I'm Dying Laughing (7 page)

‘Well, comrades—’ said Emily, diffidently and with a flush, ‘I think I’ll get back to my hotel.’ They let her go.

Others she left standing at the door of the hall. One serious journalist from Chicago made quite a face as she hurried past him, engrossed in Howard’s words; his lineaments crashed together; he turned dark with disgrace.

‘Now, he’s going to hate me. Oh, jiminy,’ she said to Stephen, ‘I’m like B. D. Given a chance we’ll all teasers and cheats.’

‘Forget him. We’re going to lunch.’

She sighed, ‘If you knew the lift I get being with you. Life is a battlefield, but not a field of honour. Here at least, we are all on a field of honour.’

Stephen said, ‘Every writer worth his salt begins by some notion of revolt. He wants to show people that the labels are wrong; and then there’s the contagion. Writers don’t write about themselves—they need others. The others—the all-important.’

‘Ah!’ she said. ‘The baffling, puzzling, beloved others. If we could just for half an hour get inside someone else and be someone else, we’d swipe the laurels. If it didn’t kill us. Maybe, it would be the fatal bolt, strike you dead.’

He said, ‘Most writers, even if doing pulp and potboilers—are forced at least once or twice in their lives to say what they see before their own eyes—they wake up one morning and say, “The emperor has no clothes, and I’ve got to tell people that.”’

‘But this lot here are the best, they say nothing but the truth and they are trying to change the world. Oh, I can hardly bear it, it is so thrilling, noble, grand,’ said Emily. ‘What have I been doing all my life? Pulping and potboiling. Every morning I said, “The emperor has no clothes”; but I said, “But the paper runs clothing ads and they won’t let me print that.” How shameful! You don’t know what it is, Stephen. I feel punchdrunk and ethereal too—free. I’m dizzy. I can scarcely breathe. Anything can happen now. To be with the
crème de la crème,
me, the family misfit.’

Things did get better for her, as he said. Howard took her to Langer, to restaurants in the Bois, to Véfour, to La Pérouse, to the Vert Galant, places big and small, with cooking exquisite—‘exquis’ she kept saying—rare, provincial, homestyle. They ate also anywhere, in bistros and cafés, just flopping down laughing, having a drink, saying, ‘We’ll eat here, why not?’ Talking, talking. He took her again to see his uncle, Maurice Howard.

‘Oh, I love you Uncle Maurice, you are so modayray,’ she said. Emily was immoderate. She found that she was a gourmet; but she was too greedy, she wanted to try everything and when she looked at a menu in a good place, not merely to know the meaning of the names but to try them all. She was so eager, delightedly gay, spontaneous, so tumultuously full of joy and folly—and with it, sharp, discerning, salty.

Stephen was satisfied. When he went back to his hotel he would laugh at her enthusiasm, smile, and tears might come to his eyes. The girls he had known knew the right things to say and eat; they enjoyed themselves, too, but they suffered from the respectability of the rich; especially if they shared his political views.

At the end of a week in which they saw each other every day and ate together at least once a day, they were thought of together; so that any group in a restaurant expecting them, left two places side by side for them. Stephen said on a Friday, when he was taking her home, ‘I have sent a cable to Mother about the girl she wants me to marry.’

‘Oh!’

‘I said it was no use. I wrote a letter to Mother at the same time and one to the girl telling them I have made up my mind.’

‘Mm.’

‘If you will have me, I will have you.’

There was a pause. He continued, ‘Let’s go back on the same boat. We can come to Paris later, not for a honeymoon, because I have work to do as soon as I get back; but next year.’

He stopped and turned to her, his eyes full with his resolution.

She was too startled to be shaken; she thought he should have asked her before writing home. Still, there it was. He was still looking at her, waiting for something.

‘All right.’

‘I made up my mind a few days ago,’ he said.

When did I make up my mind? she said to herself, in annoyance.

Then he said, ‘I want to explain why. We are going to work together. This is a time between worlds. You could sink into pessimism if you did not have a plan. Roosevelt entered the White House with a plan, that is why he can still make out: no one else has one. Roosevelt, when he entered the White House at a time when fourteen million Americans were starving, and the “tide of destitution rising” as someone said, did not promise reform, a new order, he promised revival for the business community.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he promised a more abundant life, he promised the forgotten man that he would be brought to the national table—’

‘Yes, Lazarus. There isn’t just a forgotten man, but a forgotten nation, grudgingly kept alive. So the scene is set for total breakdown or some sort of social plan. We never had a common man’s social plan before. The Constitution, though the refuge of our liberties, is secretly used in favour of the rich. Though its general rhetoric means the poor can use it too. Relief is not a social plan, it’s a few sandbags against the flood. Everyone knows relief isn’t the way to run a nation and make the human tree burst with flower and fruit.’

Then he said, ‘That occurred to me because I worked for a while in the orchards in California as casual labour. No different from what you know or expect. And those “miserables” don’t want to revolt—just one red-eyed man in a thousand—because revolt is even worse. They’ve had enough of fighting, black eyes, broken noses, thugs, sheriffs, and all to get rags, beans and something mud-coloured in a tin mug. The only reason they throw rocks at the overseer is to get into jail. Rather eat crow than bite the dust.

‘The thing is they don’t go any more for social sunrise ideas. Here we’ve got five or six, the League for Social Justice formed by Father Coughlin, politically dubious; the End Poverty in California clubs of Upton Sinclair, a coffee house dream; Dr Townsend’s clubs for old age pensioners; there’s the Share the Wealth Clubs of senator Huey Long—all vote-catchers; and two left political parties, the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota and the Progressives of Wisconsin. They don’t fit into our political history. There’s the Communist Party which has the backing of international experience, a great connection overseas and a plan—but people don’t want revolution. There all you can buy is trouble, misery and daily bouts with the police, only too glad to earn their pay with steel and tear gas. “I want a job! Take this you bastard!” And he gets it in the teeth. It’s a frightful cosmic joke. If you have a full belly. It’s either a faceless future or some trained brute plugging you in the guts. All these people here, our colleagues, know it; but the people who get slugged don’t know what it’s for, can’t talk, can’t write.’

‘They don’t know? One plug on the nose and they know: it’s a college education,’ said she.

‘But resentment isn’t enough. This could have been a revolutionary situation in the USA—like Russia in 1917, but there wasn’t enough preparation. In Russia the writers in the eighties expected revolution—they knew it couldn’t last. Thousands went out into the country, devoted their whole lives to teaching the people, lost their lives at it. It’s a terrible business to be in social reform. It gives me a pain, a real pain, in my head, in my stomach. I’ve got pains everywhere and I don’t know if it’s fear or despair or incompetence. I know I’m incompetent but I must go on.

‘And there you are, Emily, full of joy and interest and love and humanity and a need to know and you are strong, can’t be crushed. I know you’re strong and loyal. A faithful love, a true, great woman. You have the faith I’m afraid to lack.’

‘How do you know I’m faithful and strong?’ she objected, feeling cornered by this belief in her, without any foundation that she could see.

He laughed.

They were crossing the Luxembourg Gardens, on their way to a students’ restaurant in the place du Panthéon. First, as he knew, she would stand, read the incised letters across the pediment of the Pantheon—
Aux grands hommes, to patrie reconnaissante—
to (our) great men, (their) grateful country. She would sigh with enthusiasm, say, ‘Oh,
grande nation,
loving glory and greatness.’

He had said, ‘You haven’t seen Lincoln in his temple in Washington. The archaeologists to come, ten thousand years hence will find it in the rubble of time and say, “This was the American God”, or they may think it is Manco Capac, First Inca—it won’t make any difference, and the Gettysburg Address will be tacked on to the legend of Paul Bunyan, for things will be as mixed as Mesopotamia by then.’

‘He is the American god,’ she said.

‘Not FDR?’

She stopped half-way across the sandy walk by the fountain and burst out, ‘Stephen, I came over here to see Europe; and this is all I’ve seen. I don’t care if it will be gopher-mounds in ten thousand years. I came to see Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Florence, Rome, Amsterdam, Dublin—I wanted to go back with them all in arms.’

He paused. ‘Well, I could take you to Baden-Baden and Karlsruhe where my family holidayed and lived a hundred years ago; but it will be on the up-and-up, no honeymooning; the Germans know from no jokes,’ (he said with an assumed German accent), ‘or Salzburg perhaps. We have a few days yet before they’re Nazified. But Berlin? Vienna? The pot’s boiling. Last July, Nazi conspirators shot Chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna. Last month, Chancellor Hitler, now known as Der Fuhrer, rejected the Versailles Treaty and ordered conscription in Germany. He’s fired the Reichstag, blamed the communists, arrested thousands, even members of the Reichstag, who should be immune; he’s assaulted the Jews and promised Germany revenge. You’ve seen refugee writers yourself. Why go there? You don’t even speak German.’

‘I can say,
Ach, Himmel!
and
Gott sei Dank!
and
Sumpf
and
Pestfaul
,’ she said, making explosive noises.

‘Very good! That sweet song should keep you out of the hoosegow. And they’ll tell you all.’

‘But I do get news, Stephen. Emily the Scoop. I want to see where things are happening. Don’t you? You’re a political journalist: you want to meet the President, tell him forceful things. I want to see where Dollfuss was shot to death and Weimer, and where the Weimar Republic was shot to death and I’d like to see I. G. Farben and Krupp’s and where the young no-good Adolf, the Spellbinder, got up the Beer Hall Putsch; yes and Bayreuth. I want to see the Reichstag that was fired by Goering, Ernst, Dimitrov, Torgler, Van der Lubbe and anyone not on your side. That’s how I do business.’

‘Do you think by looking at the ruins of the Reichstag, you’ll know who set it on fire? I know, without spending the train-fare, by the simple deductive route of cut bono.’

‘I know too. But I love to see the spot marked X. I used to have a friend in the firehouse at Keokuk, Iowa—’

‘Were you ever in Keokuk?’ he said.

She pursed her face in her delicious roguish smile. ‘Maybe. He’d phone me and I’d get to the fire before they did. I even helped to save some children and furniture. Forgive the old fire-horse, Stephen. Think! You look up and those walls are soaked with incident, they drip with conspiracy, crack with fiasco and there are the blood-red bystanders, packed with queasy guilt or fear. I like to look at them and think about them. I get on with them, too: people talk their heads off to a journalist.’

‘Are you going to quiz the blood-red bystanders in Berlin? Then, “farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content”! No! I don’t want you to go there. I shouldn’t sleep one night, worrying. All decent people with any sense are flying or packing. The Nazis are crushing opposition: the multi-millions, though humming and ha-ing are preparing to move in behind Hitler; and everyone is
gleichgeschaltet,
co-ordinated, incorporated. It’s the fashion. Mussolini, Hitler, and even the USA is in the shadow of the corporate state: they’re chewing their nails and thinking it over, waiting to see what happens over here, letting the Nazi terror spread its foul wing, while big business recovers. Don’t you know it’s like that? Do you have to go and record the dying shrieks of a republic?’

‘You want to live in Washington and record things.’

He had a strange look, mournful, big-eyed, ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you that we’ve just become engaged? Don’t you want to be with me? If I ask you not to go, won’t you stay with me?’

‘Engaged?’ she said pondering, ‘Are we engaged?’

He took her arm. ‘What are you waiting for? Do you want a ring? Let’s grab the first taxi and we’ll go to the place Vendôme, Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, or place de la République, the five and ten—anywhere. I’ll telegraph Anna for the money.’

‘No, don’t. But I must go somewhere, Stephen.’

‘Go to Amsterdam, that’s not far. Go to Brussels.’

‘I ought to go to Belfast and see where Lennie lives. But I haven’t the address. I don’t suppose by asking around—‘

‘Well, I’m glad. I know you. You’d kidnap him. You don’t want Lennie headlined in the world’s press like Baby Lindbergh and Bobby Franks, do you?’

‘Gee whittaker—you’re the yellow journalist, not me.’

‘I don’t believe Lennie exists. They’re milking you of his pittance.’

‘It crossed my mind,’ she said laughing; ‘but golly, I can’t say such things to them.’

‘If you can get his address, I’ll go to Belfast with you. There! It’s a deal.’

They began laughing, he eased her on their way. They ate in the little restaurant where each student had his separate numbered napkin and they went to the Salle de la Mutualité to the congress; and in the evening they dropped in at the Opéra Comique and saw
Louise
by Gustave Charpentier, but she continued restless.

‘I guess I’m not happy living the perfect romance,’ she said to him; ‘it’s my training; it’s too good; I’m an unbeliever; how can it happen to Emily the Dope?’

‘But it can. You’ll get used to it. You’ll learn.’

He began to talk about their future—we’ll do this, we’ll try that, we won’t have any children at first; I have a daughter and that’s enough. I’ll take you to the best hairdressers and
couturières,
we’ll get rid of your freckles, if you like. On the way back to the hotel, he bought her a large box of chocolates.