House of All Nations (12 page)

‘Of course,' said Michel loudly and cheerfully, still standing at his post, so that they could not see that his face was not composed, ‘I can sleep here: it's just the very thing.' His eyes were fixed on the candle and matches standing on the naked wood.

But Judith Frère insisted on installing him in the bedroom, in the proper bed. There was a built-in wardrobe of unpainted wood, a box at the bedside with scarf, lamp, and book. Jean, his wife, and a square-built girl installed Alphendéry in the bedroom with the most amiable generosity, asked him if he would like some coffee, and all smiling, went out, shutting the door. But first Judith showed him the bathroom and the various little compromises with recalcitrant plumbing that had to be made, and showed him how to wedge his door to, and where to get coffee if he got up first in the morning. And Jean said, ‘If you get up early, just go straight out into the garden and get some fresh air.' It was a long time since Alphendéry's sleeping had been attended with so much love and good will.

He wedged the door and with a stricken look sat on the bed. He felt very sick, not morally, but physically. The floor was uncarpeted and not even planed. It was covered with sandy loam, brought in on the shoes of enthusiastic gardeners of the previous week. The walls were unpainted, the bed coverings thin and rumpled, and the bed linen was the sort one might expect to find in a boy's shack. Michel found that he could not sit upright. His head swam and even the sweet air did not attract him. At no time in his life, perhaps, had he wished more passionately for a loving, decent, quiet, intelligent wife. ‘A working girl,' he said to himself. He visioned, in a moment, what ‘a working girl' would make of this room in no time. He lay on the bed in the bedroom so kindly given him and closed his eyes, pale, mortified, ill. And he was ill.

Adam Constant, a silent and rather tenderly smiling witness of the previous events, now poked his sharp nose and chin through the door, which was not very tightly wedged, and looked at Alphendéry lying there with closed eyes. He came in, took off Michel's shoes, hung up his waistcoat and coat, and covered him with a blanket. Then he tiptoed out and shut the door carefully. He had observed what would scarcely have been conceivable to Jean. All the rest of the house was quiet. Adam went and sat for a long time on the veranda, looking across the wide stretch of garden, over the trees, into the hills and the distance. He was thinking of his own fate. He was convinced his life would be a short one. But the thought of where he was going and how he might die, as well as the soft night air, filled his lungs with an almost divine gust. Into his thoughts for the future stole a recollection of a moment just past. He had gone first up on to the veranda, to meet Judith, as if he had some message to give her. But he had none. She came forward and said in a low, secret, urgent voice, ‘Did you come? I thought you said you could not come so far and get back to work. It does not matter. I am glad. There is room. There are a few others here, but it doesn't matter.'

That was what she had said so secretly and rapidly. And he had answered her, in the same quick, hushed voice, ‘Yes. I know. But I needed the country so much. And I have never seen Jean's garden.'

He thought this incident over for a few minutes and smiled faintly in the dark and nodded to himself. He muttered to himself, ‘There are moments when the air is rarefied.'

Judith, on her pillow, on the mattress beside Jean, in the now dark attic, was thinking, ‘How bizarre was our conversation! What we said and what we meant—why, the voice was the whisper and the thought was the voice. I am happy.'

But now Adam Constant was thinking once more of China, and Judith began to dream that she was telling Jean, her husband, all that had been happening all day.

When Alphendéry woke in the morning he heard sounds all round him and knew it was late. He had tossed and turned, expecting to smell fire at any moment, and had only fallen asleep when the night began to pale. The sheets and pillow slip were also witness to the love the Frères bore their garden. He saw Judith pass the window, dressed in a shirt and trousers and marveled at the girl's becoming
embonpoint
. Adam was rearranging the white little stones that stood round a pond in the middle of the lawn. Someone was moving round cups and saucepans in the kitchen. The hungry animal, Alphendéry, got up, and putting his things on without washing (he secretly blessed the country for this) followed his nose to the kitchen. Mme. Lucide, the girl guest, gave him coffee, cheered him, and sent him out into the garden. He picked his way quickly through the house which looked as if a wild wind had passed through it that very morning, and out on to the veranda.

A great shout from Jean Frère greeted him. Jean was digging on the other side of the clay path. Alphendéry had the illusion for a moment that he had gone blind. He blinked. Where was the garden? Jean Frère's eyes shone. He smiled his golden infant smile at Michel, let his spade fall into the tussocks, and said, ‘There, do you like it! Gosh, I feel a different man out here. There is my garden!' He pointed without any self-consciousness to the tangled weeds, grass, shrubs, and lumps round him. Then scrutinizing Michel's expression and hearing Adam laugh, he explained, ‘My two brothers dug it up a bit last year. Now it needs doing again.'

Two or three square yards of ground showed the color of earth and were drastically heaved about. The earth was sandy loam and very stony. Behind and round this a wild half-acre stretched away to a flat marshy spot where water still shone. The half-acre went up and down, a vale of a thousand knolls in miniature. The pasture grass was thick, high and knotted, while along the side of the path were old garden shrubs gone to seed and choked in weeds and rubbish. Round the house, however, Judith had planted soft-leaved herbaceous plants, mostly lifted from the grounds of a deserted burnt house. They spent the morning now, picking out the best plants from the encroaching weeds, and even Michel was able to distinguish a few good-looking plants which he indiscriminately named ‘lilies.' Jean was so extravagantly happy all the morning and Judith and Adam seemed so cheerful that Michel could not help feeling that he had missed one or two good points which might be urged for the country.

Adam finished his job arranging the stones and then began to break up new ground in the wild half-acre. He found some mint and this brought Mme. Lucide out, to hunt for plants for salads, poultices, and infusions. Adam knew these things as well as Mme. Lucide and got on beautifully with her. Alphendéry could not help feeling a little hurt that his friends treacherously possessed all this agricultural learning, away from him.

Jean appeared, yawning, mooched round with them for a bit, and then gave up work and sat on a tuft. He showed no disposition to come and sit by Michel and talk politics. Jean only wore slacks like Adam. His rather long, robust, and youthful torso lent more light and youth to his broad sunny face. Adam, too, looked different, above his naked body: he looked more the frail earthly first man hearing the strains of sun music in one of William Blake's dawn pictures.

The ground broke open, brown, odorous, faintly moist. Adam drove the hoe into the matted strong grass roots which held the earth together. Judith watched them occasionally and smiled and called from the veranda.

‘It's heaven here,' called Jean blissfully. ‘How grand you look, Judith, by Jove! You must live in the country: you were made for it. You look ten years younger.'

‘I don't look fourteen,' protested Judith, glancing unconsciously at her developed figure.

‘Women always look better in the country,' said Adam in quiet, affectionate tones: ‘they understand Mother Earth.' He looked up at Judith and gave her a smile. Her clothes were tight-fitting because she was growing out of them. She was the perfect wife now, wedded to the earth, functioning with it, secretly fertile. The two men felt free and happy. But Judith, though alive with joy, was seen in many reflective poses round the house that morning, absorbed in some idea, perhaps not entirely pleasant. She was feeling the buffets of a battle taking place, not only in her heart, for it had long moved out of that cramping corridor, but all through her body, in her chest, her muscled waist, her broad hips, her thighs, even in her ankles. It seemed that this conflict had started up suddenly the moment Adam Constant had come last night and said, in that quiet voice, ‘I needed the country so much. I have never seen Jean's garden.'

Alphendéry, seeing all this silent activity about him, got up and took a walk up one of the dried mud ruts. They saw him in the distance, patroling by some decayed-looking shrubs and trees, twisting his hand-kerchief into knots, a habit of his, when alone, and probably talking to himself. For talking was his great amusement. Alphendéry had been walking up and down more than half an hour when he glanced for the first time at the shrubs along the paddock track. He recoiled and his heart flopped stickily around. They were loaded with swarms of small black caterpillars, living for the most part in communal cocoons, very large, white, and flossy and through which, though, imprisoned they could still be seen, moving sluggishly. This vermin had attacked a great number of green things in the neighborhood. They ate up the leaves and covered the bare branches with their horrible black masses and their giant white cocoons. They confirmed Alphendéry's worst suspicions about the country. He hurried back towards the house. No one was about. He knew what had happened. They had all gone off to pick ‘dandelions' (which with ‘lilies' completed Alphendéry's botanical universe). They had deliberately left him to walk near caterpillars and gone off to collect dandelions; probably at this moment they were indulging in that raw laughter that degraded even the finest men, even communists, in the country. He met Adam and said, ‘I begin to understand fellow feeling here, because there is nothing between me and the earth.'

‘Yes, it's the beginning of fellow feeling all round, the birth of a curious feeling, that brotherhood is not just an idea, or a fear of loneliness, or a need for telling other people your ideas; the feeling is, this is a piece of the very same flesh, as one piece of velvet and another from the same robe, but, I mean, the texture, the grain, the folding—no, I haven't said it! When you see a lot of wounded in a hospital, covered with bandages, you are just part of a roll of gauze, like the others: you are gummed together with sticking plaster out of the same box. When you see another person and, though you have never held—his hand, you know you are planted in him and he will be obliged to explain you away and stand by you, his life through; and you know he will, just as likely, ask you to die for him, as to lend him a franc, you feel very pleased: you take the sharp knife out of your belt and throw it far away, into the middle of the Luxembourg at night, you scuttle it in the Seine: the sharp knife which we call ambition, or what you will. For, what can you lose, if you die the same day: why shouldn't you go and fight, for example? You have already touched with your finger, lightly but sensibly, the living clay, you have been at the heart of life and seen invisible life. The clay of all living men is on fire, after that, with the same life. But there has to be one, perhaps not your lover, who has to be the door to the house of the living. Do you understand that, Michel?'

‘No,' said Alphendéry, ‘I never experienced that. Perhaps I never will.'

‘It is quite an accident. It happened to me: the odd thing is, I have not much wish to live now.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know.' Adam shook his head and went on cheerfully putting in the little plants from the burnt house. ‘It was a woman,' he added; ‘an ordinary woman.'

For lunch they had aromatic dishes of plants mostly taken from the wild ‘garden.' They praised Mme. Lucide, teased her, and she caught them out on agricultural and country matters. After lunch, Alphendéry went for a short walk and climbed a knoll with Jean Frère. There were tins and rags about: Jean snuffed the air. In the distance, a hill covered with trees stood up.

* * *

Scene Eight: J'Accuse

T
he visit to Frère's garden strengthened the acquaintance between Adam Constant and Alphendéry. ‘When is your book of poems coming out, Adam?' asked Alphendéry, coming in from lunch.

‘In about two months. They are slow. They have always been slow. They are the fruit of seven years,' said Adam.

‘It has to be that way, with poets, perhaps?' said Alphendéry.

Adam's ragged black-and-white face, with its traces of fire and desolation, grew smaller and younger as he smiled. ‘Well, I hope it won't be always so. I put it down to solitude. I always think if we could rub shoulders with a happy people we'd be throwing off poems all day long. I don't believe in conservation. A real poet would be a waster, not a conserver. He'd scatter his fragments everywhere, along the roads, in an automobile, passing a manured paddock, saying Cheerio to a girl in an apron outside a country pub. Oh, I think when the people are free a great harvest will come up and the poet will be the first to eat from it, with the stealing birds and the harvesters at noon. To feel the hard meat, the reluctant milk of the heavy cream grain! What is more beautiful on earth than the land under wheat and barley? It takes all the shades of the sky like a thick pile. All the voices of the air gather in it to sleep and stir and sleep. It gives comfort, it gives wit, it gives peace. So is a land heavy with well-watered and round-ripened people. I wish I could see that age.'

‘Well, you will: you are young enough,' said Alphendéry.

‘No,' said Adam, ‘I don't think so. I might. But I don't want to see it when I'm too old. I want to see it now: I want to see a harvest now, even this year! It's silly: the world won't begin to roll faster for my sake.'

‘You had lunch with Henrietta Achitophelous?'

‘Yes. She is beautiful. Full of the hairsprings of her secrets. But she doesn't know them. She never will.' He laughed questioningly. ‘Platitudes and vain health go together: you see it in new colonies, virgins, and humanitarians.'