Earthly Powers (16 page)

       "Rodney, Rodney."

       The rear stretcher-bearer shook his grizzled head. The ambulance driver carried Rodney's bag downstairs, but I forgot to give him the artificial limb. I told Brett, the porter, that I was going away for a time and gave him five pounds to pack my books and household effects into boxes and stow these in the cellars. I scribbled a note to the landlord terminating my lease. Secret war service, I said, an urgent posting. God knows what happened to poor Rodney's leg.

CHAPTER 18

I registered at the Marmion Hotel in Bloomsbury under the name of Henry M. James. The M., chosen randomly, I later discovered stood for the dachshund Max. I had a few words with Humbert Wolfe, poet and civil servant, who eased my way to obtaining a visa from the consular department of the French Embassy. We were, after all, at war, and only the doomed had free access to the fields of France. I could claim a sort of business in Paris: the British farce Goddam, freely adapted from my French farce Parleyvoo, was going into rehearsal at the Odéon, with André Claudel in the lead, and it seemed reasonable that I should at least look in and protect such features of the original as I valued. I got my visa without trouble and then wondered whether I dared risk visiting poor Rodney to tell him of my impending flight. But the police might already be seated by his bed, awaiting me. I telephoned and learned that he was "very poorly."

       It was on the packet from Folkestone that I read of his death. The boat was really War Department transport taking odds and sods to the other shore: officers with strange specialisations, journalists, two men of the French War Ministry, nursing sisters, a platoon of intellectual-looking weeds called an Extraordinary Offence Unit, a bearded but uniformed war artist who left his Evening Standard on one of the deck benches. It was in this newspaper that I read the few lines dedicated to the untimely demise of a notable actor. I wept in the windy marine dark; I had loved him and he, I believed, me. It must be hard for my younger readers to take in the fact that a man could die of influenza. We of that age had electricity, gas, automobiles, rotary printing presses, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, canned goods, Gold Flake cigarettes, mass destruction, aeroplanes, but we did not have antibiotics. Millions were to die of influenza before that year was out. This was, in art, the modern age, the age of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, surrealism, atonality, but of science we knew very little. Even our war was waged on the mediaeval assumption that the enemy was encastled on a hill that was called Central Europe, and that the hill had to be climbed painfully, trench by trench. As for homosexual love, this was a sin against society. I did not know whether, with poor Rodney dead, I was still in danger from Mrs Selkirk and the law, but there was no turning back now. I had committed myself to exile. Save for odd business visits, I would never see England again.

       The train journey from Boulogne to Paris was wretched, full of stops and jerks and railwaymen's shouts in the night. The war artist sat next to me, charcoal-sketching in the dim light a kind of general outline of a scene of slaughter. A fat Belgian opposite had an inexplicable supply of powdery Turk ish delight, which he would offer from a sticky palm. An old lady smoked what looked and smelled like Russian papirosi. When we arrived I had difficulty in finding a taxi. The only motor vehicles around seemed to be Red Cross ambulances. The blackout was intenser than London's. Of the few blue-clad porters at least half wore black bands of mourning. I must get my own black band, I told myself.

       The crippled cabdriver found with difficulty the little Hotel Récamier, which hid in a corner near the huge porticoed church of Saint-Sulpice. I had cabled my request for a reservation, but they had not received the message. Nevertheless, they had a cold little room for me, and there on the rickety table I laid out my unlined paper and fountain pen, earnest of serious work, no more farces. I undressed shivering and cried myself to sleep.

       The next day's windy cloudy Paris was no improvement on the sad and empty city of the night. After a cup of bitter chicory coffee and a stale croissant I went to the bank on the Rue de la Paix to which my London bank had transferred the greater part of my funds. I left with my pockets full of dirty francs, watching without pleasure the stream of Red Cross motors, noting that great hotels had been turned into hospitals, hearing a shattering crump that could only be Big Bertha.

       "Big Bertha," an Englishman said to me in a sad bar on the Boulevard Saint Germain. "Saw a shell explode on the street yesterday. The thing to do is not to run down into the Metro with the rest of the shitscared bastards. If it comes for you, bow it a welcome. Who the hell wants to live anyway?" And he gloomily downed a small glass of something purplish. He then peered at me, pushing his glass toward the barman for a refill. "Know you, don't I? Were with Norman back there on that literary rag, that right? Douglas, that is. Ran away after he got picked up. Buggering little boys, that is. He's her; living off rotten chestnuts. You also in necessary but fearful exile? I'm Wade-Browne, by the way." He was lean and high and hollowchested. "Clever idea, that filthy novel of yours full of tits, putting every bugger on the wrong track. Didn't take us knowing ones in, though." He chuckled sadly and dirtily. "Toomey. Let me see if I can recall Norman's limerick. Ah." And he recited: "A notorious bugger called Toomey Has a heart that's excessively roomy. For shagging and shoving He substitutes loving. Prognosis: exceedingly gloomy."

       My hand trembled as it lifted the ballon of course rouge. I sipped and wet my tie. This man could not yet know of my bereavement. His friend Douglas had a fair idea, though, of my temperament. Even those of my own fleshly persuasion were prepared to find love absurd. Such gigglers, shagging and shoving where they could, were surely damned. But why not also the oiled cheap Casanovas, chalking up shopgirl conquests? Perhaps they too, but not so damned as this boyshagging Douglas. I had only just arrived in Paris; already I knew I had to get out. Douglas defiled it, already defiled as it was.

       Wade-Browne watched me, leering. Then, by way of a sad sneer, he relapsed into his initial gloom. "The problem is," he said, "to make the negative fatalistic wait on the positively suicidal. I mean, in a war people don't take guns and knives to themselves. Suicide rate's very low in wartime. A sought-out blighty one's different. Self-mutilation in the trenches indicates a powerful desire to survive. I'd never do myself in, not with Big Bertha banging away. But getting in the way of the shells is bloody difficult."

       "Why," I said, "do you want to die?"

       "Ah, got a tongue in your arse, sorry, head, eh? Why, you ask. Well, give me a good reason for living. Go on, you do that."

       "Certain physical sensations. The beauty of the earth and of art."

       "Oh Jesus, such shit."

       I said no more. I was not going to mention love.

       "Western civilization has the right idea," he said. "Blowing itself up." Big Bertha crumped again, northeast of us. The barman crossed himself, then shrugged as to say: An inherited superstition, a mere reflex, forgive it. I decided I had better move south. I was a free man, wasn't I? I had a right to flee from dark and danger and deprivation and move to the woods of mimosa. My pockets were full of dirty francs. I could arrange for a drawing account on a branch of the Banque Nationale when I got to where I was going. I would go and pack at once. I nodded coldly at Wade-Browne, then drank up. He called something obscene and whining after me as I left.

       In the street I saw Maynard Keynes with a briefcase under his arm. He was grinning manically at an official-looking Frenchman who spoke rapidly but deferentially, as though this big, confident and clever-looking man had already been created a milord. Keynes evidently wanted to get away from him. He waved at me as though I were the one man he had come to Paris to see, then strode toward me, throwing back fluent commercial French with a Cambridge neigh to the other, a dapper and bowing hat-doffer. Big Bertha crumped somewhere across the river. Keynes and I knew each other, having been fellow guests at at least three Bloomsbury parties. Morgan Foster had been kind to me and had even made tentative gestures in the direction of the possibility of our perhaps conceivably becoming perhaps friends. But, though I liked Morgan well enough, I did not greatly care for his smell, which, incredibly, considering his agnosticism, was not unlike that of stale holy water in a church stoup. Keynes was at that time, as all Bloomsbury knew, trying to turn himself into a heterosexual with a ballet dancer. He now pumped my hand and leered at me, as if he knew why I had left London. He seemed to consider that his own presence required an explanation.

       "Buying pictures cheap for the government. The prices are down to nothing, what with Big Bertha and all the panic. I could," he said, "put you in the way of something. A Georges Rouault, dirt cheap, absolutely."

       "Why me?"

       "Why not you?" He then surveyed me with an eye closed and his bowler-hatted head on one side, not grinning. "You look bruised and lonely. You look like a man who needs a picture to look at. Come to the Ritz and see. Absolutely rock-bottom dirt cheap."

CHAPTER 19

It was not, and never is, possible to ignore the square porticoed bulk of the church of Saint. Sulpice. As I approached the Hotel Récamier with a Rouault under my arm, ready to pack, pay, search for a cab and get to the Gare de Lyon, I had the sensation of a small bomb bursting in my heart. Was I not free not only in the vague sense that is conveyed by odd pictures of oneself drinking at café tables under palm trees, but also in the particular sense of being liberated from fleshly desire? Rodney was dead and I wanted no other lover; wanting no other lover, I did not require physical embraces. Should the itch of the flesh ever come in a depersonalised form, I had only to conjure an image of giggling Norman Douglas handling little dirty boys in order to dispel it. Partly magnetised by the solidity of the church itself, partly thrown toward it by the bursting bomb of hope, I mounted the steps and walked into the stale religious gloom animated by sinners come to confess. It was Saturday, traditional day for the scraping of the pan. I joined the seated bourgeoisie, half of them black banded, awaiting shrift from Father H. Chabrier. The man next to me, who smelt of cloves, was openly reading a copy of Le Rire, or rather taking in a drawing of a skirt-dancer. He was like one who relishes the last drink before closing time.

       Confessing in French was like confessing to my mother. I could see only Father Chabrier's hands beyond the grille, gnarled pale hands that sometimes beat time to his words with a rolled copy of a daily paper.

       "Very nearly two years, hence I missed my Easter duty. Also mass on Sundays and feast days. Also my morning and night prayers."

       "Oui oui oui." He was impatient, he wanted sins of commission.

       "Sins of impurity, Father."

       "Avec des Jemmes?"

       "With men, Father."

       "Aaaaaah."

       I had trouble with the word love. In French, in all its forms and their derivatives, it seemed frivolous or cynical or grossly physical.

       "Do you sincerely repent of those sins?"

       "I cannot very well repent of love, mon père."

       "You must repent of it, you must."

       "How can I repent of what God ordains that we do? Agape, diligentia. I will not say l'amour. I loved a man, and he is now dead. What have I done wrong?"

       "There was the physical in it, as you have said. That was a deadly sin."

       "But that was tenderness, the expression of agape—"

       "Do not use that word agape to me, agape means Christian love, that is blasphemous." He sighed, groaned, then smote the grille thrice irritably with his newspaper baton. "You have committed deadly sin, do you sincerely repent of that sin?"

       "Whatever it is or was, I firmly resolve not to do it again. Will that suffice?"

       "Resolution is only part of it. There must be penitence. Are you sincerely penitent?"

       "You ask me to repent of love?"

       "L'amour expressly forbidden, l'amour filthy and obscene."

       "If that love was truly filthy and obscene, then I repent of it. Will that do?"

       He was not going to be tricked. If there was to be any casuistry, it was for him, a priest of the Church, to perpetrate. He said: "There are without doubt many waiting outside. I do not think you have sufficiently prepared yourself. You must examine your conscience more thoroughly than you evidently have so far done. Come and see me again on Monday. My horaire is fixed to the door, you will see the times when I am here. Go now and pray to be made penitent." And he crashed down his baton in a final beat, like his namesake on the last chord of, say, the Marche Joyeuse.

       So, then, I was to go south unshriven. None could say I had not done my best. When I left the confessional the waiting sinners looked up at me with vague interest. They had perhaps heard the bang of the rolled newspaper. A young girl in black looked up in disquiet and reproach: le père Chabrier was in a bad mood, and all my fault. As I walked to my hotel, Rouault also unshriven, I felt myself to be gently fingered by the savants of the Enlightenment. Tap tap, they tapped. Do more than write farces and sensational fiction. Construct something in which to believe. Love and beauty are not enough.

CHAPTER 20

As some of my readers will know, I wrote a little book called Moving South. I had originally thought of the title Austral, an austere and learned reaction to abominations like Fig a Jig Tray Bon, but filthy Norman Douglas in a manner preempted it with his South Wind. It is part travel book, part highly selective autobiography, part record of my reading en route and en voyage, part trite philosophical essay, ending with an Affirmation of Life, meaning sun, sea, wine, bad peasant cooking. I started it in the Gare de Lyon, during the long wait for the train to pull out, continued it at Orleans, Saint-Etienne, at Toulouse, at Marseilles.