Giant's Bread

by Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, Agatha

  She said gently: ‘You are a dear to bring me such a lovely present. Ring for tea. We’ll have it up here.’

  ‘That will be fine. But weren’t you going to telephone to someone? I interrupted you.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  LETTERS FROM VERNON DEYRE TO SEBASTIAN LEVINNE

  MOSCOW.

  Dear Sebastian, –

  Do you know that there was once a legend in Russia that concerned a ‘nameless beast’ that was coming?

  I mention this not because of any political significance (by the way, the Antichrist hysteria is curious, isn’t it?) but because it reminded me of my own terror of ‘The Beast’. I’ve thought about ‘The Beast’ a great deal since coming to Russia – trying to get at its true significance.

  Because there’s more in it than just being afraid of a piano. The doctor in London opened my eyes to a great many things. I’ve begun to see that all through my life I’ve been a coward. I think you’ve known that, Sebastian. You wouldn’t put it in that offensive way, but you hinted as much to me once. I’ve run away from things … Always I’ve run away from things.

  And thinking it all over now, I see The Beast as something symbolical – not a mere piece of furniture composed of wood and wires. Don’t mathematicians say that the future exists at the same time as the past – that we travel through time as we travel through space – from a thing that is to another thing that is? Don’t some even hold that remembering is a mere habit of the mind – that we could remember forward as well as back if we had only learnt the trick of it? It sounds nonsense when I say it – but I believe there is some theory of that kind.

  I believe that there is some part of us that does know the future, that is always intimately aware of it.

  That explains, doesn’t it, why we should shrink sometimes. The burden of our destiny is going to be heavy and we recoil from its shadow … I tried to escape from music – but it got me. It got me at that Concert – in the same way that religion got those people at the Salvation Army meeting.

  It’s a devilish thing – or is it god-like? If so it’s an Old Testament jealous God – all the things I’ve tried to cling on to have been swept away. Abbots Puissants … Nell …

  And damn it all, what’s left? Nothing. Not even the cursed thing itself … I’ve no wish to write music. I hear nothing – feel nothing … Will it ever come back? Jane says it will … She seems very sure. She sends her love to you by the way.

  Yours,

  Vernon.

  2

  MOSCOW.

  You’re an understanding devil, Sebastian. You don’t complain that I ought to have written you a description of samovars, the political situation and life in Russia generally. The country, of course, is in a bloody muddle. What else could it be in? But it’s jolly interesting …

  Love from Jane.

  Vernon.

  3

  MOSCOW.

  Dear Sebastian, –

  Jane was right to bring me here. Point No. 1, no one is likely to come across me here and joyously proclaim my resurrection from the dead. Point No. 2, this is about the most interesting place in the world to be from my point of view. A kind of free and easy laboratory where everyone is trying experiments of the most dangerous kind. The whole world seems concerned with Russia from a purely political point of view. Economics, starvation, morals, lack of liberty, diseased and decadent children … etc …

  But amazing things are sometimes born out of vice and filth and anarchy. The whole trend of Russian thought in art is extraordinary … part of it the most utter childish drivel you ever heard – and yet wonderful gleams peeping through – like shining flesh through a beggar’s rags …

  The ‘Nameless Beast’ … Collective Man … Did you ever see that plan for a monument to the Communist Revolution? The Colossus of Iron? I tell you, it stirs the imagination.

  Machinery – an Age of Machinery … How the Bolsheviks worship anything to do with machinery – and how little they know about it! That’s why it’s so wonderful to them, I suppose. Imagine a real mechanic of Chicago composing a dynamic poem describing his city as ‘built upon a screw! Electro dynamo mechanical city! Spiral shaped – on a steel disc. At every stroke of the hour turning round itself – Five thousand skyscrapers …’ Anything more alien from the spirit of America!

  And yet – do you ever see a thing when you’re too close to it? It’s the people who don’t know machinery who see its soul and its meaning … The ‘Nameless Beast’ … My Beast? … I wonder …

  Collective Man – forming himself in turn into a vast machine … The same herd instinct that saved the race of old coming out again in a different form …

  Life’s becoming too difficult – too dangerous – for the individual. What was it Dostoevsky says in one of his books?

  The flock will collect again and submit once more, and then it will be for ever, for ever. We will give them a quiet modest happiness.

  Herd instinct … I wonder …

  Yours,

  Vernon.

  4

  MOSCOW.

  I have found the other passage in Dostoevsky. I think it is the one you mean.

  ‘And we alone, we who guard the mystery, we alone shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy children and only a hundred thousand martyrs who have taken on themselves the curse of good and evil.’

  You mean, and Dostoevsky meant, that there must always be individualists. It is the individualists who carry on the torch. Men welded into a vast machine must ultimately perish. For the machine is soulless and will end as scrap iron.

  Men worshipped stone and built Stonehenge – and today, the men who built it have perished and are unknown and Stonehenge stands. And yet, by a paradox, the men are alive in you and me, their descendants, and Stonehenge and what it stood for, is dead. The things that die, endure, and the things that endure, perish.

  It is Man that goes on for ever. (Does he? Isn’t that unwarrantable arrogance? Yet we believe it!) And so, there must be individualists behind the Machine. So Dostoevsky says and so you say. But then you’re both Russians. As an Englishman I’m more pessimistic.

  Do you know what that passage from Dostoevsky reminds me of? My childhood. Mr Green’s hundred children – and Poodle, Squirrel and Tree. Representatives of the hundred thousand …

  Yours,

  Vernon.

  5

  MOSCOW.

  Dear Sebastian, –

  I suppose you’re right. I never have thought much before. It seemed to me an unprofitable exercise. In fact, I’m not sure I don’t still regard it as such.

  The trouble is, you see, that I can’t ‘say it in Music’. Damn it all, why can’t I say it in Music? Music’s my job. I’m more sure of that than ever. And yet – nothing doing …

  It’s Hell …

  Vernon.

  6

  Dear Sebastian, –

  Haven’t I mentioned Jane? What is there to say about her? She’s splendid. We both know that. Why don’t you write to her yourself?

  Yours ever,

  Vernon.

  7

  Dear Old Sebastian, –

  Jane says you may be coming out here. I wish to God you would. I’m sorry I haven’t written for six months – I never was one of the world’s ready letter writers.

  Have you seen anything of Joe? I’m glad Jane and I looked her up passing through Paris. Joe’s staunch – she’ll never split on us, and I’m glad she at anyrate knows. We never write to each other, she and I, we never have … But I wondered if you’d heard anything. I didn’t think she looked awfully fit … Poor old Joe – she’s made a mess of things …

  Have you heard anything of Tatlin’s scheme for a monument to the Third International? To consist of a union of three great glass chambers connected by a system of vertical axes and spirals. By means of special machinery they were to be kept in perpetual motion but at different r
ates of speed.

  And inside, I suppose, they’d sing hymns to a Holy Acetylene blowpipe!

  Do you remember, one night, we were motoring back to town, and we took the wrong turning somewhere amongst the tram lines of Lewisham, and instead of making for the haunts of civilization we turned up somewhere among the Surrey docks, and through an opening in the frowsy houses we saw a queer kind of Cubist picture of cranes and cloudy steam and iron girders. And immediately your artistic soul bagged it for a drop scene – or whatever the technical term is.

  My God, Sebastian! What a magnificent spectacle of machinery you could build up – sheer effects and lighting – and masses of humans with inhuman faces – mass – not individuals. You’ve something of the kind in mind, haven’t you?

  The architect, Tatlin, said something that I think good and yet a lot of nonsense.

  ‘Only the rhythm of the metropolis, of factories and machines together with the organization of the masses can give the impulse to the new art …’

  And he goes on to speak of the ‘monument of the machine’, the only adequate expression of the present.

  You know, of course, all about the modern Russian Theatre. That’s your job. I suppose Mayerhold is as marvellous as they say he is. But can one mix up Drama and Propaganda?

  All the same, it’s exciting to arrive at a theatre and be compelled at once to join a marching crowd – up and down – in strict step – till the performance begins – and the scenery – composed of rocking chairs and cannons and revolving bays and God knows what! It’s babyish – absurd – and yet one feels that baby has got hold of a dangerous and rather interesting toy that in other hands …

  Your hands, Sebastian … You’re a Russian. But thank Heaven and Geography, no Propagandist – just a Showman pure and simple …

  The rhythm of the metropolis – made pictorial …

  My God – if I could give you the Music … It’s the Music that’s needed.

  Lord – their ‘Noise Orchestras’ – their symphonies of factory sirens! There was a show at Baku in 1922 – batteries of artillery – machine-guns, choirs, naval fog horns. Ridiculous! Yes, but – if they had a composer …

  No woman ever longed for a child like I long to produce Music …

  And I’m barren – sterile …

  Vernon.

  8

  Dear Sebastian, –

  It seems like a dream your having come and gone … Will you really do The Tale of the Rogue who outwitted Three Other Rogues, I wonder?

  I’m only just beginning to recognize what a howling success you’ve made of things. I’ve at last grasped that you’re simply IT nowadays. Yes, found your National Opera House – God knows it’s time we had one – but what do you want with Opera? It’s archaic – dead ridiculous individual love affairs …

  Music up to now seems to me like a child’s drawing of a house – four walls – a door, two windows and a chimney pot. There you are – and what more do you want!

  At anyrate Feinberg and Prokofiev do more than that.

  Do you remember how we used to jeer at the ‘Cubists’ and ‘Futurists’? At least I did – now that I come to think of it I don’t believe you agreed.

  And then one day – at a cinema – I saw a view of a big city from the air. Spires turning over, buildings bending – everything behaving as one simply knew concrete and steel and iron couldn’t behave! And for the first time I got a glimmering of what old Einstein meant when he talked about relativity.

  We don’t know anything about the shape of music … We don’t know anything about the shape of anything, for that matter … Because there’s always one side open to space …

  Some day you’ll know what I mean … what Music can mean … what I’ve always known it meant …

  What a mess that opera of mine was. All opera is a mess. Music was never intended to be representational. To take a story and write descriptive music to it is as wrong as to write a passage of music – in the abstract so to speak – and then find an instrument capable of playing it! When Stravinsky wrote a clarinet passage, you can’t even conceive of it as being played by anything else!

  Music should be like mathematics – a pure science – untouched by drama, or romanticism, or any emotion other than the pure emotion which is the result of sound divorced from ideas.

  I’ve always known that in my heart … Music must be Absolute.

  Not, of course, that I shall realize my ideal. To create pure sound untouched by ideas is a counsel of perfection.

  My music will be the music of machinery. I leave the dressing of it to you. It’s an age of choreography, and choreography will reach heights we don’t as yet dream of. I can trust you with the visual side of my masterpiece as yet unwritten – and which in all probability never will be written.

  Music must be four-dimensional – timbre, pitch, relative speed and periodicity.

  I don’t think even now we appreciate Schönberg enough. That clean remorseless logic that is the spirit of today. He and he alone had the courage to disregard tradition – to get down to bedrock, and discover Truth.

  He’s the one man to my mind who matters. Even his scheme of score writing will have to be adopted universally. It’s absolutely necessary if scores are going to be intelligible.

  The thing I have against him is his scorn of his instruments. He’s afraid of being a slave to them. He makes them serve him whether they will or no.

  I’m going to glorify my instruments … I’m going to give them what they want – what they’ve always wanted …

  Damn it all, Sebastian, what is this strange thing, Music? I know less and less …

  Yours,

  Vernon.

  9

  I know I haven’t written. I’ve been busy. Making experiments. Means of expression for the Nameless Beast. In other words, instrument making. Metals are jolly interesting – I’m working with alloys just at present.

  What a fascinating thing sound is …

  Jane sends her love.

  In answer to your question – No, I don’t suppose I shall ever leave Russia – not even to attend at your newly planned opera house disguised in my beard!

  It’s even more barbarous and beautiful now than when you saw it! Full and flowing, the perfect temperamental Slav Beaver!

  But in spite of the forest camouflage, here I am and here I stay, till I am exterminated by one of the bands of wild children.

  Yours ever,

  Vernon.

  Telegram from Vernon Deyre to Sebastian Levinne.

  ‘Just heard Joe dangerously ill feared dying stranded in New York Jane and I sailing Resplendent hope see you London.’

  Chapter Five

  1

  ‘Sebastian!’

  Joe started up in bed then fell back weakly. She stared unbelievingly. Sebastian, big fur-coated, calm and omniscient, smiled placidly down at her.

  There was no sign in his face of the sudden pang her appearance had given him. Joe – poor little Joe.

  Her hair had grown – it was arranged in two short plaits one over each shoulder. Her face was horribly thin with a high hectic flush on each cheekbone. The bones of her shoulders showed through her thin nightdress.

  She looked like a feverish child. There was something child-like in her surprise, in her pleasure, in her eager questioning. The nurse had left them.

  Sebastian sat down by the bed and took Joe’s thin hand in his.

  ‘Vernon wired me. I didn’t wait for him. I caught the first boat.’

  ‘To come to me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Dear Sebastian!’

  Tears came into her eyes. Sebastian was alarmed and went on hastily:

  ‘Not that I shan’t do a bit of business while I am over. I often come over on business and as a matter of fact I can do one or two good deals just now.’

  ‘Don’t spoil it.’

  ‘But it’s true,’ said Sebastian, surprised.

  Joe began to laugh – but coughed i
nstead. Sebastian watched anxiously – ready to call the nurse. He had been warned. But the fit passed.

  Joe lay there contentedly, her hand creeping into Sebastian’s again.

  ‘Mother died this way,’ she whispered. ‘Poor Mother. I thought I was going to be so much wiser than she was, and I’ve made such a mess of things – Oh! such a mess of things …’

  ‘Poor old Joe.’

  ‘You don’t know what a mess I’ve made of things, Sebastian.’

  ‘I can imagine it,’ said Sebastian. ‘I always thought you would.’

  Joe was silent a minute, then she said:

  ‘You don’t know what a comfort it is to see you, Sebastian. I have seen and known so many rotters. I didn’t like your being strong and successful and cocksure – it annoyed me – but now – Oh! it’s wonderful!’

  He squeezed her hand.

  ‘There’s no one else in the world who would have come – as you’ve come – miles – at once. Vernon, of course, but then he’s a relation – a kind of brother. But you –’

  ‘I’m just as much a brother – more than a brother. Ever since Abbots Puissants I’ve been – well, ready to stand by if you wanted me …’

  ‘Oh, Sebastian.’ Her eyes opened wide – happily. ‘I never dreamt – that you’d feel like that still.’

  He started ever so slightly. He hadn’t meant that exactly. He had meant something that he couldn’t explain – not at anyrate to Joe. It was a feeling peculiarly and exclusively Jewish. The undying gratitude of the Jew who never forgets a benefit conferred. As a child he had been an outcast and Joe had stood by him – she had been willing to defy her world. The child Sebastian had never forgotten – would never forget. He would, as he had said, have gone to the ends of the earth if she had wanted him.

  She went on.

  ‘They moved me into this place – from that horrible ward – Was that you?’