The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  What the hell? I found myself wondering to myself. What was so unmanly about long hair? Hell, in the eighteenth century you would have called a dandy’s long hair unmanly at your direst peril.

  I hustled around to make them drinks, trying to show them my feeling for Hill included them. It was easy to see that a Scotch “un ze rucks”, which was what they all asked for, was quite a treat for them at this stage of the game.

  It is hard to explain how much and why the Sorbonne means what it does to the students of France. It is only one of five autonomous colleges of the University of Paris. Yet it is the spiritual and symbolic head of all the universities of France. Probably just its history alone accounts for a lot of this. It was founded in the thirteenth century, and dedicated to those elite problems of the age: religion and politics. Throughout the Middle Ages it attracted the greatest scholars of Europe. St. Thomas Aquinas was one of its great masters. Latin was its language then, and its men played very important roles in nearly every big intellectual question of the age—such as how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. As the big religious problems of that period faded under the pressures of time and living, philosophy naturally moved in to replace these and became the Sorbonne’s almost exclusive province. Always its students, and usually its teachers, stood for freedom of expression, freedom of the right to think new ideas and say them. Closed down during the worst part of the French Revolution, it had been re-opened by Napoleon in 1808 with a series of sweeping educational reforms—and it had changed almost not at all since then. But to French students it remained the holy of holies of the true French education, and in all that time it had remained the students’ private preserve and sanctuary against their hereditary enemies of the status quo: the police. An old law dating almost from the school’s inception 700 years before stated expressly that on-duty policemen could not enter the students’ revered Sorbonne without the particular invitation of the Rector.

  However antiquated and quaintly medieval all this might sound to an American system in the first miseries of a World Technological Revolution, it meant a lot to the French kids. And that M. Roche their Rector could utilize this old rule as a Government ploy to call in the cops—and without even letting them know he had done so—that was the greatest betrayal and insult he could have handed his Sorbonne students. They knew where he stood, now.

  The morning papers had presented a somewhat garbled, Government-censored communiqué stating there had been a fight, or near-fight, in the building’s courtyard: between the Leftist students holding a meeting and a Rightist student group calling itself the Occident. This fight, the Government said, had forced the Rector to ask the police to intervene. But young Hill with his bruised face told me quite a different story.

  Hill’s ran this way: Young Dany Cohn-Bendit (There was that kid again.) had been making his first speech at the Sorbonne, hoping to get converts for his 22nd of March Movement. His Nanterre group wanted to boycott year’s-end exams until the Government agreed to their proposed reforms. Rumors that could never be traced ran around the meeting saying the Occident boys planned to attack the courtyard and break up the meeting. So a student group posted itself at the entrances to the yard armed with sticks and old table legs. What appeared however was not the Occident but a line of police who filed in and lined up along the four walls of the court wearing helmets, gas goggles, their heavy protective fighting raincoats and carrying the long light hardwood riot sticks. Then, and only then, the students were informed the Rector had called for the police. They were ordered to leave quietly. The implication was that if they did, they would not be bothered. So their leaders urged them to go peacefully. But when they did, they found all the entrances to the Sorbonne tightly cordoned off by riot police out in the street, backed up by their “Black Marias”. The students had walked out into a trap where they could be arrested singly or in twos and threes.

  This was the first establishment of a pattern which the police, and the Government itself, would use on the students during the rest of the troubles:—a pattern of dissimulation, false promises, and downright lies to gain their ends. In this case the end was the arrest of the Leftist students. The riot police began carting them off by the van-loads.

  “And that was when the fun started,” Hill said cheerfully with a big grin. “There were plenty of us in the area still, and we began to drift back and jeer the police, when we found out what was really happening. They charged us and started throwing their gas grenades. We retreated to the Boul’ Mich’ and started throwing up barricades. But they had every side street occupied in advance, and closed in from all sides. That’s how they caught so many of us. We’ll know better next time. We’ll have our lines of withdrawal planned. That was our baptism of fire.”

  I couldn’t help noticing the military usage. I sympathized with their anger at the dishonesty of the Government and its police. But the military usages irritated me. I was an old soldier myself, though maybe not on Harry’s level. I didn’t like military usages.

  Hill had been at the meeting, it turned out as he went on, but had left early because Red-Headed Dany had reached that part of his speech where he began to use rhetoric and oratory and was essentially repeating himself. So had some of the others in the know, and that was why they had not been caught in the first net.

  That comment irritated me further. I had heard, too many ambitious politicians talk about the values of oratory on the ignorant populace. But I didn’t want to make an argument with Hill. I seized on Red Dany. Did Hill know Dany le Rouge? No, he didn’t really know him, he had only met him a few times briefly, and had talked to him: and he agreed with everything he stood for and believed. Well, how come he had left, then, during his speech?

  Well, you had to understand, he explained, that not all students, just because they were students, were equally smart, or sensitive. Percentage-wise, statistically, intelligent students (on their somewhat higher levels) were just as rare, just as small in number as intelligent workers or intelligent bourgeois were on theirs. And the latter part of Dany’s speech was planned to appeal to that greater mass of the less-aware students, which was where the needed power lay. So there was no reason for the ones in the know to hang around. Dany and his boys all understood that.

  I found it hard to believe he was telling me this in all innocence, as it appeared. But wasn’t that sort of—cynical? I asked.

  But yes! he said in French; certainly yes. Shit, yes! How would you think that my General makes it so well?

  Okay, I thought: I stopped right there. But Hill must have caught some look he didn’t like that flashed across my face, because he looked disturbed and went back to it: on the other hand it was not cynical at all because they were only saying what they truly believed, and what the other students when they understood it and felt it, would also realize was the truth.

  I did not pursue this sophism. I easily could have, but I didn’t want to or feel like it. I wanted to be with them. But as a matter of fact I would not have been allowed to pursue it, anyway. Because this was where the little girl Hill had brought stepped in.

  “Would you not, then, allow us the same rights to orate, to rhetoricize, to propagandate the populace that you allow of the Government?” she demanded in a cold voice. “Is that of fairness to you?”

  “I would allow you anything,” I said, and made her a little bow. Something about her way of speech forced me to. That girl instantly inflamed me. “Or rather, anything you can TAKE and KEEP. But that has nothing to do with moral right. Dialectically, you have no moral right at all. So I find it droll that you resort to the same bad methods which you hate and attack the Government for using.”

  “Because to us they do not permit some choice!” she said flatly. “They make us to make it!”

  “You would make war to stop war,” I smiled. That was one of their big bitches, already. “Will you not become as rotten as they, then, in the end? If you use their methods?”

  “Not we!” the little girl declared
with a cold contempt. “Because we are right! And you know it! We love. And we have only the good in our heart.”

  She infuriated me. “You say so. It has not been proved to me,” I smiled. “And if it were proved for this week and this group, it would not be proved for next week and some other group.”

  “But that is sophistry. Is it not bad that—” she began. Then she stopped. It was as if some invisible signal had gone round the room: I was one of them: one of the old ones: I would never understand. None of the old ones would. Why bother? In the new silence not one of the five, including Hill, offered to fill the gap or say something; and they all five simply stood, smiling pleasantly at me.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry.” And I guess I was. But that little girl just automatically ignited me. It had nothing to do with being an old one. It had to do with her absolute righteousness. She had a built-in inability, that girl, even to conceive—let alone admit—that she might ever, once, one time, be even four per cent wrong. She looked at me the way some Communists did. She was the teacher and I was the pupil. She had awarded herself total moral superiority. Not only must I come to class, but I must learn my lesson, or she would smack my hands with her ruler.

  Physically, she was a tiny little thing really. A blonde French, with arms like sticks, and nearly stick-like legs, a neck I could put one hand around almost; and out of that pale, ivory complexion beneath the bobbed pale-yellow hair, a pair of pale-blue eyes peered at me with a total, contemptuous, fierce belief.

  I wasn’t being political. I had seen Americans look at me that same way: some Liberals, some redneck reactionaries. In fact, I had seen her type often. She was one of those who even if they made a public declaration that they were three-and-three-quarters per cent wrong about some thing, it would only be to prove to themselves and to the world how absolutely good and right they 100 per cent were.

  “Let me get all of you another drink,” I smiled at her—though it hurt my face. “The same? Scotch on the rocks?”

  “With intense pleasure,” she smiled back. The others, the boys, all nodded, still smiling, that they would like the same again.

  It was a thing, an attitude, I would come up against again amongst the students, all during the rest of the Revolution. But I didn’t know that then. They had to be morally right. I was willing to admit they might be right; but that was not enough.

  In any case Hill had been sitting in one of those student-haunt cafés on the Place Sorbonne when the arrests began, he went on, and had helped lead in the jeering, and in the retreat to the Boulevard St.-Michel. He laughed happily, suddenly. “I got hit later on in the evening, with one of those long hardwood clubs. But I managed to get away. A lot of us did. But I know by God we dented a few of their damned heads.”

  My thing with the girl appeared completely forgotten. For our own reasons, we all saw fit to drop it completely. I went around with the ice and the bottle. Hill went on with his story of the night.

  “Excuse us, please. We have a thing to talk,” Hill said in French after they all had their second drink, and motioned to me toward the kitchen. From their faces as I followed him I could tell they all knew at least something about why he was there: none was surprised.

  Out there, I looked again at the ugly mark on his face. Seen more closely, it was not a black eye at all. He had taken a horizontal smash along the ridge of the cheekbone. A blue and yellow tear-shaped splotch tailed back toward his ear, and dark venous blood from it had seeped over into the hollow under the eye.

  “I’ve got a nice big chunk of beefsteak you can put on that if you want,” I said. “They say that helps.” I tried a joke. “I can always cook it later just the same anyway.”

  Hill brushed all this aside. “No, no. That’s not important. I’ll get worse than that before I’m through with this. That’s not what I came for.”

  It turned out none of the previous discussion was what he had come for. He had come to speak to me about his father.

  “What about your father?”

  “Well, you see, this thing’s a long way from over. We’re just not going to let it drop. A lot depends on what the judges do with our innocent comrades that’ve been arrested. We’re almost certain they won’t release all of them. But even if they do, we’re not letting it drop. We’re calling a big protest demonstration for Monday the 6th. They’ve made a terrible tactical blunder. They’ve called police into the Sorbonne; M. Roche has closed the entire college until further notice; they’ve beaten up and arrested hundreds of innocent students. They’ve made an awful blunder, and we are going to exploit it. We’ll have every damned student all over France out in the streets on strike!” He was very excited, and his eyes were snapping above his happy grin. I on the other hand could not help but remark his blatantly propaganda usage of the word “innocent”. He went on. “There’ll almost certainly be a lot more fighting in the streets after Monday and the big demonstration.” He actually said “Manif”, instead of “Demonstration”, which is the argot short form for the proper French word “Manifestation”. In France, in order to have a public Manifestation, any group must first ask for and get express permission from the police. Hill was sure this permission would be refused. “Which will only make it that much better. Because we’ll have so many people out there they won’t be able to stop us.”

  “But what has your father got to do with all of this?” I asked.

  “Oh. Well.

  “Well, I didn’t get home last night. What with all the meetings and all. And I don’t expect to get home tonight, either. In fact, I don’t really anticipate getting home again for quite some time, now that this has happened.” He looked at me anxiously.

  “Yes?” I said. I realized, quite suddenly, that Hill had gotten at least as tall physically as his father was. He seemed to be leaning down over me.

  “I want you to tell dad that for me,” he said. “So he won’t worry. Just go and see him and tell him you saw me, that I’m okay, but that I’ll not be coming home for a while. So he shouldn’t expect me. Don’t tell him about the eye.”

  I nodded. But I felt I ought to say something. “Well, where will you be staying, Hill?”

  “Oh, we’ve got access to a couple of lofts where we’re holding our meetings, and sleeping, when we have to sleep.”

  “What about your clothes? And all that.”

  “We’ll wash them. None of that matters. I’ll tell you a little secret. We expect to be holding our meetings and doing our washing in the Sorbonne itself. Before very long.—

  “And we’ll throw it open to the whole world! Students, teachers, workers, Government officials, everybody. Everybody will be welcome!” He coughed, to contain—and to hide—his emotion. “But don’t tell my dad that. Just tell him what I told you to tell him.”

  “But I think you should go and tell him all this yourself,” I said.

  Suddenly his shoulders came up towards his ears, and he looked at the floor. It was not so much a shrug, as it was that same look of dejection I had seen on him that night at their house: head down, shoulders up, his over-big, pup-like paws dangling at the ends of his long arms. “Aw, you know I can’t talk to him. He won’t listen to me. I could talk till I’m blue. He filters everything through those hypocritical self-indulgent ideas of his; and comes out believing exactly what he wanted to believe anyway. If I go try to talk to him, it will only end up in a fight. And then he’ll pull rank, and forbid me to go out with the comrades. And then I’ll have to tell him to go screw, and go anyway. He doesn’t know I’m grown up enough to decide—and have been for quite some time now. He won’t admit it.” He looked up at me then. “I don’t want to see him.” It had a stubborn, unmovable finality.

  “What’s your mother going to feel about all this?” I said as gently as I could. I was beginning to get irritated again.

  Hill swung his gaze back onto me, and his eyes flashed dangerously. “What do I care what she thinks! Or feels! Especially her! Both of them! With their phony
parenthood, and all that family Togetherness crap they try to sell so hard but don’t live up to!”

  “All right, all right,” I said soothingly. I could see I wasn’t going to change his mind. “I’ll talk to him. And I’ll tell him exactly what you want me to. But I want you to know that I think you’re absolutely wrong about your father. And about your mother.”

  “Okay okay okay,” he said. “I know you love them. And I love them too. That doesn’t mean I should forgive them for what their hypocrisy and all the others like them have done to the world. The world doesn’t have to be like this. Like it is. We all know that, Jack.

  “Besides, you don’t know everything that goes on all the time everywhere,” he added with a dark look. “You’re pretty innocent, at least about your friends.”

  I did not know what he meant by this last. Also, it was the first time he had ever called me “Jack”—at least it was the first time that I could remember—instead of “Uncle Jack”, or “Mr. Hartley”. I had sense enough to know it was a sort of trial balloon. I slapped him on the back.

  “All right, I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll go down there this evening. And I’ll lay your case out to him exactly as you’ve told it to me. Whether you believe it or not, I’m sure he’ll understand.”

  Hill grinned at me. “Thanks.”