturally not
of the present day. Everything needs to be done again.
So I am taking his stories one by one to rewrite them.”

He sat dreaming a moment, then:

“Maupassant. . . . I hope I shall not die like him.”

Goldvasser is too much of an artist not to have his
private neurosis; it is a dread of diseases; his contami-
nation phobia is notorious; this Communist wipes every-
thing he touches, sterilizes his knife and fork, wears

146L SHE MOSCOW, Al ERE

 

india-rubber gloves, and when he opens a door he takes
hold of it high up where nobody else can reach. ‘This is
not cleanliness but prophylaxis. Outside of words and
ideas everything to him is contagious.

He kept at a safe distance as he questioned the bris-
tling stringy-necked boy, who considered the famous
writer with the eyes of a shoplifter.

“What is your name, comrade?”

“Joseph Antonoyitch.”

“Where do you come from?”

“From Odessa.”

“Have you brought us the cholera?”

“Very nearly. I’ve brought you some verses for your
review Boudouchtcheie (‘the Future’).”

“T publish no poems but my own.”

“Mine are just as good as yours.”

‘How old are you?”

“Hifteen. Goldvasser, I came to sell you my poems.
They are signed with my family surname, Izrailoff.”

“You can stick them. . . .”

“Rive roubles. ...- Lill sell them to your for mive
roubles! Let me only read them to you. I know you'll
like them. If you really don’t like them, you can have
these five roubles.”

The Tom Thumb from Odessa crossed his greasy
long boots, opened his portfolio and read three short
poems that I didn’t understand very well, but I felt they

147PUR ORE wad LO Vb

 

were comical, exceedingly precious and rather subtle.
They came from between his gold pitted teeth like a
conjuror’s nosegay.

Goldvasser was rather struck with them. Foursquare
in his armchair like an old man laden with honours—
Voltaire at Ferney—is he not full five and thirty?—he

 

sat considering.

"You win. Here are five roubles for your poems.
They are not quite as good as you think, but you recite
them like a demon. Leave them with me. Away
you go.”

Gradually I came to see that Vasilissa and Goldvasser
were living together: which of them owned the flat?
While he dressed she informed him that there was a
meeting that night of the House Committee (in other
words the tenants’ soviet) ; that a finance inspector had
come to question her, having secretly found out that
Goldvasser had indulged the week before in extravagant
spending. He must expect to be supertaxed. . . .

He retorted venomously:

“That’s all over your filthy Coty . . . your French
face powder at a hundred francs a box.”

She, contemptuous:

You are a fifteenth class civil servant. You’ve been
seen at an embassy in a dinner jacket; you applied for
a passport to Paris, my dear. That has to be paid for.”

148Rs

 

 

 

PSHE MOSCOW; ALTRE

 

Goldvasser brought his fist jangling down on the
keyboard of the piano.

“They’re all the same since they took to wearing
trousers and cutting their hair. Are men nothing but
buffoons to them now? ‘That will teach us to live by
science!”

Meanwhile a bortch was brought in and we sat down
to the table. Goldvasser became calmer, and pulled his
drinking glass out of his pocket, for that was another
source of anxiety to him.

I felt that I was on his nerves.

“Are you here on some mission?” he asked me.

INO

“Have you come to ask Vasilissa Abramovna for her
views on the problems of the moment? We welcome
enquiries in Russia. Look here, the other day I invented
a mission to fcetuses. It was most successful. Do you
know what the Union of Foetuses wants? The answer
was: Firstly, a little air, we suffer from too much com-
pression; secondly, from too much darkness. They call
for electrification like the whole of Russia. In the third
place, do you know what they protested against? .. .
the introduction of foreign bodies! By that you will
recognize the true Union.”

“There now. Enough of food. Will you smoke?
State cigarettes. They are put up with cardboard tips
just as they used to be, but the tobacco now has no

149ORO PEAT © VE

 

taste whatever. The Russians smoke them to the bitter
end. A sad come-down.”

The door opened again. How could the hinges
hold out?

Vasilissa rose.

“This is my husband, Ben Moisevitch.”

[ understood then that these people were all living
together. Goldvasser, who is the richest, kept them.
This is the first country in which I have seen a poet pay-
ing for other people. Ben Moisevitch kissed his wife
and kissed Goldvasser on the mouth, Russian fashion.
He was a man of no particular age, clotted up by the
cold in his astrakhan pelisse and with no lashes behind
his spectacles. Only after some time did I perceive
that he was young, young like the whole of the new
Russia, in which old men evaporate, blow away, where
active life begins at eighteen and decays about thirty.
Employed in the “C.D.V.L.M.’—the “Freshware
Fisheries Trust”—Moisevitch was Just coming away
from his office—his moment for giving free rein to his
apostolic itchings. Smelling out a victim he sat down
beside me. He knew me and was already aware I was
in his flat, thanks to friends in the police who had tele-
phoned the news to him.

While dinner began all over again, the two of us
embarked on a conversation in German. Ben Moise-

150SEE MOSCOW ARTVRE

 

vitch had lived in the United States for a considerable
time. He expressed himself like an American business
man, in a direct and brutal fashion.

“Comrade, the Revolution in France before long?
Do you like Russia?”

“Enormously. To begin with it’s the one and only
country where nobody sings the Volga Boat Song.”

“For my part I love France, so great in her genius.”

“Who is it you admire most in France?”

“Poincaré. A man of iron, a Bismarck. After our
Days of October all the Allied missions took to flight.
France was the only country that left men here. Ger-
many, Italy, England . . . petty spirits. They have
expelled communism in the throes of dreadful colics.
But you? France, France it is that must make up to
us for the disillusions we have suffered from the West.”

I spoke to him about the Russians in Paris.

“The Whites? They are dead, comrade; burnt out,
corpses, as we say here; millions of corpses.”

“Talking of burnt corpses,” broke in Goldvasser, al-
ready slightly tipsy, “just imagine they wanted to build
a crematorium here. But they could never get enough
heat in the furnace. All they could manage was merely
to roast the bodies; then they put them back roasted on
the bier. ll read you a poem I made about it.”

“Don’t interrupt me with your nonsense. We are
talking seriously. Would you like to understand

151RO pen,

 

 

 

EUROPE AT ILO YV 2

 

modern Russia, comrade? Listen. Reckon it up with
me: we say, three million corpses; a hundred millions
of peasantry stuffed to the teeth with land, propri-
etors, unmoved lookers-on with digestions like boa con-
strictors. And then us, the Jews, eight millions of
us. The Ukraine, Bessarabia, Turkestan, Bokhara. The
world’s great reservoirs of Jews have burst their dams
and we have flooded in everywhere, eager, intolerant,
Talmudic. Ezekiel said, ‘Ye shall dwell in houses ye
have not built, ye shall drink of wells ye have not
digged.’ ‘Those houses and those wells are here. There
is only one other continent, the greatest laboratory in
the world, the promised land, Eurasia. ‘The word has
become a slogan.”

“T invented it,” interrupted Goldvasser.

Lying on its side, its pale lashes downdropt, an enor-
mous sucking-pig came in on an earthen dish, garnished
with potatoes.

“Ts there anything you want to ask me?” asked Ben
Moisevitch.

“Yes. How does one manage to be alone with a
woman in Moscow?”

“You are in love?”

“Very much.”

“Well, then, you marry her. Divorce is very easy,
but the acme of cleverness is to stay engaged, so that
both can keep their due and proper cubic air space and

12OD PPL A IMO TT ST ahh oT AP Wt IMD thE le ttle ne aint as HE. are

 

 

I SET MOSCOW AFIRE

 

their own share of a room. Don’t forget that here we
live under the law of Lycurgus. Lenin often recurred
to it in his speeches: Work and discipline.”

Vasilissa Abramoyna, who out of coquetry ate noth-
ing (to take pains not to grow fat is the height of
fashionable elegance in times when you are not too sure
of getting food every day), was coming back from a
long conversation on the telephone. She put in a word
for me:

“Please, please, he is French. He has sensitive nerves.
Don’t harry him with propaganda.”

“Except yours,” I said, for her private ear, as I kissed
her hand.

Moisevitch looked at his gold wrist-watch and went
out without waiting to finish his meal, carrying off
caviare sandwiched in bread and a Turkestan apple.
The C.D.M.—the House Committee—claimed him.
To-night’s meeting would be important. One question
was on the agenda: what steps were to be taken if the
lavatories were stopped up?

There would be speeches followed by a vote that
might bring defeat upon the President of the Com-
mittee, who was a Communist but detested. Moisevitch
was after his position on the C.D.M. It is one greatly
coveted, because through the president the municipal
authorities get their information about the tenants, and
many privileges go with the office. The first duty of

153PU ROPER At, 2 OVE

 

every Russian is to be on good terms with this com-
mittee.

Goldvasser refused to go up because he considered
there were too many child deputies; he was afraid of
whooping-cough. Leaving us to ourselves, he stretched
himself on the common bed, taking the telephone with
him, and already he was snoring with the deep grunts
of a woman in labour.

A little student from Tashkent University took his
still warm place. This was a friend of Moisevitch.
Like a true “incorruptible” he was clad all in black
leather, with unpolished high boots and a cap on the
side of his head. ‘The bortch was brought back. He
put his portfolio down on a chair—what on earth have
they all got in that portfolio—and sat on it to make
himself tall. You could feel that he was uplifted by his
learning and full of pride at being no longer the poor
Bokhara Jew forbidden by the Russians to keep a horse,
which is a noble animal, and only allowed to ride on
an ass. He spread out the Pravda before his plate with-
out addressing a word to us. Then he asked for the
telephone. As he ate he held the receiver to his ear
and looked as though his face was between two spoons.
He looked like Lenin and was vain of the fact. I found
that he was dictating a political propaganda lecture to
the night shift of the Dynamo works.

After his declaration he gulped down his red cabbage,

154ISEF MOSCOW AFIRE

 

with his mouth open and his Asiatic eyes shut, and then
went to sleep on his chair, not without belching several
times for good manners.

It was growing late.

“T can see that we shall never be alone now, Vasilissa
Abramoyna. But I am a persevering fellow. 'To-mor-
row I shall buy up the porter of the Savoy Hotel—the
one who looks like a Venetian senator. You shall come
up to my room.”

“Why? Are we not always sufficiently isolated by
love itself? What does the house matter?”

Till that moment I had borne her no grudge for all
these contretemps. She was not responsible for them
anyway, but if she was fooling me and wanted to make
a show of me it would be another pair of shoes.

‘This isn’t a house,” I averred, “it’s a Punch and Judy
show. I have never seen anything so funny.”

“You have no sense of gratitude. How can IJ have
any confidence in you? I know well enough, as they
say in my part of the world, that all hearts maintain an
unstable equilibrium in these heights. . . .”

‘Vasilissa, it’s not a question of feelings. It’s a ques-
tion of place.”

She gave a deep sigh.

‘“That’s the only thing men ever think of,” she said.

Darling phrase, how they all serve it up to us, done
to a turn, in every country in the world.

155EURO? Bea LO Wce

 

A flawlessly beautiful youth interrupted her at this
point. With his Greek profile and his English whiskers,
he looked like a young deity of 1815. He came up to
Vasilissa Abramovna and kissed her on the shoulder
with so much chaste passion, such restrained affection,
that it gave me a pang. With a delicious swing of the
hip he rid himself of his fur coat, tossing it on the pile
of cloaks at the door. From his dancing airs, the al-
together professional harmony of his movements, his
bracelets and the lateness of his arrival, I gathered that
he was an actor and that he belonged to that privileged
caste, the darling children of this Revolution—as of
every other one. His fine skin whitened and softened
by cosmetics, his womanish airs, his quicksilver hands,
his red silk socks proclaimed sufficiently clearly that he
was beloved. Vasilissa listened to him without a word.
Boris Redstein held the first place in her heart. Dancer
in the Grand Opera House, and something of a parasite
everywhere.

The indefatigable maid brings in dinner again for
him. He talks a great deal about his successes, drops a
hint that he is of high birth—but illegitimate—and
speaks with much freedom about Djerzinski himself, the
Saint-Just of the Reds, with no fear of the microphone.

Vasilissa Abramovna brings in the State vodka again,
and—what she had done for none of the rest of us—
produces orange vodka bought from an Armenian smug-

156I SET MOSCOW AFIRE

 

gler. (Among outward signs of wealth food and drink
are the least taxable, and everybody takes advantage
of this. What would happen if mouths were taxed?)
We had had pressed caviare, there will be fresh for him.
I feel a still sharper pang than before. The truth is
under my very eyes. Why must I always be surrounded
with conquerors, and I be always put back till another
time?

Decidedly over this community of possession there
reigns a kind of second-rate satisfaction and a trivial
pleasantness that I find annoying. This easy life led
under the sign of disorder, these mingled pleasures and
desires, this love-trust, this conjugal cartel and its in-
conveniences all too apparent, alas! the cynical harsh
light under which I must needs mark time while waiting
for better things, fills my heart with terrible bitterness
though it still struggles to be courteous.

And here is Ben Moisevitch.

Greatly excited, he knocks over the screen, waking
Goldvasser. Down tumbles a pile of proclamations in
red. capitals: THERE IS NO ART BUD ae
SOCIAL. The question of the lavatories debated in the
C.D.M. resulted in a vote of no confidence, but every-
thing seems to indicate that he, Moisevitch, will not be
elected. His hurt pride throws him into an unbelievable
state. The intrigue has been carried on without his

7

, I Cari til ghse sy oe —
MON 2 tor HH a was % 2 SreS a a oe

 

 

BU.RO BE Ae OVE

 

having an inkling of it, and two Russians—an unprec-
edented thing—are candidates against him.

“These Russians are thrusting themselves in every-
where,” says Goldvasser in the end, with a snort of
laughter.

He adds:

“Get your own back, comrade. Let’s have a game of
poker.”

Poker has taken the place of the aristocratic game
of preference. Vasilissa Abramovna does not join in,
but takes her ease near us, applying to each of our
hands the interest she feels in our four persons. She is
transparently happy to know that we are all hers like
this. Each of us has the luck that goes with our char-
acters. Goldvasser gets along like a real genius, with
terrific raises; Moisevitch overwhelms us with a queer
steady success. Boris cheats clumsily with nervous
hands and his beautiful face suddenly overrun with
twitchings. As for me, like a Westerner I play badly;
I am mean, miserly and crabbed in the face of the uni-
versal affability.

In spite of myself I hear the hoarse shrieks of loco-
motives, and the station bells celebrating, instead of the
coming of the Deity, the departure of men.

No longer do I heed even all the episodic persons who
continue to insinuate themselves into this cage of my

158= oes Sea ean
se OM)! AF é wi

 

 

i SEs MOS @OW ARTE

flown loves. And coming in each of them makes use of
the same phrase—the full meaning of which I under-
stand at last—‘I just looked in as I was passing.” And
all of them are given something to eat.

I remember especially one ugly agile young woman
who only lasted a moment. She untied the kerchief she
was wearing round her head (in Moscow hats are looked
on with no kind of favour) and let down fair hair that
fell to her very heels. She put a mirror between her
knees, did up her head again and went away saying, “I
just looked in as I was passing” without my having
discovered why she had climbed up nine flights to come
and do her hair here.

A seller of rubber goods only managed to impose him-
self on us for a moment. This was before daybreak not
long after an acepot. He displayed a kind of puppet
enclosed in a glass jar, and dropped into the water a
pink powder that suddenly clothed it all over with silver
bubbles. This was a free gift that the colossal profits
realized on French preservatives, in spite of tariffs, en-
abled him to offer to his customers (everybody knows
that our goods are vastly superior to those sold by the
Rubber Trust of Leningrad).

Towards six in the morning the samovar boiled up
and tea was served round, of course in those scalding
hot glasses that are impossible to hold in the hand, now

DyBU RORE Ak LOWE

 

that there are none of those little silver mounts,
“which,” said Redstein grinning, “are considered
counter-revolutionary.” He and I had not got a
kopeck left. As cash is scarce and no one is any longer
in a position now to go double or quits for a noble pal-
ace with a facade fifty yards wide, like the one that
was lost at baccarat in 1913 hard by the church of the
Virgin of the Don—everybody gave forfeits. Boris
was condemned to kneel on the piano with two plates
full of water in his hands; as for me, a hoop of pink
paper with a hole for my head was put round my neck,
and I pledged my honour to wear it till I got home. I
looked at myself in the mirror and found myself looking
exactly like a frilly meat pie, fatter and yellower than
ever in this clown’s collar. The anger that rose up
within me gave me no pleasure. I smashed a vase. This
explosive manifestation of my rage was looked upon as
a sign of gaiety (do not the restaurant bills here include
“breakages” as the sign that a dinner has been a suc-
cess?). I picked up the fragments of the vase, opened
the casement and flung them out of the window.
Automatically, two minutes later brought up to our
floor incontinent by duty as though by a lift, a police-
man presented himself with his red cap pulled well
down on his ears. He levied two roubles for throwing
out rubbish and tore off a receipt from a book with
160I SET MOSCOW AFIRE

 

counterfoils. Moisevitch tactlessly insisted on paying,
which added to my confusion.

Aloof and indifferent, Goldvasser felt inspiration
come to him with the dawn. He took a sheet of paper,
and began to write.

Observing my supernervous condition, Moisevitch
drew me into a dark corner as if he meant to get
through the seals of my heart in this inquisition cham-
ber. He gazed at me, trying to fathom the mysteries
of Occidental nerves.

“T see,” he said, “‘you are in love. It is your initia-
tion. You are happy. We have all gone through it.
We, we are happy no more, for our hearts bleed no
longer. Goldvasser loves Vasilissa. Boris also loves
Vasilissa, and so do I and so do you. Confess it and you
will feel a divine truce establish itself between us. The
very moment we avow it, instead of being alienated, we
become brothers.”

Vasilissa Abramovna was weeping as she listened.

I looked Moisevitch in the deeps of his fat eyes. I
looked at Goldvasser who in that cloudiness, that to-
bacco-den, had begun a poem called Springtime. I
looked at Boris, that halfwit on his knees on top of the
piano, with his plates full of water in either hand, and
weeping too.

“T hate you all.”

‘He is in love!” bellowed Moisevitch. ‘The French-

161EURO PE Ad” LOVE

 

man loves Vasilissa! As the snow with us mingles
heaven and earth in one, here we are all mingled and
united. His love breaks out over us like a gushing
spring and magnifies us!”

“Not at all,” I cried. ‘The good thing about loving
a woman, even a woman bespoke, is that it severs one
clearly and finally from all men.”

I seized my snow-boots.

“Don’t go,” cried Moisevitch, heartbroken. “I
can’t live without someone to love me. I want to be
loved myself!”

iil

I went out bareheaded, like a madman. Snow was
falling. The streets were empty but fully lighted, and
all the shops lit up for fear of thieves and the watchmen
could be seen lying crumpled up in sleep in the middle
of the goods. Behind every window I saw Lenin: Lenin
against a factory background, in a leather jacket, hand
in pocket; the bust of Lenin in some kind of wax; Lenin
in photogravure, with beard bristling, surrounded with
red rays cut out in paper; Lenin benevolent in bronze;
Lenin sombre in electric-plate; Lenin calculating in
briquette; Lenin contemptuous in luminous paper. It
is miraculous how propaganda can make great things
small and mean. I strode over that night population,
offspring of the darkness, which is the same in all cities,

162[SET MOSCOW AFIRE

 

the storogi, own brothers to the sereno of Madrid, the
night watchmen wrapped up in sheepskins, who slept
before the doors. A driver was slumbering on his
sleigh, a centaur with legs invisible, his beard full of
snow. I wanted him to drive me. He smiled and re-
fused, spitting sunflower seeds over me.

“Take the second one, comrade,” said somebody.
“The first is an equestrian statue of the Ogpu.” (The
Ogpu is the political police.)

My nerves, worn out and strained to cracking, went
down into a subconsciousness that was doubtless satu-
rated already with excessive propaganda. A regicide, I
stood up in a sledge and cried out:

“Down with the Dictatorship! Hurrah for my
freedom!”

My voice went echoing along the sleeping street.

Heads appeared at windows. Men going to work
gathered round and stared at me.

“Brothers,” said I, in my halting Russian, “I pro-
claim to you a better era.”

There was a moment of stupefaction. Only the
drivers, who are all reactionaries, tittered in contempt.

“It’s a poor idiot,” said one of them.

No one ventured as yet to come nearer. I looked at
myself in the mirror of a shop front. Still me; would
I perhaps loathe myself less if I was not forced to see
myself every day? And yet to-day I was not like my-

163EUROPE AT LOVE

 

self: hair standing up, my face crimson and that paper
collar round my neck. Behind me I saw a fish woman
and then a couple of men came forward timidly. I
perceived that the hour of punishment had come. I
turned round ready to engage in a futile struggle.

“See, it’s a poor madman,” said the woman.

‘A natural,” said one of the others.

That cleared up the situation. Far from seizing me,
those who drew near joined their hands in prayer.

“Give us your blessing,” they begged.

In the street the word was passed along that I was
about to perform miracles. Already there were people
kissing the hem of my cloak.RHINELAND PLEASURES

WHEN Francine went to join her husband at Essen the
French occupation of the Ruhr was already several
months old. Francine arrived from Paris with all kinds
of notions in her head, pallid gums, useless clothes, a
store of new records and new songs to drive away
ancient memories. She fell straight into the firing line
—five years behindhand—into an atmosphere of
organized distress which upset her immediately. She
shared Hervé’s military administrative life, his work as
an engineer and his meals at the table-d’hdte of the
Kaiserhof, a magnificent inn in the heart of the Ruhr,
a Germanic palace hotel requisitioned by the Inter-
Allied Commission in control of the factories and the
mines. In a dining-room cluttered up with Louis XVI
furniture there was a kind of mess, shared with station-
masters from Castelnaudary, napkin tucked under chin,
retired customs officials, brought back into active serv-
ice, Belgian experts, Alsatian foremen, officers with
their mistresses. For diversions, chaffing exchanges with
coke-buyers and special correspondents of provincial
papers; and at night, when the sawdust had been swept
up, there were typists’ dances.

Francine’s bedroom windows looked on to paved

165EUROPE Ar LOVE

 

streets, a little carelessly kept now by the municipal
authorities, dotted with unemployed and ragged Poles
shepherded between pickets of marines and patrols of
Senegalese. The poor devils would be making for the
forecourts of the mines to steal coal, and when a car
mounting a machine-gun showed its cupola at the corner
of the avenue they would slink out of sight among the
black and pink dumps of slag. When Francine went
out to get a little exercise, she was harassed by the same
one unchanging sight: the Ruhr, stretched out over
more than fifty kilometres from Essen to Dortmund
by way of Bochum. ‘There was never a moment when
she could get away from this strip of industrialism.
Now in the light, and now again silhouetted against the
light, like a negative, there were the same horizons,
broken here and there by steeples without smoke and
tall chimneys without God. ‘The sky choked with
clouds of lenten grey, moving at different rates of speed,
sliding you might say one over another, somehow man-
aged in the latter days of this September to scour itself
clean and emerge victorious towards evening by the
help of a wind blowing out of Holland. In this sudden
devastation nature was only to be seen at the foot of
the workmen’s gardens: cabbages, sunflowers, livid tur-
nips, besmeared with wet sunlight.

Death of factories. A whole machine at a standstill
in rust and ruin. The mines with their winding cables

166: it
eet pies iad
a rs cate

 

 

RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

under ban, the towering furnaces extinct, those yards
blocked up with uncoupled waggons, those cast iron
pipes, those rails piled up by the kilometre, all that iron-
mongery divided up by the Allies into lots and chalked
with numbers, all that barren array of confiscations
shed a gloom over Francine’s natural optimism. ‘“Noth-
ing is pretty here,” she thought . . . her French soul
completely an exile in a strange land.

Essen. September 25th, 1923. Good Lord... no
_. . Lam not a bit the Parisienne who cannot be pleased
by any sight or scene out of Paris. I can live without
the Galeries Lafayette. I am not a little girl now.
During the last few months I have had too many quar-
rels with Paris and enough ill-feeling to make it quite
possible for me to turn my back on it. And besides
what can we poor natives with no gold currency do in
Paris, that fair for American women? In France I
have the feeling that I’m living in a conquered country;
in Germany, anyhow I am in a free country.

It isn’t particularly “amusing” here. The country-
side, the fields—that is what I sigh for.

When I arrived Hervé gave me the same faithful,
hurried-over greeting he keeps for me every time we
meet. My husband is my very best of all my friends,
but the most rushed. He understands me, adapts him-
self even too well to my moods, falls in with every-

167EUROPE Ad OV E

 

thing, ferrets out endless pretexts for not having to
blame me for things, and every day girds himself to-
wards his work or his amusement without my finding
myself mixed up with it. Freedom is not so pleasant
a thing as I used to think; it is a blossom that with-
ers in our hands. Hervé is extremely intelligent, and
excellent company—even without taking any trouble—
but he has the ill-health, the flexible liverish scepticism
of all Europeans who have spent a long time in the
tropics. All his life he will be just what he is now: a
Westerner, keen, getting things done, the creator of the
Tonkin coal-mines and an inhabitant of Hanoi, the
victim of his own energy, of his liver, of his weird
character and his one or two bad habits. He accepted
the prospect of this life in the micum (Lord! it sounds
like a patent medicine!) this post as inspector of the
German coal-mines, because he was promised a com-
mand at the end of the year, but without any zest, and
with the belief in the Commission. In spite of his
whitened temples, Hervé is an artist who likes to create,
and to admire and that kind of man is no inspector of
confiscations.

October 4th, Hervé told mea piece of good news when

he came back to-night. We are to leave Essen and live

right out in the country for some weeks, outside Diis-

seldorf, in the house of a German manufacturer.
168RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

Poincaré has asked Hervé to work out an economic
agreement with certain elements. in the Rhineland who
for some weeks past have been growing very keen after
autonomy—as it is called. Hervé thinks he will be able
at the same time to embroider a political understanding
on to it. He adores diplomacy; he says it reminds him
of his negotiations with the Chinese in Yunnan.

October 10th. I haven’t even had time to tell myself
I was not sorry to be out of Essen. Here we are,
brought over one morning by military lorries into the
heart of the country twenty kilometres from Diissel-
dorf. I am living in a big brick villa, very spick and
span, with electric motors, water laid on everywhere,
flowers everywhere and heaps of enamel notices in black
and white telling you what you may not do.
Verboten. Enough hygiene to be the death of me.
Bathrooms with weighing machines, filters, lavatories
with sliced lemons for all the world like making punch.
From my window I can see the forest burnt to umber
in the autumn and the dark green pattern of the pine
trees patched upon it; the chestnut trees, helped by the
fine days, are holding out a little; the trees are undress-
ing and the Virginia creeper is blushing red. In the
whole valley there is only one factory chimney—what
an improvement on Essen!—and it looks like a poplar.
The least little canal is bestridden at frequent intervals
169>

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PUROQOBRE Al Lov E

 

by over-decorative metal bridges. The houses are white
and red, topped by roofs like a hat pulled down to the
dark.

I have met Walter von Ruhm, son of Baron Lud-
wig in whose house we are billeted. The father is an
ironmaster, while he is nothing else than the prince,
the king’s son. Their chief factory is at Dortmund;
they have others in the outskirts of Diisseldorf. Im-
mediately our occupation started the Herr Baron went
off to Capri by way of protest. The son, on whom
the sceptre has devolved in consequence, often comes
to his home, of which we are only occupying one wing.
He is a young man round thirty; he looks even less;
athletic, with features not exactly regular, but faun-
like and full of radiance and keenness. He is very
deeply tanned by the sunshine of the East Prussian sea-
side from which he is just come back. He has an
English stiffness and a German arrogance that sit well
on him. Ruhm can be harsh and curt with other people,
I have observed; with me he is pleasant.

October 12th. I have rearranged the room in which I

sit and dream, all alone, and in these days pretty well

sick of the world, till now it is as I like it, since accord-

ing to Hervé we shall be spending the early part of the

winter here. The Germans will of course give way

in the end. It was not an easy room to deal with, be-
170RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

cause of its grey and yellow wallpaper and its two cosy
corners, which are extraordinarily ugly. I never had
any great desire to buy furniture in Diisseldorf. I have
a divan of unique colours almost. It is built up of a
box spring and a mattress on top, covered in a stuff I
ruined myself to buy; fifty francs in French money;
fetched from Cologne; ordinary cotton. I brought my
cushions with me from Paris. Cushions! I snuggle
down into them with all my old flames—and who
knows whether I have my regrets?

You can pick up glass for a song in the village
close by.

October 15th. You know how little effect the differ-
ent seasons have on me; cheerful even beneath the ruins
of autumn; at Vevey in the old days the coming of
springtime saw me the only calm and unexcited one
among all you girls. All the same, I find winter has
come quickly on us. In the mornings the manure heap
sends up a steam and so do the horses’ backs.

Ruhm came just at the moment of luncheon. Hervé
had not got back from Diisseldorf. As our authorities
stationed on the high roads are requisitioning all the
good cars, Ruhm like all the wealthy folk here only
goes about in old pre-war rattletraps. He got out of
his taxi and came up to me. He said not a word, but
presently he bent his stiff backbone and kissed my feet.

7aEFUROQPLE Ar LOV 2

 

He really does the most startling things. And then
he began to talk—and in first-rate French—about
Hervé and about me. He is quite a penetrating person.
He has talked with me twice and already he knows
everything about me. He does not know Paris at all
. . . he is country-bred and mystical. He is not to be
approached on Rhineland politics. By caste he must
be a Nationalist. He has an unexampled freshness of
mind and pride too. He is a “fier original” —an idiotic
phrase, but if you restore its proper meaning to it, ex-
actly right for him. To my own private ear I call
him “the Charmer.”

I am not going to budge from here, from Fiirsten-
briick. The address is still the same: Sector 145.

October 18th. The Charmer has not appeared for
several days. So that’s that, we have a flirtation in full
swing.

October 19th. You are my witness, Anita, that I have
done just as I pleased with most men. But to come close
to Walter von Ruhm and yet give nothing of myself
I need as many tricks and turns as a trout-fisher needs
flies. He is a little mad, and that’s where he’s danger-
ous. We had two delightful hours yesterday. He is
constantly humiliating me, just as if he knew that is
what I like best. Nothing bowls him over, neither my
172RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

Vionnet frocks, nor my irresistible way of saying ““He’s
a regular lamb”,—“It’s too adorable”. We has six-
cylinder Packards, Tang horses, tenth century Rhine-
land enamels, dollars, luxury abundant and unper-
turbable. Nothing that comes from Paris can tempt
him. I always had a very different idea of Germans!
Why do we imagine that France is beloved abroad? and
why do a smaller number of us believe that France is
hated? For these people it looks as though she simply
doesn’t count at all.

As soon as Ruhm comes in, at the first glance I feel
he has seen and noted everything, my frock, my hat,
my gloves. I am continually imagining there’s some-
thing wrong about me when he is there. I hide my too
long nails; the rouge on my mouth is not well touched
on. He tells me “I don’t like your hair.” That is a
change for me from Paris and its silky compliments, but
it won’t last. He has a very fine mouth, with a scar, and
eyes that never stoop; his face is severe; I like his skin,
but he shall never know it, not he, but you, Anita, on
the far side of your Atlantic. What do you say to my
love letters, faithless friend? Marie is right; women
ought never to address their love letters to the man they
love, but to women friends, or perhaps to stray con-
fidantes: their letters then will have more chance of be-
ing understood or even being read. And so, darling,
receive these all too sudden but genuine avowals.

$73EUROPE aT OVE

 

October 29th. Walter dined with us last night and
he and I went walking in the garden together, a pathetic
spot, all pine trees and darkness even before night.
Coming back Walter let me go in front and bade me
find my way for myself, laughing at me. I was so
worked up that I began to cry, and then he almost
carried me along in his arms, scolding at me for being
silly, as far as the stone stairway where Hervé was.
Seeing us arrive like this Hervé didn’t know how to
take it: as usual he waited, half from indifference, half
from politeness, to find out my attitude, so as to accom-
modate his own to it. I said nothing at all. So then
he adopted the lifeless enigmatic mask he gets from the
far East.

He and Walter get on well together. Hervé is a
tranquil, enduring Breton. Walter is young and strong

—fifteen years younger than Hervé—but excessively

 

emotional: mistrust apart, he is without any reticence
whatever. He whinnies, one might almost say. He
plies my husband with questions about Indo-China,
the mines, Khmer art. “If only we had those splendid
Asiatic colonies to console us for the night that has

33
.

fallen on us in Europe. . . He shows reserve only
when Rhineland questions are touched on. The recent
events in Aix-la-Chapelle leave him dumb. To listen
to him he is nothing but a factory owner.

174RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

October 30th. Since the night Walter carried me in
his arms he always calls me his burden, with a little
laugh. He is a new type to me: a young animal. Anita,
what would you say if I loved him?

November 2nd. Cold rain, so cold. The schupos
put up barricades of beer barrels on the high road, and
the Senegalese made them cart them away. Rhineland
republicans wearing armlets went by at daybreak this
morning in brewers’ lorries, moving to the fray.

Walter and I have not yet “turned in”. We have
only fussed together on a chaise-longue (two feet
narrow) with all our clothes on. It’s too nerve-racking.
I had enough of it and I said to him:

“T would love to make you happy... .

“For a day,” said he.

And that might be the truth!

I went on:

“And you, don’t you think of making me happy?”

“That’s not possible,” he said, “nobody can make you

happy.”
True again.

33

November 6th. Walter hasn’t been back at Fiirsten-
briick since Wednesday. I accepted an invitation to
Diisseldorf just to see him again, the Charmer! That
day there was the Rozé quartette and Beethoven in spite

ASEUIROP EE Ar? LOVE

 

of the noise of the guns. You can see how fond he is
of music—he was at the concert. He introduced me
to his sister and invited me to spend the evening at
her house. I went by myself, for in all these smart
gatherings Hervé is never to be seen. The music was
marvellous. I was wearing my swallow-blue frock.
The other women here are always in dark blue, and I
must say it, absolutely without chic. Walter was very
correct, rather nervy, autocratic.

To my surprise he did not come to his sister’s for
dinner. They are very rich. She married a Dutchman
from Nimeguen, which gives her a rather special posi-
tion among the cream of the Rhine society; the master
of the house speaks admirable French. They “see” the
aristocracy, the business world, and also the Jews, the
artists, the advanced parties, a few members of the con-
sular body and among them the Englishman V... .,
the one who tries to play the statesman. No French
people, naturally. An exception was made to-night in
my favour, to please Walter.

Walter’s sister is Lilith. In their house everything
is most modern, and very pure in line; their style is
bearskins, peasant carpets, bare feet, crystal balls, no
tablecloths, and pictures impossible to live with.
Picasso, Braque—I’ve never heard their names in Paris.
At table my neighbour was the consul from Chile, a tall
Chilean, rather handsome, with a pink carnation, a

176RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

dinner jacket, and an infernal tiresome man-of-the-
world air. He has travelled a great deal, but like every-
body else who has been round the world a few times you
can’t get a word out of him. I took a great deal of
pains with him and kept saying to myself “and Walter
isn’t here to see me flirting.”

After dinner comes the Charmer, looking as if he
hadn’t done it on purpose: and they start dancing. The
Chilean glides over the floor as though on smooth waters.
Walter does not ask me for a single dance; in any case
he waltzes and I can’t; it doesn’t belong to my gener-
ation. Nor the tango either (I shall be twenty-three
this week). Walter went round and round without
ever stopping, and I was so much hurt that I felt a kind
of voluptuous pleasure in it. I became so gloomy that
he noticed it, had a chilly dance with me and took a seat
beside me. He asked:

“How long do you spend in making up your eyes?”

Why should I conceal the truth?

“An hour and a half.”

The electric light went out suddenly. We were alone
in the dark, and we talked. He said:

“You frighten me.”

I replied:

“You frighten me.”

I wanted to know why he had never come back to
Fiirstenbriick again. He gave me the explanation—he

177—=—. -

a

Steere

eee

 

 

PUR @ EE Ah WOW iE

 

wanted to keep away from me at all costs. I said to
him simply:

““You’ve behaved like an ass.”

That touched him on the raw.

“Tt had to,” he said. “I don’t want to be snared
by you.”

“Why?”

“Because you aren’t sincere.”

He was holding a rose. Seeing me laugh he threw
it in my face; I caught it up and in my turn tossed it
on the floor. He went out.

Later, at night. 1 knew that for the last fortnight the
Charmer had been at Diisseldorf nearly every night
with all kinds of women.

There is a curfew at ten, and the Germans have to
get indoors on account of the patrols. Foreigners are
exempt. I asked the Chilean consul to take me on a
round of low haunts.

“Are there any forbidden places?”

“Yes, but they change them nearly every night.”

To-day it is in a bakery. The entrance is through
the bake-house, and when you get to the second storey
a door opens. In the saloon bar there hung the stag-
nant smoke you get in tunnels. I observed French
officers of the colonial troops. And the captain of one
of the Rhine flotillas who looked far from enchanted
at the sight of me . . . I know his wife. Nothing to
178RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

eat, but floods of alcohol. Often there is a shortage of
bread, but never of alcohol. It’s frightful to see these
people who come to amuse themselves because they are
unhappy. Such women! These Brunnhildas eat chip
potatoes with a spoon. (The one time the Germans
might decently take their fingers to it!) A dancer, who
was invited to take a seat at a table near us, hoisted up
her frock to keep it from being soiled and displayed
a huge behind cleft by a tiny chemise that had got
twisted into a string.

A pair of Russians went through a spurious Spanish
dance: the man held a carnation between his lips and
wore a Castilian cape; the woman made passes with a
kitchen apron and had a French képi on her head.

Walter came into the room and caught sight of me.
It made him start. He came up to us and was invited
to sit at our table. He paid no more attention than
at his sister’s to my swallow-blue frock with its red shot
taffeta shimmering through, and its tassel of pearls.
And yet the whole thing was simply created for me.

“You like this sort of den?” said I.

“No. But what I must have is the air and heat of
orgy about me.”

No Frenchman would ever say a thing like that, do
you think?

Walter pretended not to see that it was for him
that I was there.

179BO ROPE Ale O V E

 

“And do you also need this sort of climate?” he
asked.

“Walter, you don’t look like a rake to-night, you
look like a warrior.”

I thought he was displeased at this, I noticed he had
a swastika design on his sleeve-links.

“Are you in Diisseldorf by yourself?”

“Yes.”

I had been warned not to say that Hervé is in town.
He has secret meetings with the Separatists. It’s my
turn to change the subject.

“You don’t say a word about my frock?”

“You have Little Red Riding-hood’s frock and the
face of the wolf.”

The cabaret was emptying. I simply longed to burst
into tears. “Where shall we go now?” Walter knew.
We took the silent consul along to give us his diplomatic
protection if we were held up. We had to leave the
bakery . . . and found a grey flour falling and settling
on the cloakroom so that we could not tell our own
cloaks. Emaciated naked pierrots were kneading bread
all among the maitres d’hétel in evening clothes, who
were stowing away their one-night wine cellar in ward-
robe trunks.

Another snowfall . . . twisting down like a shower
180RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

of gimlets. We went through commercial quarters, not
asleep so much as abolished by the night. Walter had
my fox by the tail and pulled me along, just like a child.
I could have kissed him even before those sentry boxes
painted in barbarian colours. We walked along quickly.
What a notion—there we were at the railway station
. we hurried through the waiting-rooms . . . into
the bar, lit by oil lamps. Belgian or French soldiers on
leave were sleeping on their knapsacks on the floor,
waiting for the morning. Here you can get decent
canteen wine for two francs a litre, free of duty, for
the station is military territory. Queer young people
were exchanging many signs of affection, a blind man
in front of the empty milk chocolate automatic machine
uttered magic cries, and on the table at the back there
were Jews sorting out paper money and carrying on
an exchange business till the morning; this was the
“black bourse” in full swing. A Russian was playing
the accordion and trying to free his arms loaded with
chains, while with his feet hung with tiny bells he imi-
tated the jingling arrival of a post-chaise. This railway
station is the latest of the night clubs.
We began to dance again. The Charmer was holding
me and I melted in his arms.
“Walter, do you love me?”
He answered:
“Not so much as my country.”
181Sill a) alia

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Pon a ennai

 

 

BUROEE AT ih OwV-E

 

I was just on the point of saying, “What a strange
answer” when the accordion came to a stop; a thunder-
shriek cut short Ox the Silver Shore, a hot blast en-
veloped us, the windows shivered, the doors slammed
in our faces; Walter in a cloud of white steam looked
like a Wagner hero; then everything disappeared in
the explosion: it was the Hanover express hurtling into
the station and dashing through the ball.

November 10th. Before everything in the world I
prefer solitude, children, little stupid nothings, books,
anything that simply and uncomplexly just exists. Two
days at Diisseldorf were enough for me among these
Germans, who now that we keep them from doing any
harm or from trading are like beetles turned over on
their backs. And those American officers’ wives! And
the English Intelligence officers! When, oh, when will
the reign of those jaws, all alike, when will it come to
an end? You want to go to the bathroom or the lava-
tory? An Englishman. And to think that they are
the least unpleasant of all foreigners.

Mice in the house. I have gotten a cat, but on Coco’s
account I had to get a very little one, and so he is afraid
of the mice. I’ve put him into a pink basket, and he
looks as bold as a little tiger. Dear Anita, I haven’t
mentioned my Coco dog to you for ever so long. Now
he’s the real Charmer. He must have sensations. One
182RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

thing he adores is to come for me when he is having his
dinner, and I must let him see I think it terribly good
and try to take it away from him. Then the little per-
vert gives himself the pleasure of growling.

He has seen that I’m writing to you, and has come
and put his head on my knees.

November 11th. Paris! I am dreadfully homesick for
Paris this morning. That great brute of a Charmer is
spoiling the country for me. What disgusts me is that he
has such a nice voice and such nice eyes. Otherwise I
don’t think there would be such a lot of happiness in it
all. All the same, he does know how to treat me... .
If only I had somebody else I might escape from him.

He can hardly touch me without making bruises on
my skin like the spots on fruit.

November 13th. 1 had promised myself lovely
things. So much the worse for me. If we had gone to
bed together I should have seen that the lovely things
didn’t exist and everything would have passed off
painlessly. While like this I go on believing in the
lovely things.

I am taking German lessons. I’m reading Heinrich
Heine.

November 14th. 1 dreamed about Coco and that I
was caught in a quicksand. He could swim, but I was
183BURORE Ady LOY E

 

lying stretched out on the sand and the water crawling
up on me little by little.

November 16th. It is altogether winter and I am
very lonely. Hervé is continually on the road. Politi-
cally we have been left in the lurch by England and
Belgium, and here we are, it would seem, with the
whole of the Separatist movement on our hands. Walter
has never come to Firstenbriick again. I have written
to him and he has not answered. ‘The forest is covered
up in snow: in the streams at the point to freeze over
hard there is a little skin of brittle floating ice. When
Hervé is here we shut ourselves up together, and have
little to say; though that is from no want of under-
standing. Wedrink tea. Early in the evening my hus-
band goes up to his room and I hear him undressing.
Above his door there is a glass panel, the light from
which is suddenly softened. He has shaded his lamp.
And there on the ceiling appears the elongated shadow
of Hervé’s head, a long stick, a reddish smoke. I hear
a little bubbling sound as of melted butter in a pan,
and with the first puffs of smoke an odour drifts to
me... Hervé is fancying himself at Hanoi and for-
getting the Ruhr.

These political games are the most boring things in
the world, I do think. And besides it all makes me
184RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

uneasy. At dinner to-night Hervé told me he had an
appointment this very evening and in this very house
with Landeck, one of the Separatist leaders from whom
the greatest things are hoped for; our last hopes after
the failure of Deckers, Matthes and others. Herve
takes his réle of political agent most seriously. He told
me he would prefer that Walter should continue to
keep away from Fiirstenbriick. I prefer no such thing.
According to his information, the Charmer is an active
member of the Nationalist party and head of the mili-
tary association known as Odin. But outwardly his
attitude is irreproachable. It has been impossible to
take any steps against him. I dissembled my joy at this.

After dinner there was a whistle outside. Hervé
caught up his leather coat and his electric torch and
went out. He came back a moment later with a visitor
whom he brought into the dining-room without my
seeing him and without coming back through our
drawing-room.

I put my feet close up to the stove and pondered
over Walter.

“Evidently this man is not for me. But why am I
so stirred by him? He is not in love with me. I do
think that as a Frenchwoman he finds me disconcerting.
But he is dangerous. I always come back to that, with
the sudden impetuousness of the real débauché. I
want to get away from this man who is poisoning my

185BURORE AL. © OVE

 

life. Iam ill of this man. Why is he not in prison?”

The floor creaked under a heavy weight. I turned
round.

Walter was at my back.

“T am coming to supper,” he said.

He had bottles of champagne in his hands and cigars
and brandy under his arm.

“You look like the Commendatore in Don Gio-
vanni.”

“Quite true, I have come for revenge. ‘The last time
I saw you, at that dinner in Diisseldorf, you did the
unpardonable thing.”

I opened my eyes to their widest.

“Yes, you made me blush.”

This puzzled me still more.

“That scratch on my hand . . . you insisted in front
of everybody on my telling you how I got it... .”

(I had given him the scratch myself a few days be-
fore.) What a creature!

He opened the window and banked snow up round
the champagne. And there he stood lost in his own
reflections and taking no heed of the cold.

“Do you see that big beech? I planted it when I
was a boy. It was born copper-red. There are people
like that who start their lives with autumn. In the
spring the stags come to rub their velvet against it.”

Hervé had heard us talking and came into the room,

186ME trees

 

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

 

RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

looking just too imperturbable. Walter was uncon-
scious of it.

“I am being indiscreet, Mr. Inspector.”

“You are in your own house.”

The champagne was opened. Hervé settled down
with us and at once everything became orderly and
stable, no longer provisional. The men talked of far-off
countries, of pagodas to which you ascend by stairs red
with betel spittle; Hervé told delicious things, how he
had gone hunting in forests where no man had ever
found his way before him; at his first shot instead of
taking to flight all the birds came round full of inquisi-
tiveness. Walter repeated eighteenth century German
verses and Hervé English poems written in antique
forms on the lip of an indigo vat. They drank solidly
until midnight, till they couldn’t tell the bottles by
their labels. Walter put his glass on top of the gramo-
phone record and watched it going round and round. |
Then he sat down to the piano and—I won’t say that a
he played—he inflicted a severe punishment upon it. |
The open Steinway looked like a boat in the act of
foundering. Walter’s fingers bled over the keyboard.

At last the clock struck one.

Anita, why did I let myself go through a night such
as I would never go through in Paris? A night in
which I was neither in the world of reality, nor in the ‘ |
world of dream, and had drunk not a drop; between
187|
?
j :
:

’
f

 

 

 

BO ROPRE At WLOWV E

 

two men, handsome, personable, and of agreeable man-
ners, and that in Germany, too, the conquered country?

Presently they fell to recalling life before the war,
their boyhood. I was all but asleep. I told them they
ought really to talk about something else, so they talked
about me. Hervé was firmly convinced, after three
years of married life, that I was still a child. Walter
disagreed, and took my hand, saying:

“What is to be done with this woman?”

And Hervé replied:

“You must leave her alone. She is charming and I
love her with all my heart, and she is my wife.”

Walter said:

“She has treated me like a fool.”

And he turned to me, putting his head on my breast,
and wrapping his arms around me, in front of Hervé.

“JT am so fond of you, Francine.”

I remained as cold as the snow. I am beginning to
grow accustomed to men given to alcohol, to men
intoxicated. In brotherly fashion Walter offered to be
a second Hervé to me. My husband answered him
with a meaningless laugh. And all this in an indefin-
able atmosphere in which I sensed what madness must
be like. They were both exchanging words and phrases
a little out of their control, anything might have hap-
pened. Nothing did happen. Hervé took his leave
of us.

188RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

And after that I remained with that madman Walter
from three till five, tightly clasped in his arms. We
kept on talking so that we should not fall asleep.
Walter said to me:

“Listen, Francine, you are ugly; I don’t like your
eyes, and your mouth, and your pointy nose; only your
body is beautiful, but too wide-hipped. But a certain
charm comes from you. ... I would love to sleep
like this all night long. . . . We will go up to your
room. I’m going to take all your clothes off and put
you into bed... . What an ugly mouth you have,”
he went on, “only beautiful when it is kissing. Kiss

33

me.
And then, still tightly held against his heart, I said:
““And you, you make me sick. . . . You see, I am

absolutely without feeling in your arms. I don’t want
to kiss you.”

(In Paris I have given a man one single kiss . . . an
hour long by the clock, and all I remember is that kiss.
O Paris kisses! )

Then Walter absolutely went mad. My bodice gave
way, and all messed and crumpled in my lovely taffeta
frock I slipped down upon the floor, where he joined
me. He tried again to kiss me, but I wrapped my arms
tight round my face. He hurt me and gave me no
pleasure at all. My eyes were full of tears. He begged
me to tell him truly if I was drunk. But no, no,
189

: " FEC
FPP ME. yeti hile eae)
ne OM 3 3) aS OTeBU ROPE Al LOVE

 

Lhad drunk nothing at all, and my head was quite clear.
Really at that moment the Charmer was loathed: some-
thing told me all at once that he was no more sincere
than I was. I was dying with fatigue, and my head was
swimming. I don’t know how it happened, but I
seemed to be at his feet, and he said to me in a reli-
giously impassioned voice:

“Francine, you are kneeling before me, see for your-
self, it’s simply not possible.”

Suddenly I heard from the corridor someone passing
softly along, in rubber boots as though going out in
the snow. The door gave no sound, but it had certainly
been opened, for a freezing wind blew along the floor
where we still were. Walter sat up on his elbows,
pale and dishevelled. He seemed ill. Minutes went
dragging by.

“T will go out and get a little air,” he said. “I am
too drunk.”

He got up, smashing two glasses as he rose, and turned
to me. In my eyes he saw that I was not taken in, that
I knew he wouldn’t come back, and anticipating my
question—

“And for heaven’s sake don’t write to me,” he added,
with inconceivable coarseness, “I find your letters just
idiotic.”

November 17th. The snow fell so thick during last
190ROEIINGESE ACN CD Pal EAL SIOL RES

 

night, that memorable night! that all the wires are
broken this morning. It is midday as I write. As he
could not telephone to Diisseldorf Hervé went out
early after breakfast. I am waiting for him now to
sit down to lunch. He will be very late for the motor
can hardly make any headway, with the chains lapped
round its tyres. I have broken off playing the Boutique
Fantasque to write to you, Anita, and tell you about this
affair: it will astound your American mind. Is it really
and truly your Francine in this drawing-room? Was
Walter here not ten hours ago? Was it just a dream,
all past and far away already?

As it struck two Hervé got back, and told me his
news. At daybreak this morning his last night’s visitor,
the Separatist leader Landeck, who was to have be-
come head of the party this very day, was picked up
murdered on the highway a kilometre out of Diisseldorf.

Paris. End of December. I have come back to
Paris for the holidays. Here is a world of marrons
glacés, of toys, of street booths and vague mixed smells
of all kinds of things to eat. Germany cloaked with
snow, the symphonic forests, Walter, those people of
practical hands and wild hearts, can all that really exist
a mere dozen hours away from Paris? Here nobody
has any notion of it. Everything about me is pleasure
and wealth. At Essen there are those shop-fronts
191BUR OPE, Agl YEO Vie

 

armoured with iron bars behind which there is... a
single egg; and people crowding and jostling round a
boot-shop the way we do round Cartier’s. I often
think of that melancholy ending to the Rhineland re-
public—a play to an empty theatre. My departure

those days of rioting, the Communist processions
led by a death’s-head, the smashing windows, the
schupos, the motor quick-firers, and the street scattered
with blood and broken glass.

January 10th. Never have I felt so calm and my
soul so at peace as since I turned my back on love.
Paris, whatever I may say of it, is a convent in the
heart of a garden. I never answer the telephone and
T see no one at all. At bottom Walter disgusts me .
he is of the same breed as his emperor. The Germans
are now enemies, and how could I admit a feeling quite
against nature here? And when I can’t admit, I forget.

April 8th. I have come back to Germany, my dear
Anita, to be with Hervé for Easter. Heavens, how dull
this country is! This time I am living in Diusseldorf.

I had not been eight and forty hours at the Rhein-
ischer Hof when Walter made his appearance. Such
a handsome triumphant Walter. A sinister day it was.
A woman telephoned me and insisted she must come
and see me. I was seedy and not in the best of tempers

192RHINELAND PLEASURES

 

—a little like Hervé the morning after his “black
smoke”. As it was a woman I like—the wife of a
Russian refugee—I pulled myself together and let her
come. She began at once:

“Are you free to-night? Some one wants to make
your acquaintance, Baroness von Ruhm, Walter’s wife.”

He is married. And married to a Jewess because
he had to have money, seeing that our occupying the
Ruhr has ruined him. I was in two minds about
accepting but Hervé put some heart into me. I wore
my black and white satin frock, and went. As usual
I was the only Frenchwoman in the place. There was
a big gathering, millionaire manufacturers, bankers,
tenors and so on.

The Baroness von Ruhm threw herself on my neck.
Walter must have told her everything. How very
German of him! I talked with her first of all. She has
plaited hair bleached to a sort of greeny yellow just
like the sulphur ropes they burn for disinfecting casks.
She is a flabby thing. You can feel that she has been
through a lot of men’s hands already. She sings the
commonest of Rimsky’s ballads. The rest of the eve-
ning I spent with Walter. And then I got the feeling
that he had married out of disappointment. And how
he has loved me! He knows everything I do, and who
I am intimate with; directly he heard that I was back
in Germany he arranged this evening and turned the

193EUROPE Ar LOVE

 

place upside down just to see me again. It was really
touching to see this tall Boche playing the good comrade
and me so changed and so much mistress of myself.
Another victory for Paris! I went into that man
through his nose and eyes and ears. He will never for-
get me now. But he did make me furious.

It was growing late, and Walter simply could not
tear himself away. His wife had to come and drag him
out of his chair. She’s a stingy creature and the car had
been waiting for a whole hour, and in Germany a
Waiting car is expensive.

Anita, when I got home that night I cried. And
so did he, I am sure. But he has nothing now, and
I have Hervé. My husband is wonderful on these occa-
sions. How deeply we ought to trust men! How
poorly I think of women when I consider my own
behaviour! At the end of all my love affairs I always
see that everybody, myself included, has been cheated
and deceived; everybody but Hervé. They say he shuts
his eyes; but no, he keeps looking through his eyelashes,
always ready to come to my rescue. Nothing hits him,
but he misses nothing.

194THE AMUSING SCIENCE

Wanpa lay in her bed up in the sixth storey above the
mauve blob of the park, just like a celluloid sleeping
doll. On the thither side of sleep she was waiting for
me. Every night I used to go to her, clambering down
from my eighth storey turret. Shall I ever forget those
winter nights? I would get out of a warm bed, open
the service door and all at once ... the void; down
at the bottom London all extinguished and slumbering
and waiting for an air-raid. The wind, which had
sucked up all the smuts and carbonic acid gas, would
do its best to suffocate me or to wrench me from the
iron fire-escape, down which I went turning, turning,
giddy with all those spirals, down past the white enam-
elled outer side of a cistern. It was impossible for me
to use the main stair-case, on account of the night
watchman; on account too of Wanda’s mother, Madame
Beatus, the sister of Monsignor Slavitzky the Arch-
bishop of Palermo, who watched, as no mother to-day
would dare, over every breath of her sleeping daughter.
Madame Beatus filled me with terror and I preferred
a scramble down a ladder to the necessity of passing
her door, guarded by a pair of boots so crabbed and
195PU ROP EY Aw EO VE

 

malevolent that the mere look of them was enough to
give you a pain.

I got into Wanda’s suite through the bathroom, hav-
ing only to push open the door, which was unlocked.
Hesitating I would go forward into the dark, making
for the spot that smelled strongest of almond soap.
My hand stretched out towards Wanda would come
upon her breast, or her face; I would run my fingers
over quivering eyes, receding temples, the thick full
lips, the little broad nose; I would pull her ears pointed
like a sheep’s. And then, without completely waking
up, she would close tightly on me at once with the
automatic action of a clam, legs slippery smooth and
straight like tall candles, by which I would fall to my
devotions.

I was driven to go down every night to Wanda’s
room by the instinct strong in those who have not
yet been exiled from the best country in the world—
their twenty-fifth year. Silently, with never a sound,
she and I together, we would work out the most in-
tricate designs in the darkness. We collaborated in
experiments of technique, in those inventive ingenui-
ties that call for a nice sense of sequence in the dis-
position of one’s forces. I had not reached the age
when men tell you that love-making doesn’t tire a
woman. We never managed to get our respective de-

196

See H eae!THE AMUSING SCIENCE

 

sire for loving and need of rest to coincide with each
other. Decoctions of sugared cinnamon and pounded
pepper often break up the harmony of the dish they
were meant to season. The more we strove to be one,
the more we were sundered by our excesses. The re-
sult was an exhaustion that became alarming. Wanda’s
neuroticism often brought me into a state of panic.
When I held her my close prisoner so that every rib
in her body might be duly roasted at my fire Wanda
went into trances that frightened me and at the same
time attracted me. Near as we were to her mother’s
heavy slumbers, I had in the end taken delight in those
writhing joints that seemed at the point of breaking,
those nails sinking into me like lion’s claws, those teeth
that seemed to be grinding upon powdered diamonds,
and all that shuddering, disordered and aswim.

To call and see her next day at a polite hour, stretched
out on her sofa, full of lassitude, dead to the world,
could any one haye suspected that she possessed such
reserves of strength? It was no longer the moment
when her body seemed hooped about with invisible
lines of power. Then Wanda seemed deserted, emptied
of a body not her own, withdrawn under the influence
of some unseen magic. I imagined that I was the
magician.

U7,EUROPE Al LOW E

 

One night when we were together in the darkness
of the sheets, in a dank and heavy temperature, a night
aflower with passionate demands, our union was sud-
denly torn apart by an explosion that set everything
shivering and shaking even to the curtain rods of the
brass bed. So shattering was the turmoil that you might
have thought it caused rather by some earth convulsion
than by a mere military operation. The bombs were
falling along the shortest possible curves. With the
shock Wanda seized desperate hold of me, tried to cry
out, then fell back as though in a dead faint. I spoke
to her, she made no answer. I took her hand, the fin-
gers were clenched. At that moment the handle of the
door communicating with her mother’s room turned.
I flung myself into the back of the wardrobe trunk and
covered myself with Wanda’s dresses.

There was light. Madame Beatus came in: already
fully dressed, ready to go downstairs, and festooned
with jewels, those monstrous huge stones sold by Rus-
sian refugees, so big that they lose any real commercial
value. Ready for emergencies and calamities, she was in
full harness in a second, like fire brigade horses.

“Wanda, darling, come down. It’s the Zeppelins!”

I could only see very dimly, but I made out Wanda
trying to open her eyes.

SINow | . leave me.~ she said; “I’m ull. . . .-Rutethe
lamp on the table . . . that light is killing me.”

198THE AMUSING SCIENCE

 

“Our Lord help us!”

“Don’t talk, mamma. ... Put your hand on my
forehead. . . . Press my temples. Oh, God! is that
beginning again?”

Wanda uttered a hardly human cry, then sank down
again into a stupor, a kind of pitiful birth-throe.

“Hello . . . Grosvenor 2682. . ... Is /thatemmtne
Brompton Oratory?”

As soon as the mother had got on to the sacristan
of this Catholic church, which was close to the hotel,
she asked for a priest to come.

“No, not for the sacraments,” she said in a terrified
voice, “as quick as you can! For an exorcism. There

is a fiend in the bed.”

To this confusion there was added the turmoil on
every floor coming in through the door that stood open
on the corridor, along which women in nightdresses and
tiaras, Pekinese dogs and Teddy bears, children, para-
lytics complete with their potions, were all strenuously
making for the luggage cellars. The whirring of the
propellers was loud overhead.

“Don’t be afraid, Wanda darling, the priest is com-
ing. I’m going down to meet him. Cover yourself

3>

(PPh o 6 v

At last I was able to emerge from my hiding-place.
199BUROPE AT LOVE

 

In the room now lit with a dim pink glow, Wanda
was gliding crouching low to ground. She was in fact
naked, except for fur slippers. Her epileptic eyes no
longer perceived me. Lips clamped together, body
bent like a bow, her middle heaving like a stormy sea,
she seemed to be taken in a conjugal embrace before
my eyes by a man invisible; aghast I stood watching
her leaping and struggling against this extraordinary
outrage. Then she was seized with hiccoughs. Her
mouth opened. . . . I thought she was on the point of
vomiting. But suddenly there spewed out from her
lips a phosphorescent paste that slid down on to her
chest and spread. I ventured to go to her: the stuff
seemed flaccid, elastic, and here and there fibrous. Her
belly was tense with straining the while she was emitting
this substance.

I called to mind in an instant Wanda’s peculiarities;
her hysteria, her spells of somnolence alternating with
violent ecstasy, and the day when, seeing her neck
so white and thick I said to her, much to her astonish-
ment:

“Wanda, you have a medium’s neck.”

Unquestionably the first of the explosions had put
her to sleep, as often happens at the outset of hypnotic
trances.

The sirens were sounding from every quarter, the
one at the Admiralty loudest of all. From Shepherd’s

200

Sinan os ie gegen ee no ryTHE AMUSING SCIENCE

 

Bush to Woolwich, London was strung round with the
red net of the barrages and lit up by fires in the suburbs.
I suffered for Wanda with a brother’s pangs. She
was still hiccoughing without respite. Out of terror
and curiosity and despite the risk of being caught I
stayed on, eavesdropping at the door chink of the
Unknown. ‘The strange substance continued to be
ejected gradually and evenly; then it fringed, drew
‘tself out like a cord fastened to her body, became a
dough that took shape under some invisible kneading.
What I then saw stopped me from retiring. Above
Wanda a being materialized. I discerned the ridge of
the nose very distinctly; the eyes appeared all at once;
between the cheeks was torn the slit of a mouth. And
now it was rising up in jerks, like a pneumatic tyre
inflating, like a cobra roused by the charmer’s pipe.
The spectre grew dense, was making ready to come
alive. Quite close to me fingers were materializing that
pushed forward without the help of an arm... -

I wanted to put a distance between myself and this
writhing mass, this macaroni from beyond the tomb.
My pithless legs refused to help me to fall back. In
my confusion I knocked over a curling tongs and a
spirit lamp, which broke with a crash. Immediately,
as though seized with fear, the figure wavered in its
growing; soon it shrank in volume, the cord dwindled,
contracted, and the whole simulacrum returned into

201BPUROLE Al LOYV £

 

the mouth whence it had emerged, as though into a
warm crimson womb.

I got back to the roof. In the all too starry heavens,
above the wheeling rays of the searchlights, there passed
a kind of gigantic tramcar, with all its windows ablaze,
making its way towards the north.

202INTER-ALLIED BARCAROLLE

War and love in Northern Italy. Ten years before
could we have dreamed of so Stendhalian a mess?

Madame de Ruttdorf-Balsamin had stayed on in
Venice, spending there the winter of 1917-1918 in
spite of the bombs that continually shot up spouts
of water-dust in the canal and shook masterpiece dust
from her Tiepolo ceilings. A marquise by rank, she
lived in the lacustrine suburb in her rheumatic palace
covered with wire netting and with sandbags on the
terrace. As she was beautiful—an Italian bee of the
purest strain—Erroll and myself, Erroll of the British
squadron and I of the French seaplane base on the Lido,
determined to make love to her, and as she was reputed
inexpugnably virtuous, we agreed to establish a com-
mon front for our attack. So much had the war ac-
customed us to give one another strong succour and
support that it never entered our heads to steal a march
one upon the other. We carried on the tradition of
Venice and went sailing over the halcyon seas of amo-
rous intriguing.

Thanks to our intelligence service each of us was
immediately aware of all the favours granted by the
marquise to his fellow. The first time she let me have,
203

hh 7. oe 5 i m4
setts
Co ee 3Bip ie SEB A rrr ee re ee ara ae

 

 

BUR ORE Ad EO VIE

 

if not her mouth, at any rate her lipstick, Erroll was
hovering in a gale six thousand feet above the Piave.
She and I were warming ourselves in front of a great
fire painted on the walls, with the very flames done in
perspective. At our feet, upon the tiling that simu-
lated a carpet, an electric radiator made in Germany
was the one thing that stood between us and death,
and threw a pink glow on the friendly legs of the mar-
quise. Why at that moment should I think of a certain
passage in Rousseau—in the Emile, I fancy—which I
have never forgotten since my schooldays, and which
begins “If I had amber melons in the depth of

33

 

Winter . .

The marquise, who had eyes of a different colour
for every one of her dresses, was wearing her basalt
pair that day, what jewellers call touch. No sooner
had I brought my lips close to hers than she fell into a
fainting fit, in the good old orthodox fashion.

I took my leave. It was my turn to fly in a night
bombardment, and before Erroll had actually come
to anchor I was already seeing Venice below me like
an oyster bed. Nevertheless, when he went to finish
the evening with the marquise in the Ruttdorf-Balsamin
palace, the lady was astounded to discover that he knew
everything that had happened. I had carefully in-
formed my friend by wireless.

Our tactics were not ill-devised, for a woman’s re-

204INT ER-ALLIED BAR CAROL EE

sistance uses itself up and wears away without any-
one, even herself, being able to guess who will profit.
“There are no difficult women,” Erroll told me, “only
impatient men.”

Now and then the marquise would face us, petting
her greyhounds, whose tails were adorned with silver
tassels.

‘Which of you loves me best?”

Like the porphyry knights of Saint Mark’s we were
put to the test.

“Conjointly and together we love you best. It’s a
case of co-partnership.” And each of us claimed the
treatment proper to the most favoured lover.

The marquise hid her face in her little napkin.

“Erroll is handsome,” I told her one day. “He looks
like one of those baby dolls floating in a bath. Since
he’s English women think he’s rich and well built.
Now I am an ugly fellow, and in love-making that
throws me back by a week. All through that week I
have to recognize that Erroll does his utmost to plead
my cause for me. I shudder at the thought of triumph-
ing before him.”

One night when there was no stand-to, and the sea
was powdered with stars, I succeeded in drawing the
marquise along through one ill-swept stone-paved room
after another, under the eye of the Tintorettos, till we
205

a7EUROPE Al LOVE

 

reached her own bedroom, where the sheets, mingling
with the tulle of the mosquito netting, were no more
than a perfumed torment.

“Look at the state you have got me into,” she said,
with her laces caught on the buttons of my uniform.

At that moment Erroll appeared.

“Are you going to refuse my brother-in-arms,” I
asked, “‘his due and proper share of this success?”

The marquise replied that we were a pair of monsters,
and that we should only have her and her life together.
But Erroll took his seat on the bed and explained to
her all that may be seen in wartime in London and
Paris.

She was a true Italian and determined not to be a
“back number”. And neither of us hung fire.

206

aD
ae — a EeeTHE DOUBLE FLOWER *
I

ImMepiatELy following the Armistice, Captain Olivier
Lebecq, of the Army of Saloniki, found himself de-
tached on special service with the Jugoslav authorities
+a connection with the apportionment of the Matériel
surrendered by the Austrians in Dalmatia. Like many
another regular army officer, Lebecq felt himself in
easy circumstances for the first time in his life. He
had no private income, but his pay and a variety of
allowances made it possible for him to live luxuriously
in a country where living is normally simple. He was
able to commandeer a 100 h.p. Benz, an Austro-Daimler
motor boat, and a villa set among laurel trees on the
edge of the sea between Ragusa and its port, Gravosa.

Lebecq was a Basque. A farmer’s son. Educated at
Saint-Maixent. Brother Pontiff of the “Discreet
Friends”, Masonic chapter, at Bordeaux. Churlish, full-
blooded, more intelligent than he appeared to be, full
of verbal explosions but of selfishness and prudence,
too. A provincial, concerned with his social station,
devoid of restlessness and curiosity. Just enough bowels
to permit of digestion.

1 Translated by Lewis Galantiére.

207EUROPE AL 3. @ V-E

 

His mission was drawing to an end and he had de-
cided not to give up the rather tardily encountered
pleasures of a care-free existence. Debrouya bichaya!
which is to say in the Basque tongue, “By the horns
of the Devil!” he wasn’t going to be seen with recruits
again at seven in the morning on the Boulevard Alsace-
Lorraine, at Bayonne. There were many such fellows in
1919. It was at a time when the world awoke to find
itself in the hands of professors determined to teach
no longer and army officers who had sworn never to
drill troops again.

In obedience to this fashion, to this physical law, and
with the help of his business instinct, Lebecq turned
imperceptibly,—too imperceptibly for some people,—
from an army captain into an exporter of timber, lig-
nite, and bituminous schist. He entertained with Mar-
seilles commercial relations unmarked by apathy.

 

II

A short time before his resignation, in the spring of
1919, Lebecq was on a tour of inspection in the vicinity
of Spalato, where he had gone to affix his seals on an
Austrian calcium carbide factory. In uniform, ac-
companied by his orderly, he was “navigating in the
heart of the desert”. Their horses were moving at a
walk. Suddenly they turned a corner in the road and

208

~

ih a moe SRT ee mr a faTHE DOUBLE FLOWER

 

came upon a Venetian fortress in ruins, flanked by
two pink towers, impregnable except to goats, and
adorned by a white marble lion with one paw on a
ball. Such a sight is not rare in Dalmatia. But the
ground was strewn with dead in magnificent costumes.
All about Lebecq lay turbaned Turks pierced with ar-
rows, fallen cavalrymen in Milanese armour, Venetian
archers in velvet doublets shot with gold pomegranates;
they lay among mortars, culverins, and stone cannon-
balls. Close by the moat a blackish crowd wearing low
sashes was crying in Italian: “Long live Italy!” and
rushing towards the portcullised gate.

As Lebecq approached, a double row of trumpeters
issued forth bearing the pennons of his Most Serene
Highness, followed by a Providentor, foreign ambassa-
dors, and, riding a dappled horse and shaded by a gilded
canopy such as Lebecq had seen only in ancient wood
paintings, a young virgin, a magnetic damsel, dark with
very curly hair, accompanied by the Doge’s legate and
a cardinal, and followed by enemies in chains, grey-
hounds, cheetahs, and captured matériel.

Lebecq gazed after this procession as it crossed the
drawbridge and moved towards two Fiat camionettes
on whose tarpaulins was painted Turin Cinema Limi-
tata. This Company was shooting Italian propaganda
films on the Dalmatian coast for the purpose of proy-
ing to the Congress of Versailles, then in session, that

209PUG ORE ae GL©) VCE

 

the Italian occupation of the coast antedated the ar-
rival of the Slavs, who were claiming the region for
their own. Lebecq had just witnessed a cinemato-
graphic carnage. The Doge, still dogeared and covered
with blood, surrounded by stage carpenters and camera-
men, was mopping his brow:

“What a morning! Nine shots to get that assault!”

“Yes, but what a programation!”

“You want to put a halo around her; send rays of
light through her hair. What hair! If the kid’ll do
it, Pll give her a six-year contract,” exclaimed the di-
rector, who was seated on his megaphone.

They spread a picnic lunch on the grass and Lebecq
found himself seated beside Donna Zuliana, the super-
star.

“J suppose you are ‘addicted’ to the cinema,” he
suggested, as if speaking of a new vice.

No, she was not addicted to it. She knew nothing
of close-ups, make-up, or the Hollywood studios. Be-
cause of the political nature of the film, the organizers
had been forced,—in return for the subsidy granted by
the Government,—to cast in this picture only Italian
natives of the Dalmatian region. Thus the extremely
nationalistic character of this so hotly coveted strip of
land might be amply demonstrated.

They could not have done better than to choose
Donna Zuliana, the most beautiful of the vestiges left

210THE DOUBLE FLOWER

 

by the Venetians at Spalato. Her father’s patriotism
had induced him to allow her to serve the cause. She
was so dark in the midst of all these blond Slavs, with
her beautifully plaited Italian hair caught, Dalmatian
fashion, in a coral net; so patently a thoroughbred, sur-
rounded by these big-boned, round-nosed, heavy-ankled
democrats come from heaven knows what Northern
land; so like neighbouring Italy herself, whence had
come to these barbaric regions the little of civilization
and refinement they possessed, that she seemed to Lebecq
to belong to a superior race. He caressed his moustache.

The next day they shot another picture, this time
+n Roman costume, among the ruins of Diocletian’s
palace at Salona, on that admirable plain through which
passes the great highway between Rome and Constan-
tinople at the mystical junction of the Empires of the
East and the West. More supers at forty dinars each.
A dash of grease-paint, a bit of Bologna sausage, and
forward! under the Mercury lights. Once more Zuli-
ana. The purple, or rather the Andrinople cotton,
moulded more closely than on the day before; a form
no longer quarrelling with its vestments. For two days
Zuliana was a queen of the screen. From each ear
hung a bronze ring that made one desirous of carrying
her off with tenderness and precaution, like a statue
freshly unearthed.

Lebecq could contain himself no longer, the more

ZiehEURO PEAT (LOVE

 

so since he had discovered that “his beauty” was the
daughter of a rich maraschino manufacturer of Spalato.
Although he was a Frenchman, he considered himself
something of ‘“‘a personage on the coast”. He was a
man to be reckoned with. He asked for Zuliana’s hand,
obtained it, and went with her to settle at Ragusa.

Til

It was the beginning of a monotonous bliss. By way
of adding to its middle-class French cooking, watered
nasturtiums, and, after luncheon, a daily game of
piquet, Lebecq sent to France for his sister. She was
a girl of some thirty years, very Basque, tremendously
pollita, they said at Ciboure,
—and easy to live with. Their house was bought

 

talkative, rather pretty,

from the Alien Property Custodian. It was a modern
chalet of the Secession school decorated by one of those
Viennese firms who are responsible for all the furniture
of the Balkans and Hungary, and seemed imprisoned
in the arrowheads of its laurel leaves. But what is
Ragusa except a bower of laurels providentially hung
upon the wall of pumice-stone that moves down from
Istria into Greece?

Mornings, nothing happened. Afternoons, under the
mahogany wings of the electric fans, they slept. After
sunset the three went down to the Café Dubrovatz.
PLZTHE DOUBLE REOVCER

 

The apéritif is the Frenchman’s evening prayer. Every-
thing on this terreplain at the foot of the ramparts and
of Port Saint-Blaise, bespoke a decent folk: the shady
plantains; the unfermented drinks; the group of petri-
fied nymphs displaying their croups to the Adriatic
where it gleams suddenly in a tear in the rocks; the
French Lending Library; the sense of well-being felt
by every traveller from Italy or the Orient, who won-
ders what its origin is until he sees there are no beggars;
the recurring appearances, regular and refreshing as
fan beats, of the strolling Slav girls dressed very simply
in lawn or cotton-prints, their ruddy gold hair streaked
with bands of darker gold, and their red skin inflamed
by voluntary sunstroke. The absinthes they ordered
stood out among so many innocent raspberry-and-
sodas.

The Lebecqs saw few people. There were no French-
men at Ragusa; the American consul was addicted to
“prohibition cocktails”; the Italians were on bad terms
with the Slavs and Madame Lebecq’s origins made her
share their prejudice. The Russian group was corrupt.
Lebecq felt that these, idle, unemployed young men and
women, who spent their days naked on the sandy beach
at Lapad, surrounded by gold cigarette stubs and wear-
ing platinum chains on their wrists, were not the kind
of people to frequent. What is to be said of the rest
of this colony in flight? Under her diamonds, a prin-

213ARR Rc enn

 

 

     
  

FEU EROIP IE GACT: TE OsVek

 

cess of the blood royal drove the prefect of police, whose
mistress-chauffeur she was. It was worth a good deal
to see the prefect recite her orders every morning and
thereafter curtsey to her. There were generals’ wives
whose tanned skins bore little white designs in witness
of the pearls they had just sold. ‘The V-couple were
held in high esteem, but the Russians hated V be-
cause he owned securities that were really gilt-edged. In
order that their money be forgiven them, the Count
and Countess tried to pass themselves off as false refu-

 

gees, coming home ostentatiously from market with
their vegetables in a net. All these people lived at
the fortress in a collection of abandoned casemates.
They cheated, wept, and jabbered forty feet above the
Adriatic and death.

From time to time the Lebecqs dined at the Hotel
Odak where, fronting a sea whose polish had been dulled
by the evening, the Czechoslovaks met. Or at the Im-
perial where, in the former summer houses of the Aus-
trian Archdukes, diplomatic adulterers from Belgrade
and all the corners of the Balkans once buried their
nudities beneath fig leaves and false passports.

Zuliana was gentle, negative, silent: ‘a horse that
will never throw her rider,” Lebecq used to say. She
never sought other company than that of her family.
Mademoiselle Lebecq, who worshipped her brother, had
very little fondness for her sister-in-law, but Zuliana
214oe DOW BEE EE OW ER

 

seemed unperturbed by this. They taught her French.
She read a good deal and made rapid progress. She
was a serious and thoughtful young woman.

During the year 1920 Lebecq’s affairs expanded and
he commenced to travel. He went to Herzegovinia and
as far as Belgrade. Each time that he returned, he
found his furniture well polished, his wife docile and
loving, awaiting him under the mosquito netting like
a young bride in a conjugal bed, surrounded by a ram-
part of insect powder.

IV

One day Zuliana announced to Lebecq that she was
enceinte. We was overjoyed. Life was good, the cli-
mate of Ragusa very healthy, and he looked forward to
a generation of Lebecqs who, in their turn, would be-
come Apprentices, Companions, and Pontiffs of the
Lodge. A few weeks later their hopes were dashed.
Zuliana explained that she had been mistaken and was
no longer expecting an heir. Two months afterward
the same perturbation and the same disappointment.
Lebecq proposed that she see a doctor. His wife replied
evasively, put off several proposed visits to a celebrated
gynecologist at Trieste, and in the end did nothing.

Thereupon, her nature changed. She was still gentle,
but she became morose. She preferred to be alone, and

215

>.BUR ORE Asl ab © Vib

 

mortified herself. Her frank, open countenance ap-
peared meditative and concentrated. Her apathy was
such that Mademoiselle Lebecq, despite her vitality, her
chatter, and the slight difference in their ages, was
unable to pull her up. Diversion, syrups, and iron
tonics were tried with equal lack of success. They put
their hope in cold baths, and when the heat of the day
died down the two women would go out in one of those
swift launches that seem to draw the placid water
behind them like a cloth, to the Isle of Lacroma, a
former Crown residence opposite Ragusa. There they
would disrobe among the rocks where each break in
the shore led to a natural pool among the perfume of
the trees. They would plunge to their armpits into
the most transparent of waters.

One day Lebecq, having finished his work early, went
out to meet them in a bark. It was an evening towards
the end of August. The sun was falling in the west
behind an invisible Italy, distant one night across the
sea. The tri-coloured Jugoslav flag dipped into the
water at the bow of the boat. Turning, Lebecq could
see Ragusa which, in order not to be crushed between
the bank and the mountain, reared its dungeon-guarded
wall, plunging it in great slabs or sharp angles into the
waves or in the meat-red rock. On the port side, the
walls of Ragusa are not Venetian but French. You
can see the barracks of Marmont protecting the dome

216THE DOUBLE. EO WER

 

of the Dominicans, the roof of the Jesuits, and the alleys
of the old town, twisted and complicated, like the
smaller intestine.

Lebecq went around the island, approaching it from
the open sea at the back. He debarked and began to
seek the bathers. He found his wife first. She had
her back turned towards him and was unaware of his
presence. It couldn’t have been anybody else, and yet
Lebecq was scarcely able to recognize her. The body
he had thought he knew so well seemed suddenly thin-
ner than usual, stripped, straight of hip, and without
those rotundities, of which she was more sparing than
most, but which nevertheless filled out certain of her
curves. Her breast seemed on the point of disappear-
ing. He marvelled at what new eyes one can suddenly
bring to the most familiar domestic sight. Had Zuli-
ana always been like this? She must have been. Had she
not arrived at complete growth, at a final expression of
herself? Apparently there was no room left,for change.
And yet no illness could have changed her more greatly.
What he saw was not the confused disturbance pro-
duced by a crisis, but rather a secret deviation, one of
those slow deformations that are the product of a
chronic lesion. It was not possible to say she had grown
thinner, on the contrary, she appeared stouter, but the
proportions were no longer the same; the center of
gravity seemed abnormally high. Enigma. An artist

2AERUROPLE Ad LOVE

 

would have said that in this body of a woman nothing
was any longer “‘in its place”. Without understanding
why, Lebecq suddenly felt extremely displeased; he had
the impression that Zuliana was growing ugly.

At this moment she turned around. She saw her
motionless husband and cried out. It would have been
natural if, once her surprise was gone, she had made
him a friendly little sign and had let him approach
her. But on the contrary, when he took a step in her
direction she seemed the prey of a modesty which, be-
tween man and wife, was in truth unjustified. She
blushed and turned back to him only when she was
clothed. All this was ridiculous. Lebecq did not go
so far as to wonder if he was dreaming, but, lighting his
pipe, he thought that the cause of these novel impres-
sions and curious discoveries was probably within him-
self, and that he would have to be careful to drink fewer
glasses of Basque liqueur.

V

From that time on, Lebecq found it impossible not
to observe in his wife an almost daily moulting, some-
times physical and at other times mental. One would
have said that she no longer walked in the same way.
Her voice had changed; it was as if somebody else were
speaking in her. She fell into an even deeper melan-

218

— enemnees SeTHE DOUBLE FLOW ER

 

choly, a silent and secret despondency from which
nothing could withdraw her. Lebecq blamed himself.
She replied that she was perfectly happy and had noth-
ing to reproach him. Mademoiselle Lebecq, with gentle
grace, interfered in vain. The doctors who were once
more consulted recommended travel. Zuliana refused
first to leave her house and thereafter her room. At
times she would become infinitely active and independ-
ent; but this too was so factitiously a reversal of her
normal habits that it disquieted Lebecq as much as any-
thing else. She began to display aversion for manual
work, the care of the household, and sewing, in which
hitherto she had excelled. And finally, that all may be
told, Zuliana refused any longer to entertain conjugal
relations with her husband. A rumor was spread that
the two were about to divorce.

For the first time in his life Lebecq was suffering,
for he was in love. Besides, his middle-class habits were
upset. He considered this conduct to be a sort of re-
verse debauchery. He expected each person to practise
his craft, and Zuliana in particular to practise hers.
Seeking an explanation, he rapped on her door one eve-
ning. No response. He opened the door. She was out-
side on the terrace, reclining on a chaise-longue, her
face bathed in tears. It was an Adriatic night, dis-
tended, splotched with stars. Fireflies drew hoops of
green light around the foxgloves.

ZEDOUR np a a

 

 

PUR OPE AT LO VE

 

 

When Zuliana saw her husband she became livid.
She had to control herself not to run. Then, turning
towards him, she relaxed:

“So much the better,” she murmured.

They understood in that instant that the time for
circumspection had passed.

“Shame prevented me from speaking,” she burst
forth, “but my pain is too great. I prefer the torture
of speech.”

Lebecq seized her by the wrists and drew them to-
wards him as if they had been two oars.

‘“Have you a lover?”

“Of course not!”

“Two lovers?”

“Dio mio!”

“Why do you no longer love me?”

“My affection for you is greater than ever.”

“Then let me take you.”

His body stiffened at the contact with her warmth.
She pushed him off.

“T cannot.”

Lebecq made an imperative knot about her with his
arms. He had promised himself to torture her, but
the thread of his ideas fled as soon as her body lay against
his. Zuliana felt her heart beat wildly, a needle flut-
tering on the rosy compass of the winds.

220LEE DOUBLE BEOW ER

 

“Don’t ask me to tell you. . . . Let me write it to
you.”

“Are you trying to be funny? I insist that you
speak.”

“T am lost.”

“Pll find you quick enough.”

“Don’t hurry me. I'll tell you about it. Oh, I don’t
know how to say it. I almost didn’t know how to
warn you, confess to you. Now I have only one word
left.”

“What have you done?”

“Only Nature can say.”

“Enough of this gibberish. I want to hear one word
—or one name.”

“T am a monster.”

““Morally a monster?”

“No, physically.”

To Lebecq this seemed not so serious after all. He
said gallantly:

“What do you mean? Darling, I can do very well
with your kind of monster. Are you still going to leave
me in a state of non-activity?”

She controlled the advancing hands.

“Oh, come. I am your husband.”

His speech was leaden.

SINom€

“Thanks for the orange blossom. I’ve had enough
221BUR ORE a) LOVE

 

of this. Quit shamming. It is night. I am a man.
You are a woman.”

*“No.”

“What do you mean by ‘no’?”

Lebecq jumped as if he had been stung. Zuliana
nodded her head calmly.

“No, I am not a woman.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me you are a man.”

“Tf you must know it, I am a man.”

Was it possible that anyone might go mad with
so little fever, betraying one’s state so little to others?

He tried to frighten her.

“Zuliana! I don’t like eccentricity, you know.”

“T have kept my promise. I have told you every-
thing.”

She opened her arms the better to show how torn
she was. In her unwavering glance he saw the habit
of sorrow.

Lebecq was about to cry out, but her face wore the
expression of a man sinking for the third time. The
sight of it took away his breath.

“Listen to me.”

She stopped trying to make herself understood in
French and spoke pathetically in Italian:

“T have never kept a secret from you. I am speaking
to you now with the frankness and the precision of
despair. Besides, even if you were to doubt what I say,

222TEE DOUBLE EEO WER

 

the proof,—you hear me?—the proof of it exists. It
will soon be two years since I married you. All I wished
was to live near you, to be faithful to you with per-
severance. Why can I not do it any longer? By what
divine malediction have I, unknowingly at first, and
then to my horror, changed my sex?”

“Zaliana, don’t insist. . . .7

“You know what I hoped for last year, and how I
was disappointed more than once. I had to see the
evidence of the change. One day my periodic troubles
ceased,—and yet I did not become enceinte.. Apart
from this curious phenomenon, nothing happened. But
one morning towards the close of winter, scarcely three
months ago, I bent down and made a violent effort to
pull on my shoe. Suddenly I had the impression that
my sides were tearing. I felt sharp pain as if a body
were seeking passage. . . . I thought it was an acci-
dent, hernia, perhaps, a hemorrhage. But no. In all
innocence, at first I could not understand what had
happened. But soon my figure changed. I tried to
hide the change, as if it had been maternity, under full
gowns, so that you would be able to see nothing. Alas,
it was the direct contrary of maternity. Down began
to cover my body and my lips. I shaved. My voice
frightened me. It seemed to me that it was shouting
my secret. Night after night when the house was
asleep I would light a candle and stand, despite the
225EU ROPE asl OO Var

mosquitoes, before my glass, examining myself with
hate. I would pass worried hands over my body, ready
to doubt this nightmare. Already my belly was hollow-
ing and hardening, my breast ceased to swell, my legs
grew straighter. When you came upon me on La-
croma,—do you remember?—I should have died if you
had come close to me. It seemed to me each day that
the woman in me was becoming atrophied and another
being was demanding birth, a being who already hated
you. The rdle I played all day long dropped at night
from my lips and I had to make an effort to remember
it the next day. While this was going on I began to
feel intolerable pain due to the conflict between my
former state and my new prerogatives. The pain kept
me awake all night. When I was no longer able to en-
dure it, I took advantage of your trip to Serbia last
month to go and see a Bolognese professor of medicine
whose name I had picked out by chance from a scien-
tific journal I was able to get hold of.”

“And then what?”

“As soon as he had examined me he said: ‘Why the
disguise? Why do you dress in woman’s clothing?’
And as I started to protest he said: ‘I don’t doubt that
you were once a woman. But now you are a man,
perfectly constituted and capable of reproduction.
Your case is rare but it is far from unique. Nature
sometimes evinces these tardy repentances.’ ”

224FHE DOUBLE FEOW ER

 

Here Zuliana stopped her ears as if the memory of
the scene and the words of the doctor tore her hearing.
She drew forth a paper from her bosom:

“If you want technical details, read this report that
he signed and gave me.”

Lebecq adjusted his monocle and read by the light of
the moon, then gave back the paper to his wife.

“T came home,” Zuliana went on, “still hoping that
this miracle would cease, that my body would listen to
reason. I prayed to the Bambino; I burned candles to
the Madonna. Nothing helped, and it was in vain I
burned kilograms of wax. Despite my age, nature
undertook to reconstruct me, tried to adjust me to my
new state. I was as alone in life as if I had been made
of another substance than the rest of you. My mis-
fortune separated me from everybody. I tried to find
out things, to learn if cases analogous to mine were fre-
quent. All I have encountered here is ignorance, de-
rision, severity. I was cut off from the living. You
came home. Could I tell you my secret? Could I
remain silent? Could this sacrilegious existence of two
men persist? When you came into my room this eve-
ning I felt that my last hour had come. Farewell, my
unsuspecting life with you! Farewell to the joy of
motherhood! Farewell to an honourable past and a
happy future! Olivier, the only thing left to me is
to die.”

225EUROPE “sl LOVE

 

Zuliana made her hands a desperate ligature about
her brow.

Lebecq left her without a word. He wandered under
the walls of Ragusa which are provincial rather than
wild, now along the interior avenue, now upon the cliff
outside. He knew that he would go mad if he suffered,
but that had not yet come upon him. He was in a
state of day-dream as he passed the night cafés in the
bowers of rushes where, against a white background,
white men drank black wine, or strode beneath the
consoling stars.

He walked to the parapet and gazed at the sea. The
idea that it was called a guard for the insane amused
him. He was himself situated at the heart of madness.
He shut his eyes and saw nuggets of gold; in his ears
he heard a jester’s bells, then salvos. He felt as if he
were falling through the storeys of a house from the
roof to the ground. His export statistics seemed to
him a record of death. He wept. The darkness
drowned his mind. He was capable only of repeating
words: “She isa man. A man is waiting at home for
me. Iam married toa man.” The thing ended by be-
coming meaningless. No, he was not suffering. You
do not suffer from things superhuman; mythology is
not moving. He was fluttering in the extraordinary;
he was no longer subject to terrestrial laws. He fell
asleep on a bed of eucalyptus leaves.

226

sip eee amaranteLEE DOU BE E HlOWER

 

When he awoke a party of Russians was returning
homeward. That is to say, it was morning. Their
faces were of chrome leather as they moved up towards
their casemates. By their belted linen blouses it was
easy to tell that they were former officers. They limped
and leaned on their canes. One of them, newly arrived
from Constantinople, had one foot in a Turkish slipper
and the other in an old boot. Their poverty was patent.

Up there Zuliana was probably asleep. Lebecq could
not blame her. After these few hours of slumber on
the ground he was almost ready to laugh. Deceived?
She had been deceived much more than himself. He
was not without pride at the thought that what the
world took for a perverse and poetic joke of the imagi-
nation of ancient authors, actually existed, and in his
home. Lebecq remembered the doctor’s report: the
word cryptorchid seemed to him enchanting, strange,
a dark crypt filled with pale orchids. He was cer-
tainly in an impossible, an unimaginable situation; but
he, at least, was officially somebody; he had the attri-
butes, the privileges, and the costume of his sex. He
thought of Zuliana’s distress, and was moved; kindness
carried him off in the air. His duty appeared suddenly
before his eyes. Never would he leave her. Marriage is
as much a mystic as a carnal tie. Besides, he had his
social station to think of. Was his moral and social
situation to be at the mercy of a scandal? Not at all.
DLL,PURO PRE A LOW-E

 

She should keep her secret and continue to live with
him, and thus nobody would know of this night’s
drama.

Henceforth he had a brother; that was all.

VI

The days went by. Lebecq bought a radio set and
played with the luminous bulbs. They threw open
their house several times; seated a few notables in their
velvet armchairs; enjoyed certain social satisfactions.
The ex-captain was decorated with the Order of Saint-
Sava when a French torpedo squadron visited Ragusa.

Lebecq stepped with slippered feet into this tragic
situation. As a good Frenchman he was desperately
attached to form. He believed firmly that by main-
taining intact the framework of his life (what nobody
knows doesn’t count!) he would force destiny to obey
him. The military fear of a bad mark had remained
perennial in him. This life continued in common. was,
he admitted, rather a clever stunt than a human im-
pulse. At bottom he never ceased to suffocate as he
watched the change which took place progressively
under Zuliana’s disguise. He knew very well that he
had not given himself a brother, but had rather con-
tinued to retain a wife, a wife who suffered from an
incurable malady, but who remained his property. He

228THE DOUBLE FLOW ER

 

tried not to think of it. But chagrin, opportunity,
curiosity, each in its way, drove him on; his sentiments
got the upper hand, freed themselves from the watch
he kept; and he could not accustom himself to this
life in common with another man, here face to face
with him, hidden under a woman’s attire. Powerless
to avenge himself, this Free Mason called upon God
to witness this unseemliness.

Nature persevered in its aberration. Zuliana became
the caricature of herself. Under her feminine attire
she had become the too pretty Italian boy one sees
at the Lakes. Mademoiselle Lebecq had ceased to dis-
play her almost unaffectionate reserve of former months,
and no longer blamed Zuliana because she had cap-
tured her brother and lived in his house. Now she
would stroll arm in arm with Zuliana when they went
out; insisted upon herself putting flowers in Zuliana’s
room; and, unknown to Zuliana, displayed towards her
a thousand considerate thoughts whose origin she was
far from suspecting.

And now Zuliana is about to change not only physi-
cally but spiritually. She has begun to speak of her-
self in the masculine. Almost she signed her last letter
to her mother il tuo figlio, thy son. And, like Lebecq,
the more she too tries to ease out of this adventure, the
more is she punished for her reserve. During her sleep,
all her desires fly like prisoners whose cell has been left

229

FineEUR ORE Ag iO V8

 

unlocked. She awakes thinking: “After all, why
should I be ashamed?” and then the new thing appears
to her irreconcilable with the peace of a civilized so-
ciety, solidly constructed on the scaffolding of its two
peoples: the masculine and the feminine, and shame
once more overcomes her.

Whether she likes it or not, she must do her appren-
ticeship asa man. She must wear different shoes, gloves
of a larger size. She experiences the desire for tobacco
and strong liqueurs. It is impossible for her to pro-
long her concern with elegance. On her dressing-table
her powder and perfumes fall into disgrace. More than
once she has surprised in herself a desire for action.
A taste for the permanent gives way to a taste for risk.
An accident,—she was asked to sit down and wait until
the danger passed,—confirmed in her this faith in her-
self. It seemed to her that she was being disdained
when she was treated as a woman. When people spoke
to her of beauty she thought of courage. When men
saluted her courteously she felt that this was merely
by virtue of a privilege which was soon to cease. Under
her skirts, she could feel her legs becoming terribly
free, unsheathed, like a statue refusing the help of its
pedestal.

230hone DOUBLE EEO WER

 

Vil

Lebecq, too, was aware that this strange existence
would soon become impossible, and that sooner or later
his tranquillity was doomed to expropriation. The
words “laudable efforts at adaptation” which he often
employed, lost their brilliance. He took steps rapidly.
The scandal had to be avoided. He consulted lawyers
by correspondence under an assumed name. He wrote
to a famous jurist, author of a brochure entitled Is a
Hermaphrodite Entitled to Vote? ‘They all answered
that he could not think of divorce. Since Zuliana and
the man she was formed one single and identical being,
Lebecq could not appeal to one of the commonest
causes of annulation of marriage: an error in the per-
son. Another article of the Code stipulating, in its
limited simplicity, that every person must be either
man or woman, this scribe’s error made it impossible
for Lebecq to break with Zuliana. He could not leave
his monstrous partner; each was pulling at his own end
on the same chain. ‘This discovery floored him. He
was a husband deceived by nature, pursuing an unseiz-
able enemy. Ridicule lured him with its wiles. He was
not slow to nibble at the bait.

One morning he arose at dawn to dissipate his in-
somnia. He looked for his clothes, which, on going
to bed, he had left at his door to be brushed. They

231

ee eeEUCR@ PIE Ack Ww @ VE

 

had disappeared. And yet, nobody was awake in the
house. A term in the intelligence service had left
Lebecq with a taste for the solution of mysteries. He
went down into the garden in his dressing gown. There
was no sound except that of chanticleer at his love-
making. Day dawned with the way it has of pre-
senting itself eternally as something to be welcomed.
Suddenly the gate opened; a man came furtively in,
somewhat unsteady on his legs. Lebecq was stupefied.
The man was wearing his own clothes. It was Zuliana.

“Where have you been in that get-up?”

“Is ic my fault if I don’t yet know how to tie a tie?
I can’t hold out any longer. Forgive me. I often go
out this way. I have to have, for a few hours, the
freedom of belonging to my own sex. If I don’t, [ll
die. Something so imperative urges me to escape from
myself, to persevere in my new path, that if I were to
resist it I should die.”

Lebecq turned into a weak and furious husband.

“You are always talking about dying. Meanwhile,
you go on a bat. Give me back my clothes and go up
to your room.”

“If that is the way you feel, I shall leave you. I
shall never return. I have a right to my sex, even if
I have to secure it at the price of a scandal, of the
honour of us all. This masquerade cannot go on. I
252SI Ln eR ANT AO ide IEE Set emnn

 

 

LEE DOU BEEP RE OWE R

 

want to be free. I feel in myself a man’s courage to
face the unknown.”

“I forbid you to go out.”

Zuliana looked at him in a stupor. He, shaken,
gazed at this adolescent who had the air of a schoolboy
caught on his way in from a night in town. He was
wearing tennis shoes; his trousers were too large and
were held up at the hips by a kerchief; his hair was in
disarray; his shirt was open; the collar of his coat was
turned up. It was Lebecq in his dressing gown who
looked like an old woman. This could not go on. He
was becoming inhuman.

“For the last time, I forbid you to go out.”

“Don’t you understand,” answered Zuliana calmly,
looking him full in the face, “that now I have the
right to all the benefits of my new condition; to all,
without exception. Of course, it’s easy enough to talk
of my staying here. But haven’t you even noticed
that your sister has fallen in love with me?”

Lebecq left Ragusa that very evening on a Bar-les-
Pouilles Company cargo boat, bound for Ancona.
Aside from the last of his amphibiological adventures,
which rendered all compromise henceforth impossible,
he had just received by post a fresh bit of juridical
counsel which put him on his guard against the dangers
involved in his situation. He was informed that co-
habitation after the discovery of the error in the sex

725)5)

ae

sot sii} ont poe Be ye 1S ‘ e weep ape

—- wer

 

 

 

 

EUROPE At LOVE

of one of the couple automatically nullified any action
arising therefrom. He had to fly immediately. He
was on his way to Rome, for he had been married at
Fiume under Italian law, and also, he wanted the ec-
clesiastical authorities to annul his marriage. He desired
a solution at any price, and was determined to go home
only when he was free. At bottom, Zuliana was frank,
and her case, in all its strangeness, was equally frank.
A change had taken place without ambiguity. She
was less to be pitied than most hermaphrodites who are,
and remain all their lives, invalids and degenerates. It
was she,—from force of habit he thought of Zuliana
as “‘she?—who was undoubtedly right. She could look
forward to an inverse but normal life; why should he

not help her to do it?
vil

In Rome, Lebecq was introduced to a lawyer who had
gained a reputation by his handling of lawsuits in both
the civil and ecclesiastical courts. This man of the
law revealed to Lebecq the existence of one of his
colleagues who specialized in certain medico-legal dif_-
culties, and whose office was situated behind the Va-
tican, in the Prati. The horror of this riverside quarter,
composed of inhuman cubes, is well known.

Lebecq found his Cavaliere de Sant’ Arona on a mez-
zanine floor, lodged in a redout of two rooms. Sant’
234THE DOUBLE FLOWER

 

Arona had a pale face covered with an ugly skin,
splotched like a mosaic, a sharp voice, and a short fichu
worn over his top coat. He coughed drily. The name
he went by was borrowed; he was of German origin and
was named Hesselbach. He gloried in the fact that he
was the only hermaphrodite practising before any bar
in the world. In accordance with the German law,
his parents had chosen a sex for him at his birth, but
since he was free to opt in this matter on attaining his
majority, he had opted for the contrary sex, “‘and did
not regret it.” Lebecq met his secretary, a former mid-
wife whose acquittal Sant’ Arona had obtained. She
had succeeded in violating a client, and when examined
at the hospital had been conceded the right to conduct
herself in this evil fashion. Lebecq was able to see,
through the open shirt of the scribe as he bent over
his papers (he could not endure starched collars),
voluminous breasts traced with a network of blue veins
the colour of certain Delft potteries.

A taxi-driver came in smoking a pipe. His hereditary
malady was the possession of milk. Caught on one
occasion by a storm when sightseeing in the Abruzzi
mountains, he had been able to nourish a new-born in-
fant several times a day.

““My office,” explained Sant’ Arona, “is the meet-
ing place of all those beings whom nature, by its hesi-
tations or its errors, has disgraced. You will meet here

255)))not only Italians but foreigners come from all countries
to plead their cause before the Court of Rome. They
find here moral support, a library, and medical counsel.
I am the inspirer of a sort of association of hermaphro-
dites.””

Sant’ Arona promised Lebecq to look after his case.
The certificate signed by the Bolognese doctor was suf-
ficient to begin the action. The fact that he was a
foreigner, combined with the expenditure of some
money, would do the rest.

“T shouldn’t like this to get into the newspapers,”
Lebecq objected. “Why is it that the mere word
‘hermaphrodite’ makes people think of indecent things?”

The lawyer reassured him:

‘Nobody knows of our existence except the inter-
ested parties. As a matter of fact, hermaphrodites,—
what a disappointment!—are almost never debauched
creatures. They are the neutres, the sterile, the melan-
choly. (Allow me to present Miss Willis, a school
teacher. She plays the organ. Occasionally some of
our friends from the Sistine Chapel pay a neighbourly
call and she accompanies them. La Donna e mobile on
the harmonium is an agreeable pastime.) All my clients
are poor abandoned people who reek of malediction.
Remember that it is not a long time since hermaphro-
dites were put to death. The ancients considered them
birds of ill omen; in the middle ages they were thought
236THE DOUBLE FLOWER

 

to be monsters sent by God; modern society is hardly
more indulgent towards them.”

Over a bottle of Cinzano, Lebecq was shown photo-
graphs of famous hermaphrodites: Angélique Courtois,
Giuseppe Marzo, the child of Woods, Adelaide Preéville,
who married as a woman and was discovered after her
death to be a man; and that Alexina B
fession is one of the most curious documents in the
history of human curiosities. He took a long look at
the portrait of Bullings, the priest who was twice
brought to bed of a child; and at Marie Madeleine
Lefort, shown at the age of sixteen years with her firm,
round womanly bosom, her graceful turban of Ingres’
day framing her short hair, her moustache, her mascu-
line traits;—and then the same woman at sixty-five,—
just before her autopsy,—with her white beard falling
between two shrunken breasts.

In a windowless room, surrounded by anatomical
exhibits and, under glass, mounted animal hermaphro-
dites,—a rat, a deer, a lobster,—Lebecq signed his plea.
There was also in the room a mimeograph machine; it
was the editorial room of the Hermaphrodites’ Bulletin.

“Console yourself, sir, and know that there are not
two sexes,” said Sant’ Arona as he accompanied Lebecq
to the door. ‘Nature, you see, being economical, works
only from one model. Yes, only one, with the same
organs. At a certain stage in our development, in the

237

whose con-EUROPE Aw LOW £

 

Se Ri one 7 -
i -*

womb of our mother, we begin to differentiate. In
some, the organs cease to grow: everything folds in-
ward, opens half way, surrounds itself with safeguards,
and these are women; in others, the growth continues,
everything lengthens, grows outward, and these are
men.”

Sant’ Arona stopped on the last step of the stair-
case. To Lebecq his mouth seemed full of pity, the
mouth of a confessor; his hand was the thoughtful hand
of a surgeon, ready to heal any wound,—and his eye was
the eye of a rogue. The man clung to him:

“Doubtless, sir, those of us who unite the two sexes,
far from being pariahs, should receive men’s admiration
as being the nearest to perfection. Were not Astarte,
and the great Asiatic divinities, bisexed, tell me? Your
Bible, now; open your Bible, and in Genesis you will
read these unequivocal words: ‘God created the man-
woman, masculum et foeminam creavit eos. A Para-
disiacal state; a pre-Adamic state; the normal state of
man before the original sin. Specialization, that is what
kills us all. A rivederla.”

A tramcar sizzled its way forward; the Frenchman
jumped into this frying pan.

Ix

On the advice of Sant’? Arona, Lebecq first secured
for his wife a revision of her civil status, and then a
238EFHE DOUBLE ELOGW EVR

 

judgment setting them both free. Zuliana changed her
name to Zuliano. Zuliano put on man’s clothing and
went to live with his parents at Spalato. Soon after-
ward, he took unto himself a wife.

239snetinttipaitiliaitinns mig 3

ew ~

THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEARS OLD

WHEN I heard that, by the help of the password of a
poison, Diane had just crossed in her sleep that ili-
guarded frontier which divides us from death, I felt
no surprise.

“What are we?” so must her extravagant philosophy
after Ambre des Pagodes have asked, “what are we but
a fleeting agglomeration of cells to which there has
chanced the common and futile adventure of consti-
tuting our body? Sooner or later must not this chance
medley come to an end, and each atom resume its own
individual destiny?”

And yet it is not granted to every fortuitous con-
currence of atoms to be as successful as the one that
constituted Diane. People were ready to call her stupid,
but her mouth was so red that everything she said al-
ways seemed intelligent to me. Lovely to perfection:
and no doubt that was why she was stricken by a curse
the causes of which were obscure though the effects
were obvious. Diane could not believe in the reality of
anything outside herself; the painful yet consoling sense
that we are part of humanity and even of a system of
worlds never achieved so much as a mere adumbration in
her mind. She was one of those creatures who, without
240THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEARS OLD

 

any definite sorrow—one of those feminine sorrows to
which everybody can put a name or a Christian name
—genuinely and absolutely have no hold on life. From
her childhood she had been like this; Diane grew up in
the midst of a universe in which she did not believe;
furthermore, in her twentieth year she developed
the neurasthenia—in the phrase of the nineteenth cen-
tury novelists—that was the end of her a year after.
Her soul losing all its weight quitted the earth, like a
toy balloon let slip by the hand of an unthinking child.
I was with her during one of the last episodes of her
life. Perhaps, seeing that her death came so soon after,
this was her last attempt to keep from giving way to
the deadly vertigo of non-existence. I tried to save her.
I held out a hand to her; it is true enough I was being
selfish in a fashion, since I loved her; but all in vain.

A quarter to eleven in the morning is no very orig-
inal or striking moment, but neither is it compromising,
and at every age one comes upon it with a certain pleas-
ure, so long as there has been no excess the night before.
So on this day when I went into the hall, like the hotel
itself I was open to all comers. The palms in the lounge
had been wiped over leaf by leaf, the newly shaved por-
ter, instead of being on the defensive and saying “No”
to everything, offered himself as a kind of gilded hyphen
between the different wishes of every suite; the colour

241EUROPE AW? CLOW £

 

of the flowers in the carpet, lately revived by the
vacuum cleaner, gleamed with new splendour; the
maitre d’hétel was marshalling his luncheons like a
battle; from the basement there rose no outcry of men
from whose nails the manicurist had just drawn blood,
and finally, as the last word in harmony, the helmeted
telephone girl was at her post and charging at the head
of the numbers called for.

And all this meant that any delight that could now
supervene could only bring about an overplus of happi-
ness and leave nothing to desire but catastrophes. This
final felicity appeared in the door of the lift—Diane!

She found herself pinched between the pleasure of
meeting someone she professed a liking for and the need
of protecting a liberty she could not do anything with
anyhow.

I saw she was going to exclaim: ““My dear! I won’t
be able to give you any time. I’ve such a lot of errands
todo. I’m off again to-morrow,” so I got it out first.

“My dear,” I said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t
stay with you. I’ve a heap of errands to do. I’m off
again to-morrow.”

Diane’s face lit up at once. Her eyes softened. Just
like a cat, she would stay with you of her own accord,
provided you made no sign of wanting her to.

“Come,” she said, “you can surely pay me a little
attention.”

242THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEARS OLD

 

I had her.

And so, with her hat the very mirror of fashion, one
of her cheeks a trifle redder than the other (because her
looking-glass was better lit on one side), her skirt as
tight as a bandage, her scarf knotted on one shoulder,
Diane went on her way towards death.

Making a pretence of quoting Emerson, I put my
hand round her waist.

“From whatever side we look on Nature, Diane, we
never see anything but the face of a man disguised.”

“That man is a woman,” she replied, “and that
woman is me. My life is a party to which I invited
everybody; but nobody came.”

She is the victim of the old philosophical fallacy,
which she takes up again, between her lips a pendant
whose even sapphires she shows off against her even
teeth.

“Tf I die, the universe dies too.”

“None of that, Diane, I have a horror of women who
suck their pendants and men who fiddle with their
keys.”

“Eind me some reason for living.”

Ever since I have known her I have often tried to
help Diane to some way of escape from herself, from
that circumscribed universe within which she locks her-
self up out of pride, that pride which far more than
the love of pleasure destroys women and especially the

243BO ROPE AT iO VE

 

best of them. I have thrown the wide world open to her,
we have gone soul-wandering together, I have trans-
lated her dreams for her, I have assured her that the
supernatural was merely the natural yet unexplained,
and I have pushed her out towards things, the arts,
crafts, faces, fashions.

To-day I described to her the beginnings of the cathe-
dral of Chartres, the art of Benin, wireless telegraphy.

But after a moment Diane ceased to listen. Her eye
became fixed and she had withdrawn into herself. When
I tried to follow her there I was put to the door.

I became minatory. I prophesied that this lack of
adaptability would destroy her. I told her that it is
cheap and easy to be haughty. I wasted my time in
putting myself forward as an example, clinging to every
object to keep afloat the better, disregarding symbols,
unrebellious, taking everything as it comes.

“Do be vulnerable, Diane! Do be mortal. Come to
terms with feeling, with sentiment. What would you
say to love?”

“I beg your pardon.’

“To be in love is to take one’s stand at the very heart
of things. i

>

“At the heart of things there is myself always.”
“You are a stone statue, Diane, a monolith, an
aerolite.”
Diane paid no heed, whereas other women, when any
244THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEAKS OLD

 

one talks to them about themselves, are like lizards at a
whistle; they stay put and listen.

I took the bull by the horns.

“Tf you won’t love me, Diane, I'll kill myself.”

“Never!” she laughed. ‘Your tie is far too well tied
_.. No, do not think I am cruel except to myself.
Look here, this very morning chance your luck as they
say here. Count up to three. Good! Now show me
three things, three people, three sights, three curios,
whatever appeals to you, and whatever you choose. If
I am stirred, if you achieve the miracle of bringing me
under the influence of anything but myself, of procur-
ing someone else to find answers to the cruel question-
ings I put to myself, in short of setting me free by new
associations, I shall be most grateful.”

“What do you mean?”

“You'll see.”

Diane was one of those beauties who need to be lit up
from within to be admired. The moment she became
animated I was conquered. At once she appeared direct
and moving. I called for a taxi. The hotel porter be-
gan to whistle in the street like a blue blackbird.

“Caledonian Market,” I said without hesitation.

After twenty minutes’ ride through gloomy streets
we came to a huge rectangle paved with square setts,
cut up with wooden barriers into compartments, and
in fact just what it seemed, a cattle market, except that

245BUR Ome Ad GLOVE

 

to-day the place of the beasts was taken by inanimate
things. On Fridays this is London’s junk market.
Everybody knows the one in Rome near the Tiber,
where tongs and chasubles are sold for a song, the one
in Madrid, the world’s fair for old keys and cigar stubs
heaped in zinc trunks as blue as the wings of tropical
butterflies, the huxtery of the boulevard Richard Le-
noir in Paris, sparse and meagre, for French families are
the last in the whole universe to sell off their rubbish;
and last and chief of them all the “‘flea fair” of Petro-
grad where you find eighteenth century quartos lying
open in the snow, with the dark engravings of Eisen.
But none of these comes up to the Caledonian Market,
for London is the mart of the unknown, the city of
chance.

On the ground at our feet, on the raffia mats ravelling
out like the beard of the Ancient Mariner, were collec-
tions of old pipes, gothically antique telephones, broken
plates, rusty golf clubs, imitation pearls, invalid chairs,
broken boots hanging from their own laces. With one
dealer, still smelling of his native Lvow, sheltering under
a pink sunshade lined with black lace, buttoned up in a
mackintosh, in his mouth a pipe upside down because
of the wind, who was selling not merely a furniture
polish like Cheshire cheese and chlorine-coloured lemon-
ade, but also knives, tankards and paper-weights, I
was lucky enough to come upon one of those glass

246THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEARS OLD

 

spheres known as “witch balls,” which give a curving
reflection of the scenes to which they are held up;
twisted, elongated, they absorb and concentrate and
focus deep inside themselves objects and light with
diamond intensity.

To refrain from biassing Diane, I made a little speech
to myself.

“Odd knacks and gewgaws,” said I, “far from weary-
ing the beholder by mere accumulated number, are
vastly exhilarating: shoe buckles, ships in bottles, paper
flowers, and above and beyond everything else, things
made of mirror glass, besides the fact that, singly or in
combination, they are poems every one, are for collec-
tors a private mode of self-expression, of confession, of
telling one another secrets in front of the profane. I
now declare the beauty of looking-glass, of every shard
of mirror, of every least slip of plain transparent glass
the moment it is backed with foil. I mean to found
before long the O.L.G.L. . . . the Order of Looking-

>>

Glass Lovers. . . .

>

“Your imagination,” countered Diane, “is powerful,

your sentimental life is active, and your intellectual
Lite: fan:

“Ts nil,” I ended for her. ‘I remember I once heard
a lecture on the soul of the negro that contained those

very phrases.”
247BUR OPE wT LOVE

 

“Most certainly you remind me of the negroes; you
take a delight in anything shiny.”

I held the ball up and away from her, and in it we
could see ourselves as macrocephalous monsters with a
dome of sky pressing down upon us—all laws of light
and sight being transposed and remade.

“Could anything be more fascinating? See: you are
beginning to come back to life; this touches you, doesn’t
ite

“No,” she said.

“You don’t understand this magic skin, the mercury
film behind a looking-glass, all things builded anew,
made right. Just a bit of a mirror and infallibly, auto-
matically, you double your capital, as the gambling sys-
tems have it. What is there not in it?”

“TI see nothing in it,” she said, “except myself.”

First checkmate, and an elegant one.

We took our taxi again and after a very long round-
about arrived at a vague district to the southeast of
London, dominated by Shooter’s Hill, with a country
fair spreading in the middle of it like an eruption, and
a many-coloured carnival. An old Ford car with a
quite unbelievable van attached to it was parked in one
of the side alleys; it opened up like a Jack-in-the-box;
one of the flap sides was violently decorated with
posters, and propped down so as to turn the van into a

248THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEARS OLD

 

shop at certain times. Upon the bonnet might be seen
in red letters:

CHARACTER READING
HIGHEST TESTIMONIALS

and below written in freehand:
Mrs. Taylor attends all race meetings

Mrs. Taylor was got up coster fashion: a black apron,
straw boater with a rose stuck in it, broken earrings
and a necklace of black pearls losing their colour on her
skin. Her nose was boiled in whisky.

“Hullo, dearie!”’ said she.

“Do the crystal ball for this lady,” said I, “and try to
bring her back from the void.”

“Another ball,’ exclaimed Diane.

“T see a white mist! . . . it is clearing . . . you will
lose a case,” began the sorceress, without a moment’s
hesitation, staring into the ball . . . “a queer law-case

. seems like a case against yourself . . . an oppo-
nent that doesn’t look very dangerous . . . but who
will wins. << .:0

I was triumphant.

“Soothsayers only read our own thoughts by the
roots, while we only see the bit above the ground,” said

249EURQOPE AT VOY £

 

Diane. ‘What your Mrs. Taylor has just shown me,
in that fat yellow crystal, my poor friend, is still me.”

And so nothing was succeeding in catching my com-
panion’s interest. I had not managed to win her re-
lease, to procure for her the appeasement she seemed to
look to me for; so far two experiments had come to
grief.

What was I going to be able to do for her in the five
minutes left before we parted? What star could I show
her, what perfect, unique, imperishable object that
might rehabilitate me in her eyes and bring about her
healing? I thought of an electrical machine, of a certain
dagger (but it was in the Bargello in Florence), of a
Jesuit compass for measuring the stars (but that was
in Berlin, brought back from China).

“Tf I fail,” thought I, “I lose her for ever.”

And then it flashed into my mind to bring her to the
first floor of the British Museum, and the Mexican room
of the American Antiquities section. I brought her to
a full stop before the crystal skull.

Under a clear light distilled through a glass case it
smote us blind. How rare it is to find oneself face to
face with an object free from all trace of admixture, in
front of a sheer idea which submits to take on a form
without being either made heavy or diminished thereby?
Imagine a frozen drop of water: even so is this skull,

250THE CHILD AN HUNDRED YEARS OLD

of life size, made out of a single block of rock crystal,
flawlessly polished with its teeth indicated by a line, the
only one that scratched that pure and elemental dia-
mond; the eye places, instead of being filled with
shadow and terror, were sockets in whose depths
gleamed a light brighter than the brightest eyes; the
head was lit up from behind, from above, whatever side
the light came from it fed on it, condensed it, absorbed
‘+ into the heart of the crystal, where ideas are shaped.
There could be no doubt that this skull went on shin-
ing at night with the same fire, so surely it seemed to
create its own gleaming splendour.

“An Arctic marvel,” said Diane, greedily leaning to
the frozen block as a woman bends to her image in a
glass.

“Confess that you are ravished out of yourself. That
head was brought back from America by Cortez as a
gift to Charles the Fifth. It is a Mallarmé sonnet, an
iceberg discovered under the Equator. . . . Every year
I come back to London just to look at it.”

I fell silent. Diane stood beside me as though bereft
of life.

“Tt is magnificent, but... .

I interrupted her.

“Tt is useless to give me the rarest of opportunities to
pass from the abstract to the concrete, to strive to recon-
cile me to my own time, to prove to me that the darkest

251

35BUROPE AT (LOV E

 

of all ideas, the idea of our last end, may by the power
of art become the brightest and most transclucent of all
things. Not even that convinces me—isn’t that what
you were going to say?” Then crossly: “Decidedly you
are a poor kind of thing! How ancient you are! Re-
member the Preacher: “The child an hundred years old
shall be accursed.’ ”

She nodded her assent. I took her hand, she allowed
me unresistingly.

“You are not going to tell me that in this ball also you
met with yourself?”

“Yes,” replied Diane, “I saw myself in it, dead.”

THE END

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