Prater Violet (3 page)

“Have you asked him?” I wanted to inquire, but the question sounded unworthy of the occasion. I met Chatsworth's solemn eye, and forced a weak, nervous smile.

However, the smile seemed to please Chatsworth. He interpreted it in his own way, and unexpectedly beamed back at me.

“I bet I know what Isherwood's thinking,” he told Bergmann. “He's right, too, blast him. I quite admit it. I'm a bloody intellectual snob.”

Bergmann suddenly looked up at me. At last, I said to myself, he is going to speak. The black eyes sparkled, the lips curved to the form of a word, the hands sketched the outline of a gesture. Then I heard Chatsworth say, “Hullo, Sandy.”

I turned, and there, standing beside the table, incredibly, was Ashmeade. An Ashmeade nearly ten years older, but wonderfully little changed; still handsome, auburn-haired and graceful; still dressed with casual undergraduate elegance in sports coat, silk pullover and flannel bags. “Sandy's our story editor,” Chatsworth was telling Bergmann. “Obstinate as a mule. He'd rewrite Shakespeare, if he didn't like the script.”

Ashmeade smiled his smooth, pussycat smile. “Hullo, Isherwood,” he said softly, in an amused voice.

Our eyes met. “What the hell are you doing here?” I wanted to ask him. I was really quite shocked. Ashmeade, the poet. Ashmeade, the star of the Marlowe Society. Obviously, he was aware of what I was thinking. His light golden eyes smilingly refused to admit anything, to exchange any conspiratorial signal.

“You two know each other?” Chatsworth asked.

“We were at Cambridge together,” I said briefly, not taking my eyes from Ashmeade's, challenging him.

“Cambridge, eh?” Chatsworth was obviously impressed. I could feel that my stock had risen several points. “Well, you two will have a lot to talk about.”

I looked squarely at Ashmeade, daring him to contradict this. Ashmeade simply smiled, from behind his decorative mask.

“Time to be getting back to the studio,” Chatsworth announced, rising and stretching himself. “Dr. Bergmann's coming along with us, Sandy. Have that Rosemary Lee picture run for him, will you? What the hell's it called?”

“Moon over Monaco,”
said Ashmeade, as one says
Hamlet,
casually, without quotation marks.

Bergmann stood up with a deep, tragic grunt.

“It's a nasty bit of work,” Chatsworth told him cheerfully, “but you'll get an idea what she's like.”

We all moved toward the door. Bergmann looked very short and massive, marching between Chatsworth's comfortable bulk and Ashmeade's willowy tallness. I followed, feeling excluded and slightly sulky.

Chatsworth waved the attendant aside with a lordly gesture and himself helped Bergmann into his overcoat. It was like dressing up a Roman statue. Bergmann's hat was a joke in the worst taste. Much too small, it perched absurdly on his bushy gray curls, and Bergmann's face looked grimly out from under it, with the expression of an emperor taken captive and guyed by the rebellious mob. Ashmeade, of course, wore neither hat nor coat. He carried a slim umbrella, perfectly rolled. Outside, Chatsworth's Rolls Royce, complete with chauffeur, was waiting—all light gray, to match his own loose-fitting, well-cut clothes.

“Better get plenty of sleep tonight, Isherwood,” he advised me graciously. “We're going to work you hard.”

Ashmeade said nothing. He smiled, and followed Chatsworth into the car.

Bergmann paused, took my hand. A smile of extraordinary charm, of intimacy, came over his face. He was standing very close to me.

“Good-bye, Mr. Isherwood,” he said, in German. “I shall call you tomorrow morning.” His voice dropped; he looked deeply, affectionately, into my eyes. “I am sure we shall be very happy together. You know, already, I feel absolutely no shame before you. We are like two married men who meet in a whorehouse.”

*   *   *

WHEN I got home, my mother and Richard were in the drawing room waiting for me.

“Well!”

“Any success?”

“What was it like?”

“Did you meet him?”

I dropped into a chair. “Yes,” I said, “I met him.”

“And—is everything all right?”

“How do you mean, all right?”

“Are you going to take the job?”

“I don't know.… Well, yes … Yes, I suppose I am.”

*   *   *

ONE OF Chatsworth's underlings had installed Bergmann in a service flat in Knightsbridge, not far from Hyde Park Corner. I found him there next morning, at the top of several steep flights of stairs. Even before we could see each other, he began to hail me from above. “Come up! Higher! Higher! Courage! Not yet! Where are you? Don't weaken! Aha! At last!
Servus,
my friend!”

“Well?” I asked, as we shook hands. “How do you like it here?”

“Terrible!” Bergmann twinkled at me comically from under his black bush of eyebrow. “It's an inferno! You have made the
as
-cent to hell.”

This morning, he was no longer an emperor but an old clown, shock-headed, in his gaudy silk dressing gown. Tragicomic, like all clowns, when you see them resting backstage after the show.

He laid his hand on my arm. “First, tell me one thing, please. Is your whole city as horrible as this?”

“Horrible? Why, this is the best part of it! Wait till you see our slums, and the suburbs.”

Bergmann grinned. “You console me enormously.”

He led the way into the flat. The small living room was tropically hot, under a heavy cloud of cigarette smoke. It reeked of fresh paint. The whole place was littered with clothes, papers and books, in explosive disorder, like the debris around a volcano.

Bergmann called, “Mademoiselle!” and a girl came out of the inner room. She had fair smooth hair, brushed plainly back from her temples, and a quiet oval face, which would have looked pretty, if her chin hadn't been too pointed. She wore rimless glasses and the wrong shade of lipstick. She was dressed in the neat jacket and skirt of a stenographer.

“Dorothy, I introduce you to Mr. Isherwood. Dorothy is my secretary, the most beautiful of all the gifts given me by the munificent Mr. Chatsworth. You see, Dorothy, Mr. Isherwood is the good Virgil who has come to guide me through this Anglo-Saxon comedy.”

Dorothy smiled the smile of a new secretary—a bit bewildered still, but prepared for anything in the way of lunatic employers.

“And please suppress that fire,” Bergmann added. “It definitely kills me.”

Dorothy knelt down and turned off the gas fire, which had been roaring away in a corner. “Do you want me now,” she asked, very businesslike, “or shall I be getting on with the letters?”

“We always want you, my darling. Without you, we could not exist for one moment. You are our Beatrice. But first, Mr. Virgil and I have to become acquainted. Or rather, he must become acquainted with me. For, you see,” Bergmann continued, as Dorothy left the room, “I know everything about you already.”

“You do?”

“Certainly. Everything that is important. Wait. I shall show you something.”

Raising his forefinger, smilingly, to indicate that I must be patient, he began to rummage among the clothes and scattered papers. I watched with growing curiosity, as Bergmann's search became increasingly furious. Now and then, he would discover some object, evidently not the right one, hold it up before him for a moment, like a nasty-smelling dead rat, and toss it aside again with a snort of disgust or some exclamation such as “Abominable!”
“Scheusslich!”
“Too silly for words!” I watched him unearth, in this way, a fat black notebook, a shaving mirror, a bottle of hair tonic and an abdominal belt. Finally, under a pile of shirts, he found a copy of
Mein Kampf
which he kissed, before throwing it into the wastepaper basket. “I love him!” he told me, making a wry, comical face.

The search spread into the bedroom. I could hear him plunging about, snorting and breathing hard, as I stood by the mantelpiece, looking at the photographs of a large, blonde, humorous woman and a thin, dark, rather frightened girl. Next, the bathroom was explored. A couple of wet towels were flung out into the passage. Then Bergmann uttered a triumphant “Aha!” He strode back into the living room, waving a book above his head. It was my novel,
The Memorial.

“So! Here we are! You see? I read it at midnight. And again this morning, in my bath.”

I was absurdly pleased and flattered. “Well,” I tried to sound casual, “how did you like it?”

“I found it grandiose.”

“It ought to have been much better. I'm afraid I…”

“You are wrong,” Bergmann told me, quite severely. He began to turn the pages. “This scene—he tries to make a suicide. It is genial.” He frowned solemnly, as if daring me to contradict him. “This I find clearly genial.”

I laughed and blushed. Bergmann watched me, smiling, like a proud parent who listens to his son being praised by the headmaster. Then he patted me on the shoulder.

“Look, if you do not believe me. I will show you. This I wrote this morning, after reading your book.” He began to fumble in his pockets. As there were only seven of them, it didn't take him long. He pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. “My first poem in English. To an English poet.”

I took it and read:

When I am a boy, my mother tells to me

It is lucky to wake up when the morning is bright

And first of all hear a lark sing.

Now I am not longer a boy, and I wake. The morning is dark.

I hear a bird singing with unknown name

In a strange country language, but it is luck, I think.

Who is he, this singer, who does not fear the gray city?

Will they drown him soon, the poor Shelley?

Will Byron's hangmen teach him how one limps?

I hope they will not, because he makes me happy.

“Why,” I said, “it's beautiful!”

“You like it?” Bergmann was so delighted that he began rubbing his hands. “But you must correct the English, please.”

“Certainly not. I like it the way it is.”

“Already I think I have a feeling for the language,” said Bergmann, with modest satisfaction. “I shall write many English poems.”

“May I keep this one?”

“Really? You want it?” he beamed. “Then I shall inscribe it for you.”

He took out his fountain pen and wrote: “For Christopher, from Friedrich, his fellow prisoner.”

I laid the poem carefully on the mantelpiece. It seemed to be the only safe place in the room. “Is this your wife?” I asked, looking at the photographs.

“Yes. And that is Inge, my daughter. You like her?”

“She has beautiful eyes.”

“She is a pianist. Very talented.”

“Are they in Vienna?”

“Unfortunately. Yes. I am most anxious for them. Austria is no longer safe. The plague is spreading. I wished them to come with me, but my wife has to look after her mother. It's not so easy.” Bergmann sighed deeply. Then, with a sharp glance at me, “You are not married.” It sounded like an accusation.

“How did you know?”

“I know these things.… You live with your parents?”

“With my mother and brother. My father's dead.”

Bergmann grunted and nodded. He was like a doctor who finds his most pessimistic diagnosis is confirmed. “You are a typical mother's son. It is the English tragedy.”

I laughed. “Quite a lot of Englishmen do get married, you know.”

“They marry their mothers. It is a disaster. It will lead to the destruction of Europe.”

“I must say, I don't quite see…”

“It will lead definitely to the destruction of Europe. I have written the first chapters of a novel about this. It is called
The Diary of an Etonian Oedipus.
” Bergmann suddenly gave me a charming smile. “But do not worry. We shall change all that.”

“All right,” I grinned. “I won't worry.”

Bergmann lit a cigarette, and blew a cloud of smoke into which he almost disappeared.

“And now,” he announced, “the horrible but unavoidable moment has come when we have to talk about this crime we are about to commit: this public outrage, this enormous nuisance, this scandal, this blasphemy.… You have read the original script?”

“They sent a messenger round with it, last night.”

“And…?” Bergmann watched me keenly, waiting for my answer.

“It's even worse than I expected.”

“Marvelous! Excellent! You see, I am such a horrible old sinner that nothing is ever as
bad
as I expect. But you are surprised. You are shocked. That is because you are innocent. It is this innocence which I need absolutely to help me, the innocence of Alyosha Karamazov. I shall proceed to corrupt you. I shall teach you everything from the very beginning.… Do you know what the film is?” Bergmann cupped his hands, lovingly, as if around an exquisite flower. “The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion, it revolves with an enormous dynamism. It cannot pause. It cannot apologize. It cannot retract anything. It cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot explain itself. It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion we have to prepare, like anarchists, with the utmost ingenuity and malice.… While you were in Germany did you ever see
Frau Nussbaum's letzter Tag?
”

“Indeed I did. Three or four times.”

Bergmann beamed. “I directed it.”

“No? Really?”

“You didn't know?”

“I'm afraid I never read the credits.… Why, that was one of the best German pictures!”

Bergmann nodded, delighted, accepting this as a matter of course. “You must tell that to Umbrella.”

“Umbrella?”

“The Beau Brummel who appeared to us yesterday at lunch.”