A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (5 page)

As Mr. Auerbach’s seeing eye and strong right arm, I had the privilege of meeting these influential men. Their aristocracy and refinement of manner and general culture were astonishing to me. Certainly the several politicians whom I had encountered in the United States were not in a class with them. And they were far from the phlegmatic type of Britisher; they expressed their gratitude to Mr. Auerbach over and again, and indeed our impression was that they would have been glad of his company even if he had not entered into their plans for the peace of Europe.

Perhaps I have not given enough emphasis to the fact that Mr. Auerbach was a very good companion; a really civilized, knowledgeable old man. It was extraordinary, given the narrow range of his life as a whole and the complacency that as a rule develops with the making of a fortune. For almost half a century his days had been spent in Wall Street, in intense concern with money matters. He once confided to me that in his waking hours, until the hateful war left him to his own devices, business had never been out of his mind for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time; even his beloved beautiful wife had not distracted him from it. Yet now in his old age he had some grasp of all the main features of culture as such, and a personal point of view about it all. A love and a knowledge of music had come to him from his family, and having begun to buy art, he had mastered the essential facts about that also. On his brief annual holidays abroad he had kept in touch with all sorts of Europeans, and he appreciated the best in England and France and Italy as well as in Germany. He had a host of appreciative friends in New York, though not much intimacy with them; and even those who kept a bitter memory of his lack of patriotism in 1917 admired the dignified way he bore the onus of it. He had an odd, superior, deceptively simple nature. To me he was almost a hero in spite of the fact that I was to some extent, you might say, his valet.

From London we journeyed across to Paris. It was April; the French spring came early that year. It was my first trip to Paris, I was young, I had never loved a city before, of course I loved it. The famous festive style and modest proportions of its architecture surprised me as much as they pleased me; all so pale, with a rosy tinge early in the day and a blue tinge later. The beauty of Paris is too well known to write about, although naturally now it is being forgotten. The weather that week was enchanting; the sunshine rippled over everything and at the same time the moisture in the air veiled it. Those old-fashioned carpets of flowers were brought from the greenhouses and laid down amid the Tuileries and the rectangle of the Louvre and elsewhere—extremely neat patterns in the fragrant, soft cross-stitch of all the petals. The mild breezes in a few days wore them out, until the greenish and brownish warp appeared; then overnight those patterns would be gathered up and replaced with a fresh set.

Every evening we dined in the Bois; at that age I was not a gourmet, but I liked dining with fragrances and to music. What I liked best was the hush of the streets at twilight, when suddenly you were aware of the voices of the Parisians, light soprano and tenor voices, tired but complacent about the day’s work, turning with their peculiar kind of gratitude to their sentiment, pleasure, and sleep. Parisians get sleepy somewhat as birds in dusky branches do, sociably, with murmurs welcoming it. Every midnight when Mr. Auerbach retired I ran to Montparnasse, and I was almost in love with Mina Loy, the famous muse, famous there then.

One afternoon Mr. Auerbach and I came out of a great picture-dealer’s in the Rue de la Paix, and turned into the Place Vendome. He was very cheerful. We had gone to look at a little fifteenth- century Italian Madonna which, as it was described to him, he had expected to want badly; and he had been in a mixed emotion, telling himself that he ought to resist the temptation to buy it. But just now, with his binoculars on it, he had decided that it was not all it should be. This made him glad of the long time he had spent educating himself in matters of the Italian Renaissance; it had saved him money. And as he liked to feel that I was learning from him little by little, and in this issue I decidedly agreed with him, he was well disposed toward me too.

He was smoking a cigar, wielding it in his strong small fingers, often moving it from here to there across his sensitive mouth, gesturing with it and pointing with it, enjoying it. He would smoke only the choicest variety of Havana cigar, imported by him as his chief self-indulgence. We had brought along upon our journey a small trunkful of them, which was troublesome for me; at every boundary between the absurdly narrow countries I had to declare their number and value and pay duty and keep an account of it. I remember that we had a few left upon our return to New York, and I amused myself by estimating what they were worth at that point, with the accumulated assessments—a matter of several dollars each.

Mr. Auerbach liked to offer them to his friends, especially in Europe where during the War everyone had been deprived of such things. But I observed that he offered them only to the rich or the ex-rich. The poor, he assumed, would not have appreciated a blend so delicate. Even smoking, in the way his mind worked, was a thing to be made a study of, like art or like foreign affairs; and in all things the opinion of the professional and the expert was gospel. He himself smoked all day long, and Mrs. Auerbach was inclined to attribute the diminution of his eyesight to that; but she was far too sorry for him to discipline him. As diagnosed by famous oculists in Zurich and New York, the trouble was organic somehow; but for my part, thinking as usual on the basis of rash intuition, I decided that it might be mental or spiritual.

There we were, that April afternoon, strolling around the Place Vendome, in no hurry, talking and smoking. I, in a spirit of economy, was trying to accustom myself to French cigarettes, and Mr. Auerbach jokingly promised to buy me something better; my rank little puffs beside him spoiled his fine smoke. We paused for a moment and gazed round at that small place which is (I think) the heart of Paris—that octagon of architecture standing with a strange lightness, apparently one-dimensional like a screen. I have always fancied that it could be overturned with a good hard push but that, in three centuries, no one has really touched it. Middle-class Parisians in their shabby garments with their regular steps hastened past us, preoccupied, unselfconscious, with an air of artists in their own studio; and a few upper-class Parisians and very similar foreigners went slowly into the Ritz.

The sun was shining, but so diffusely that it cast only slight shadows; the form of the Colonne Vendome lay like a mere recollection or suggestion across the pavement. Yet it was too sunny for Mr. Auerbach; he had to shade his tragic eyes with one hand. He stood a moment in that attitude of looking at Paris; he drew a deep sigh; and he said, “I tell you, my boy, Paris is the most beautiful city in the world.”

It struck me as odd and sad to hear a man who was half-blind pass judgment on the appearance of a city. But, I thought—I who had never seen this city before—what a vision of it he must have in his acquisitive mind’s eye, built up at intervals in perhaps fifty years. Perhaps, I reflected, the estimation of the young, bright eyed, un biased observer is the least authoritative of all. Certainly I could not imagine a more beautiful city.

Mr. Auerbach sighed again. “And I tell you,” he added, “it would be the greatest city in the world too if the Germans had it. What a pity they lost the War!”

I could scarcely bear to hear this, just there in the sunlight, with fine spun shadows on the pavement, and the fragrances of tobacco and petrol and women borne round us by courteous breeze; just then, in 1923, so soon after the treaty of peace. I exclaimed, “But why, Mr. Auerbach? Why?”

You see, I was not in a position to deny what he said. I was an outsider, what you might call a virgin tourist. I was not pro-French at all, I did not know the French. On the other hand, I had spent a year in Germany and I was fond of certain Germans. There was no bias in my heart, not yet; no French fearfulness, nor even the expectation of another Armageddon. I suppose, in fact, that hearing Mr. Auerbach make that statement was the first political or historical fright of my life.

“Why, Mr. Auerbach? Why should the Germans have it?”

“Because France,” he replied, “is a sensual, effeminate, idle, decadent nation. The Germans are superior to them. The Germans are a wonderful race; they are virile, hard-working, patriotic, self-sacrificing, with the future before them.”

I think we never spoke of it again; in any case I did not make a quarrelsome issue of it between us. It was a history lesson for me. The point of it was the extraordinary lack of foresight of so many well-meaning Germans and German-Jews, caring for nothing in the world so much as the recovery of that injured, invalid Reich which was to grow too strong for them, so soon. I have mentioned the important English believers in Germany; there were a good many of the same persuasion and influence in every country.

The scorn of Mr. Auerbach also first suggested to my immature, uninformed American mind another grave problem: the problem of the weakness of France. Evidently Great Britain and the United States have expected too much of that nation which they have loved more than any other; and now many Englishmen and Americans say of it, word for word, what Mr. Auerbach said. A better understanding of its nature and limitations, a measure of exoneration in the eyes of the world, will be one of the chief difficulties and one of the noblest aims of the peacemaking after this war. I myself think that an entirely Anglo-Saxon world, with no respect for the weak Latin nations, no interest in their grandeur of art, no confidence in their antique sagacity, would scarcely be worth living in. Both the heritage and the future expectation of humankind would be cut in half; and it would be absurd, like a world of men without women.

Mr. Auerbach did go blind, a year or so after our journey abroad together. For various reasons I did not keep up our friendship, so that I never had to sympathize with him in person concerning the fate of the Jews and those superior liberal Aryans in Germany whom he so fondly admired. I do feel a peculiar pity for men of his type who go forward in their minds to meet and indeed welcome a new violence of history with no notion that it concerns themselves and those they love. As to the relative strength of Germany and France, Mr. Auerbach did not live to see how prophetic he had been; he died in 1938.

All summer long that country and the sky over it, if any one gaze could have embraced it all at once, would have been said to be silken, Roman-striped with rainbows. Hard-looking clouds and hard rains were interspersed with choking sunshine. Prodigal breezes brought the needed moisture, and then perversely burned the oats and the immature corn. The continual lightning had much in common with the wild lilies, the grass snakes. The heat smelled like wine. Flowerbeds, green fruit, and pools, shone in abundance in the landscape—false jewels upon plaques of wind-engraved light. None of it, alas, was worth as much as it looked. Never were penury and extravagance so softly fused.

Sometimes the people had drunken hopes, sometimes their faces fell. Nature let them hunger and thirst but drenched their bodies instead with its overflow; through the spray they could not see clearly. Most of them led spendthrift lives now but worked heart-breakingly as in the past. Wistful, continually seduced by amusements, they were educated beyond their station and lived beyond their means, buying at a premium what their comfort-bound and debt-driven effort produced, and in the errors of love begetting children they could ill afford. Most of the children were beautiful and over-ambitious.

Along the cement highways, the buildings of the small town were draped with knitted boughs. Each one was half villa, half cabin; all in ephemeral woodwork. The porches were linked by gossiping friendliness, which ought to have encouraged moral uniformity, self-satisfaction, prudence. But the wild atmospheres of the farming country all around (the promising dawns, reptile-colored, the storms, and undulations of the sunsets) showing themselves to the young and to young couples and retired farmers, affected their emotions otherwise and excited them to every extravagance. Very clearly against all the white clapboards, in a language of flowers, a great deal about them seemed to be expressed: hollyhocks stood for their powerful hands and red faces, hydrangeas turning brown on pruned stems for anxious innocence, for optimism gradually discolored by reality.

Within one particular house, by each piece of furniture, a genteel aspiration was inexpensively represented; and since each piece had a thousand duplicates elsewhere, there was a general effect of bareness. There were two small living rooms thrown into one; three bedrooms which the beds almost filled; a bathroom (but water had to be heated on the stove and carried up); a small kitchen without a servant. Of course there were also a phonograph, a radio cabinet, a piano, a furnace, installations of gas and electricity, an automobile. There were so many doors and windows and the walls were so thin that a sigh under the roof could be heard at the front door. Here one summer long lived a mother, a father, a young daughter, another in ill health with her husband and a baby, a grown son.

The son had returned from a great distance for a holiday. He felt poor; luxury went with his way of living—by his wits—but there was nothing left over. His relatives were genuinely poor, and childlike about it. Their frugality seemed to him sordid, their impracticality spellbound. Their unwise luxuries shocked him; important depravations they had to suffer made him ashamed of his own far-away habits. The landscape and the jeweled weather, the family’s physical beauty, their unstinted affections, contrasted intolerably with their worries. He kept imagining pleas for help which no one would have uttered in any event. Perhaps the trouble was native to the place: as a boy he also had been always in trouble, grasping and ineffectual— he might be drawn into it again. In spite of himself he dreamed of running away, once more. Gallantly, the wistful women reassured him. “Do not exaggerate,” they said. “Your imagination goes too far. We are in the habit of experiencing all this, and we suffer less than you think. We have the necessary.” What they had was food, lodging, love, and pathetic distractions, from day to day, from hand to mouth.