I'm Dying Laughing (71 page)

In the meantime, a fresh trickle of hope had started in her. She and Stephen would see Douglas Dolittle almost every day. Dolittle had many friends, they would be happy again. Paris was already full of interesting, liberal Americans, who lived well, had luxurious villas, apartments, went abroad, loved France, drank wine at dinner, had good cooks. Life again, thought Emily to herself, after the plague hospital. She felt she had impressed the melancholy, good-looking Dolittle; they might become fond of each other. ‘Oh, God, how I long for a real affection, a love, to which a political proviso is not attached.’ How long had they wasted their time treading mazes in no man’s land. She sat down with Stephen after the party for a breather and talked things over. They both felt released and softer towards each other.

Emily wished they had Christy with them again: that would complete their happiness. She said to Stephen, ‘Our storms are over. Poor Christy suffered from them. I hope in a few months we can enchant him back again. We will all be different. It was a tearing-apart of ourselves. Now we are convalescent. What bliss! What a paradise! Eh, a real marriage at last: the voice that breathed o’er Eden, that earliest wedding day—oh, my heaven, what bliss!’

She fell on Stephen’s neck.

Stephen talked of practical things, too. He had to see his mother the next day about the actual conditions under which she would give or lend him the money. She had wanted to meet Dolittle and Stephen’s present friends.

‘As Anna says, you cannot get twenty-five to forty thousand dollars without a consideration. It’s fair enough, as Pegler would say. Henceforward I associate only with Dulles, Walter Lippmann, Truman, etc. But she has spoken to Dolittle: she is going through with it.’

Stephen believed that Dolittle was delighted to have the support of a family like the Howards, even if the money was a comparatively small stake. Stephen was to be a partner.

‘I shall have my room, my desk, my secretary.’

‘And why not,’ said Emily. ‘Douglas is lucky to get a man like you. There are so many oddballs and deadbeats roaming around, opium-eaters of a sort, wanting to park their ragged ass in a publishing house, do anything to be the handmaids of literature. And you! He’s got someone right from the top of the tree.’

‘And when we really get started, we’ll take your books and mine and they’ll get translated, too.’

‘Thank heaven; and I can write what I want now,’ said Emily.

Stephen frowned, ‘First, let’s get on our feet. I have managed to bring my family round and get them to respect me. Let’s not go wildcatting now. You have several money-books to finish. First things first.’

Emily turned red. However she said, ‘Tomorrow, I must get off those letters Anna wants us to write.’

Stephen thought it of no importance. Bad news could wait; also the curses of their former friends. Emily was restless, though; wanted to know the issue. Would even Mernie Wauters visit them now?

‘Why ever not? He’s a man of the world. Besides he likes our food and drink.’

‘Suzanne says that Mernie has had to do a lot of standing up for us, since the last visit of some character, sent especially from the USA to blacken us. Mernie has been faithful to us, she said, terribly decent and kind and warm. From him and Suzanne I learn that we never had any idea of what was really going on in this stupid inferno, fry’em and boil ’em business. Surely the people over there have something better to do than fry us on a pitchfork. Oh, I hate and despise them. And if it hadn’t been for Vittorio himself we would have never known what went on; and that there had been a frightful uproar among the great ones, that Cachin and Duclos and Togliatti and Palme Dutt and Harry Pollit had been warned of or knew of our taking part in a turmoil, over our miserable presences; and even our evening parties in Paris came up for discussion. Who would have guessed that such slight personages had international meaning? We’re the subject of an international conspiracy! And now because of our eminence we are in outer darkness. If only we had been nobodies, we could have disappeared and never been heard of again, led the quiet life. But because we were spotlighted, top names, we are therefore the worst traitors and fomenters of sedition and in general an international nuisance—Marxian reversals, eh? We could scarcely have got so much fame or notoriety if we had been faithful sheep.’

Stephen said, ‘No more of it. Thank heaven it’s over. I shall never go down on hands and knees again to anyone. My novice days are over. I am now a democrat, a real one, anyone’s equal. I feel as if I’d been let out of a convent.’

Emily said mechanically and sadly, ‘And I as if I had been let out of prison. My heavens, every word might be guilty, every action might bring you on the carpet. How did they invent in these days such a system of crime and punishment? They do nothing to make us want them and we must give up everything for them. So what if the age is decrepit; and eventually towards the year 3000 the world will be communist? My long-mouldy bones will have reached the democracy of dust. In my life I will have been tarred and feathered and ridden the rail for nothing.’

‘Well, it is over. What is there to cry about?’

But she was crying. Large tears were welling from her eyes of their own accord—she sat in her chair, the picture of misery, round, rosy and not crying of herself, but with the regret, remorse, bafflement welling out of her, a profound sorrow.

‘What is it? What is it?’

She said humbly, ‘It’s to be free of that overhanging sensation—I guess. It’s the sadness that once we were loved by people we respected.’

She sat drooping, drowned in tears.

‘Don’t cry, Emily. I can’t stand it.’

‘And Suzanne told me that Madame L’ (she named a high Party name) ‘said that she could never come near us, not even in the presence of fifty people. That if we were at a party with someone else, she could not come, because she would herself rather have died or committed suicide—and you know how repugnant and wrong that is to a communist!—than do what we have done!—and,’ she said with a dreadful sob, ‘are doing tonight. She said that even supposing for a moment that everything we say about the Party is true, to do what we do is worse than death, a filthy and contemptible thing beyond description.’

The tears were pouring down her face.

‘My God, I thought we were going to be happy now. When did she tell you this?’

‘Tonight. I said to Suzanne, Bring me face to face with her and I’ll say to her, “You are a leader of women. Don’t you understand the problems of a woman like me? What have I ever done against the human race? I am just a woman who can’t live in disgrace!”’

She got up and was angrily standing in front of Stephen.

‘And tomorrow or tonight I have to write those damn letters to suit your mother, in order to ease twenty or thirty thousand measly dollars out of her. When I myself made, with a turn of the hand, three times that in Hollywood in one year. She’s putting her foot on my neck.’

Stephen said, ‘Don’t talk that way of my mother: she could be worse. Didn’t you say she let you out of prison. Let’s bury the episode. Tomorrow we’ll get down to business. Yes, let’s go to bed. Let the servants clean up for once. Don’t let the ghost of your stepmother keep you out of bed.’

‘No, I’ll clean up and begin to mumble the text of those letters over to myself. I won’t sleep unless I get that fixed. It’s like Mernie said. You knew they were on your trail and at last the Gestapo knocks on your door and you’re almost thankful. It’s over.’

Stephen was very pale, ‘Let’s go to bed. Leave the ashtrays. I can’t stand any more.’

They got into bed and turned off the light. Suddenly she shivered a little, but it was a giggle. It increased: she began to laugh. She laughed outright, frankly, hilariously: she roared with laughter.

‘Go to sleep: the bed’s shaking, Pagliaccio,’ he said, touching her with his hand.

‘Oh-ho-ho,’ she continued.

‘All right, you dumb ox, you down, what is it?’

‘We were going to clean up Europe with the Marshall Plan and already Europe has cleaned us up,’ said she, strangling between laughs. She continued wilder.

He said, ‘Very funny. Go to sleep.’

‘Haw-haw-haw.’ The house rang with her gigantic laughter, ‘Ha-ha-ha, oh-hoho.’ She got up and tried to walk about, ‘Stephen—oh-hoho, save me!’ She fell on the bed and turned on her side trying to stifle her laughter. ‘Haw-haw-haw, oh, my God, oh-ho-ho, I shall die!’

She sobbed, struggled, strangled, shouted, screamed with laughter, strong, immense laughter, it seemed, not hysterical, the great roaring of big lungs and a strong heart.

Stephen turned on the light and sat up. Her face was crimson, tears poured out of her eyes. Her bosom heaved convulsively. He said, ‘Stop it! You’ll have convulsions. Stop! Stop it!’ He slapped her.

She stopped, still heaving, and sat up to glare ferociously at him, ‘Don’t you dare touch me. I’ll kill you.’

‘Calm yourself.’

She said, ‘You wretched worm. How I hate you! How I despise and hate you!’

He looked at her astonished, his mouth half-open. Her eyes fell lower, thoughtfully, and she said forcibly, ‘And myself!’

She laughed a little, feebly, ‘But we are happy! But we have made good. The Howards have squeezed a pittance out of Mamma. We have lost all our friends, but we have made genteel acquaintances and we’ll get yet to a Walter Lippmann cocktail party.’

She laughed softly, ‘I’m deleerious, I’m raving, I’m so happy.’

‘Have you finished?’

She turned to him, ‘I’m a damned soul, I’m lost, I’ve betrayed everyone and everything. But it’s all right, we can pay the servants.’

He dropped down on his side and moaned, ‘Leave me alone. I can’t cope with all this. I can’t take any more. It’s too much. I’d rather die. If I have your contempt like that I’d rather die. I only wanted to make you happy.’

She looked at him with contempt, ‘I have given up the whole world but thank heaven, I have become a Howard. Now I must mention every one of their names with respect, four-footed, false-hearted Fairfield, four-alarm-bitch, dear Dale, who can tell you all about the Cecil Sharp collection, and the dead-head Dolittles and Mrs Humphreys with their loved Sevres. That is to be the field of battle henceforward of Emily Wilkes, who once fought for human freedom.’

‘Leave me alone. I don’t know what this is all about. I only know I make no one happy.’

She was tired. She lay down, baffled. Stephen turned out the light. She began to compose her letter of renunciation to her former friends; but in a few minutes she was fast asleep.

In the morning she got up about five and began at once typing her recanting letters. The first was to Ruth and Axel Oates, now back in the USA where Axel had set up another weekly and news service. She wrote to them first, thinking they were the only ones who might still be her friends; ‘and to get my bloodstained hand in.’

She began with an intense burning hatred of the Germans for what they had done—to Europe, to France, to the Jews, to children—and mingled in with this civilities towards England, which in its faded conservatism and anaemic socialism, she still loved; and to Belgium, whose great wealth and kermis spirit and bad French she loved; and cowards Italy where they intended to go in spring, and to Geneva where they might one day reside. She then discussed English Labour, ‘childish, on a lower level, unsuitable when we live in an epoch of absolutes.’

‘What did Stephen say only last night? Ah, well, one can debate the socialist policies of parties in England and the USA. But actually it’s all shadow, no substance. Neither of these countries can or will produce any significant organization of the proletariat. Let us talk about Reality, History; for example, France, Italy—and ourselves in this time and place. Stephen is taking a new step, he will be learning, writing, and the old frustration will slowly disappear. I hope he will be at once appreciated; he needs it. The whole idea of Gaudeamus Press must be revised. Stephen has so many ideas; and they admire and respect him and wait on his word, I can see that. It is true that he hankers after a thing like the
Labour English Review
which, childish as it is, would be readable if it had the editorship of a man like Stephen. This is an interim. He may go on to something like that. As it is, without a period of reassurance, he cannot go down once more into that shadow struggle with gigantic, venomous, ever-changing pygmies. For Stephen now, another kind of life, the sunlight; no wandering in the amorphous mist but battle in the sun and struggle for reason, blessed reason, independent reason, which lives apart from shibboleths and apart from the darkness and flame that surrounded the Inquisition, the mysterious sects, the devil-worship, the Trotskyists and other sectaries. Yes, they say it all happened because they are small in numbers and cannot reach the people; perhaps that is so, but even in France and even in Italy where the membership is large, can it be said that the individual does not suffer? That no injustice is done? Are there no innocent martyrs whatever in the bloody dark unrevealed chronicle of Bolshevik history, no innocent people afraid to return to their loved country for fear of a rope or a shot in the dark? No people hauled out of bed and brought suddenly up on strange charges, ignorant of the denouncer, the accuser? Oh, the dread secret denunciation and private informer, meaning nothing and arising out of jealousy, envy, crime, lust or even a little cash, blackmail, pressure but ending up as only one thing—your name on the records of infamy now and forever. Your name pilloried innocently. How can the innocent person defend himself? He cannot. The innocent suddenly charged, behaves like the guilty, guiltier than the guilty. It is the criminals who get off and have false papers and friends in the police. But we, never—no, indeed, once accused how can we not take our stand with the other side? For terror and dishonour and misunderstanding await us on the side our hearts once chose. Oh, alas, dreadful dilemma which cannot remain a dilemma, for we are not obscure persons. We must live and work, bring up children nobly and why should we fail? For an error? A judicial error? And are communists, those pious stiff-necked people the pattern of the philistine, better than others? Indeed, as they used to say, Tammany is better for the poor, for you can buy them and they will listen to the broken-hearted mother who has a few dollars in her hands. And if you can buy communism, where is their virtue? So they remain unhuman. We must live on the side we belong to. I remember hearing my father talk about an engineer, Phil Brotherton, working in Mexico. He sympathized with the Mexican workers, but he said if his Mexican workers rose against the damn gringos (it was then) he would have to take refuge with the whites, and fight with them. And we too—with the whites! Ah, this waiting, this waiting; why are we always waiting? Is it a situation of our class in our age?