Contango (Ill Wind) (18 page)

“Three.”

Three, was it? Thirty-three would have appeared to concern him no
more—and no less. For he knew then, quite definitely, that he
didn’t want to make another film at all. He was bored, with a boredom
like a hot chafing that would soon break into a sore. “I think
I’ll go out for a walk,” he said, desperately seeking relief.

“But, Nicky, dear, if you wouldn’t mind, there are just a few
things that you simply must do. …”

This time it was autograph-books that had to be signed. There was a whole
heap of them awaiting the scribbled “Raphael Rassova” which,
since it would inevitably convert the mere admirer into the devotee, was
considered well worth the trouble both by Sylvia, with her experience, and by
Nicky’s new private secretary, with his. This latter person was a
hearty, hand-shaking New Yorker, specially recommended by Vox for the
education of rising stars in the way they should twinkle.

Nicky filled his fountain-pen and set dismally to work. Just before he had
finished the secretary admitted a girl journalist who wanted to know his
life-story, how it felt to be famous, and his opinion of American womanhood.
A few of her questions he answered frivolously, and afterwards Sylvia warned
him against this; for it appeared that journalists were dangerous people,
with immense power to injure him if they conceived themselves slighted. He
was, he realised, a much more vulnerable person now than ever
before—an idol, it would seem, only so long as he skilfully avoided
becoming a target. He grumbled for a time, but there was soon the need to
dress for a dinner and reception that were being held that evening in his
honour. He went in a state of grudging resignation induced by several
cocktails, shook hands with between four and five hundred people, made a
short speech, signed menu-cards by the dozen, and drank some rather bad
brandy. As he crossed the pavement afterwards with Sylvia to reach their car,
a crowd of girls who had apparently been waiting in the rain for some hours
rushed forward. His coat was torn slightly and one girl put her arms round
his neck and pulled his hat off. He rode back to the hotel ruffled, sombre,
and hardly soothed by the sight of a monster sky- sign spelling out his
pseudonym in letters of vivid scarlet. Sylvia, of course, had been marvellous
throughout the entire evening—marvellous herself, and marvellous in
the way she had tried to spare him the kind of things he disliked. It was the
one axiom he forced himself to admit on every possible occasion—the
marvellousness of Sylvia. That she was beautiful, clever, and immensely
capable of running their married life as a going concern, were facts so
indisputable that he could not easily decide what else there was that she
could have been. Perhaps not very much. And yet… his mood of growing
dissatisfaction seemed just to touch her, as it were, while his back was
turned, and to recoil swiftly whenever he caught himself at it.

That night, in their bedroom, she remarked that he had talked very little
during the evening, and asked if he had been tired. The question, coming
then, focused all his complicated discomforts into a single pinpoint of
misery, so that he answered, rather amazed at the extent of his own
suffering: “Yes, I was tired. The people didn’t interest me, and
I didn’t want to bother with them. Why should I bother with people if I
don’t feel like it?”

“Only that you always used to be so amusing in company,
Nicky—”

He flared up suddenly at that. “Oh, God, must I always be what I
always used to be? That’s the fault of everything—to have to go
on doing the same thing, being the same thing—it’s like that
with films—because of one, you’ve got to go on making two,
three, four, five, six!”

“Nicky, my dear, I don’t know why you should let yourself get
in such a rage. Just because your success has been
wonderful—”

“Yes, I know it’s because of that. It’s only the happy
failures who have freedom to swop grooves. If you’re unlucky enough to
be a success, you’re expected to stay where you’re put so that
mass- hysteria knows where to find you…. Oh yes, it’s wonderful all
right. But I remember I once said that the Californian scenery was wonderful,
and you told me that you were tired of it because it just went on being
wonderful. A wise remark, that, Sylvia.”

“I was despondent in those days, if that’s what you mean. I
remember how I envied you your eagerness for things—you had plenty of
it then.”

“Well, I don’t envy you yours now. I could stand you enjoying
all this success if you were only a little privately amused by it. But I
don’t think you are. I think you really believe that ’Red
Desert’s’ a masterpiece.”

“I certainly haven’t reached the point of despising it, as you
apparently have.”

“I don’t despise it—I just think it’s ridiculous.
The idea of the Indians was all right to begin with, but the ending you let
them stick on was utterly fatuous. Of course if it was merely money you
wanted, that’s a sound reason, I admit. But why go on pretending that
the thing’s still any real good?”

“You agreed to the change of ending yourself.”

“Oh, yes, I’d have agreed to anything. To tell the truth, I
was so damnably bored by the whole business by that time
that—”

Even the squabble, he reflected heavily, was proceeding with the
orderliness of routine. They had had many such, during their four months of
married life, and all had left their sincere affection for each other
entirely unimpaired. But now he felt only saddened instead of slightly
exhilarated by the quick-fire exchange, because he could sense behind it the
pull of so many tenuous threads of emotion. He felt uneasy, exacerbated,
aware of a host of irritating tendernesses. He said, pacifying himself:
“Oh, what’s the good of all this wrangling, Sylvia? I’m in
a filthy temper. I think I’d better work it off on some of those
signatures. There are still about a million of them to be done.”

“Oh, don’t bother, darling, if you feel tired. They can
wait.”

“No, no, I couldn’t sleep if I tried—I may as well get
on with them.”

He put on a dressing-gown and passed through the adjoining rooms into the
one that had been fitted out as a temporary office. Here, on a large table,
lay his job—mysterious and cabalistic, the writing of two curious
words, with his own hand, on pieces of paper— the last lip-service to
personality demanded by a rubber-stamp world—and even then the
personality was bogus. The trouble with modern fame, he decided, wielding his
fountain-pen, was that it so soon became humourless. It had been fun, at
first, being fęted by celebrities and having money enough to buy
fur-overcoats and Cadillacs; just as it had been fun at first, in fact rather
a lark, to go picture-making in the mountain-deserts of New Mexico. New
sensations were always interesting up to a point, but the point was so
fatally often that at which they ceased to be new. He swung round to the
window—it was on the thirtieth floor or so—and watched the
glittering panorama which represented the strange world that he had
conquered. But had he conquered it, or had it only conquered him? On a desk
near by lay an enormous heap of unopened letters, forwarded from the film
company’s headquarters in Los Angeles and all addressed to him by
unknown admirers. It was his secretary’s job to deal with them, of
course; the usual procedure was to send a polite reply enclosing one of the
signed postcard photographs. But he opened half a dozen himself, in mere
curiosity, and glanced through their contents—ill-spelt appeals for
money, hard-luck stories from out-of- works, maudlin sentimentality from
schoolgirls, passionate unburdenings from bourgeois wives in big cities… .
He threw them back into the heap after a few moments, in a mood of utter
nausea. And these letters, he realised, came by every post, all the year
round, and not only to him, but to Sylvia and every other screen-idol. They
were his fan-mail, individually of no importance, but to be carefully counted
and classified as an index-figure of his rise or fall in the public esteem.
He took up his pen and scribbled ‘Raphael Rassova’ once more, but
the name, facing him now so absurdly on all sides, transfixed him into panic
as he thought of the three more films that he was promising to make. He
couldn’t do it; he knew now that he couldn’t and wouldn’t.
To have to stereotype himself like that, with the same theme always repeated
da capo al fine—was it not all a sort of harlotry, standardised
harlotry for those standardised brothels of the machine-mind—the
cinemas? The phrase, pleasing him intellectually, converted his momentary
cowardice into rebellion. He suddenly felt a vast grudge against those who
were offering him, under the guise of success, this rigid and dingy slavery.
He was to become a part of the huge mass-production plant of Fordised
emotions, a rare and expensive raw material surrendered to the machine. It
made him think of a paragraph he had seen in a woman’s journal a few
days before, suggesting that Raphael Rassova would soon be second only to the
Prince of Wales as an object of feminine adoration; and the recollection gave
him a quickening sympathy with that enigmatic figure across the ocean, a man
nearly old enough to be his father, yet condemned to everlasting
Peter-Panhood by a country haunted by the spectre of its own old age. But he,
anyhow, had been born to it, had had half a lifetime in which to get used to
seeing his photograph, like that of a rather forlorn head-prefect, on
magazine-covers and chocolate-boxes. It was harder to accept such bondage
voluntarily, and for no visible reward except the power to spend money with
as little genuine freedom as one had been permitted to earn it.

The spectacle of that future, dimly menacing as it had been for weeks,
revealed itself more monstrously as he sat pondering alone. He saw its
tentacles closing in on him with every moment; already the giant machine was
being prepared for his bodily insertion. He felt as if it were about to pulp
him into nothing but a phallic symbol to be held up before the stiffening
glare of the mass-mind. That phrase pleased him too; he felt protected,
somehow, by his own power of mental invective. A little cheered, he turned
more tranquilly to thoughts of Sylvia. He liked her, and would have liked her
nearly as much if she had been a man. The little difference, never important
to him, had grown less so with familiarity. Perhaps in that sense it was a
mistake for him to have become anybody’s husband, even a fourth one. A
sudden consciousness of his own personal tragedy came over him at that
moment. He was rootless, like so many of that war-spoilt generation; without
parentage, nationality, or religion, he had developed a sacred petulance of
spirit which was all he could confidently call his own. But it was too
fragile to bear the imposition of outside ties. The thought of himself as a
father, or as an old man, made him fret uneasily; he had no reserves of
stability, his only happiness lay in movement, though whether, in the long
run, he was chiefly pursuing or escaping, he could never be quite sure. Just
now, at any rate, he wanted definitely to escape—from New York and
America altogether; yet, if he did, he wondered if Sylvia could possibly
understand that he was no more tired of her than an explorer is tired when he
moves on. All he hoped was doubtless the impossible, that she could let him
go as joyfully as he, if she were but joyful at all, could leave her.

He went to bed, slept badly, and rose in the morning restless as from a
series of nightmares; after breakfast he left Sylvia busy with maids and
secretaries and took a brisk walk along the pavements, wearing his hat and
overcoat as disguisingly as he could. Even that, for instance, had been an
exciting sensation at first—the continual expectation of being
recognised by strangers; but by now it had become nothing but a fierce
unpleasantness. He walked fast, eyeing shop-windows furtively, and managed to
remain unnoticed for a time; but along Broadway some girls coming out of a
department-store identified him. There were shrill cries of
“Rassova,” and before he could gather his wits he was hurrying
along with a shouting and cheering mob at his heels. He turned into a side-
street, increasing his pace and throwing a smile to his pursuers; a woman
seized his hand and shook it vehemently; then, with the smile still streaked
across his face, he saw an open doorway and swerved into it, blindly pushing
open the inner doors to which it gave access. To his surprise he found
himself in a church. It was too dark to see clearly, but he caught a distant
glimpse of another occupant and hurried towards him. “Excuse me,”
he began, rather breathlessly, “but is there a different exit out of
here? I want to get away from a crowd that’s following me—you
see, I’m Raphael Rassova.”

Despite the urgency of the matter, he could not restrain a thrill of
pleasure when he found that the man had clearly never heard of the name.
“Rassova, the movie-actor,” Nicky explained, and the man
answered, in a quite unimpressed voice: “Oh, I see…. I’m afraid
you’ll have to go out by the way you came in, but there’s a room
where you could wait for a time. I’ll tell the crowd to clear off, if
you like.”

“Thanks,” said Nicky. “I’m terribly obliged to
you.”

Only then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom of the interior, did
he perceive that his rescuer wore clerical costume, and a few minutes later,
sitting by the fire in a comfortably furnished vestry, he realised from
pictures on the wall that the church was Roman. After an interval the priest
rejoined him and began to chat casually and still without the slightest
inquisitiveness. When Nicky out of courtesy volunteered further information
about himself, he merely said: “Oh, yes, I understand— some of
the people in the crowd told me about you.” He spoke in a way that
rather charmingly avoided both contempt and any excessive interest.

“Perhaps you didn’t believe me till then?” Nicky
suggested.