A Little Tea, a Little Chat

by Christina Stead

  At this Grant began to laugh and said, “Perhaps I know who you are. I don’t say I do, mind.”

  Gilbert leaned back, crossed his legs, and was smiling at them, his handsome, smooth, bluish face lighted up with confidence and naïveté. He seized the opening, “There I differ with you. A man must know himself before he knows others or can manage others. I fancy you must spend, perhaps, the first seventeen years of your life investigating your own impulses, reactions, processes—even finding out you have them—before you realize the other man’s just another such animal as you are. The day you know that, you not only grow up, you can manage other men.

  “I don’t believe I could swear, but Dad has never done that once in his life. Perhaps once. Some shock. Take shock! Dad talks about getting a shock. He gets shocks. But shock is supposed to give you a new vision. Now, I’ve always argued that shock is not enough. You must have maturity, insight. You can shock and shock a dumb animal and what does it know more than it knew before? It doesn’t even know you’re hurting it. It’s shocked. Just like Dad. He gets a shock and tomorrow he’ll trust the same pack of criminals and scoundrels he’s trusting today. This Ben—this Alf Goodwin—this Betty, a vicious little animal—it’s in their faces—Dad’s gifted, if you like, I grant that. He cerebrates, but he doesn’t think all round a subject. He has flashes of intuition, he’s damn near what you might call genius, but he doesn’t apprehend! Apprehension is a sort of crystallization, all over the surface and down to the bottom of the flask: it begins in one spot and spreads, like hoarfrost on a window. Now Dad’s apprehension always stops at that moment of polarization…I don’t say I have anything like Dad’s gifts, but one thing I can do he can’t do, and that is see the causes of things, the roots of personality. His mind is like a flashlight, it’s here—there—it’s very bright, you see the time by it, but you get a spotty idea of the landscape—pale here, red there, a couple of inches of ditch there, a dog’s print somewhere else—you can miss a haystack and a corpse—you have to wait for that gray morning light to see the whole layout. The gray morning light—that’s my type of thinking. Now if you spotlight personalities the way Dad does, and you have a big generous impulse the way he has, you don’t see them at all. They’re like actors in a movie. I’ve given this whole subject a lot of thought.

  “I said to myself, ‘Why is Dad always surrounded by rascals—the sort of men no decent man would shake hands with?’”

  Grant, nursing his knee on his leg, looked at them, with the expression of a young girl whose bosomy mother is discussing her before visitors. The others waited, drinking, talked into quiescence.

  Young Grant continued, after looking happily into their faces, imitating his father’s gesture, nursing his knee, “Why doesn’t Dad do better in business? He has a poor understanding of his competitors. It’s dog eat dog. Now you would think an animal would instinctively understand its enemies at least and their way of fighting, and fight back; and once it had won, leave them. A dog, though, fights a skunk and somehow gets the worst of it. Dad is surrounded by swindlers, crooks, cheats, and he doesn’t even know it. Then a man has to have a broader view of life than Dad has. Dad is always telling me—I’m sick of hearing it, though I don’t doubt he means it—Dad says to me, ‘I’ve made enough to live on, you are grown up, and now all I want is some woman who’ll understand me and make me happy.’”

  The women repressed their surprise. The boy looked around with a manly air, observing his father’s annoyance and deep flush, said with a smile, “I’m adult now and see things differently. When I was a boy I believed Dad when he said Mother was an angel and sweet—and she is too—and Dad’s a fine fellow, you couldn’t find a better; but in a way Mother is sharper than he is, and not so angelic as he is and—in a way Dad’s more wrong-headed. In short, they’re both fine people and not suited to each other.”

  He said with a twinkle at his father, “—that Dad, who is a nice old lad, even if growing weatherbeaten, is attractive still to women, especially women who don’t just go for a young face and understand character, for I’ve noticed a thing or two, though I shut my eyes, as I should—the same thing does not of course apply to my mother—well, my feeling is, to make a long story short, Dad, that if you and Mother were thinking of an arrangement like that, I should have nothing to say against it.”

  Grant looked in embarrassment at the women. He murmured incomprehensibly. Livy said, “You’re all right, Lieutenant.”

  He paused and glanced around dramatically but without fire. “Certain types are poison. Now certain people Dad dragged me to dinner with, against my will if I may say so, last week, the Yabes: I made it a point of honor to quarrel with the Yabes. The opinions I heard there were the same inflation-profiteering opinions we hear from your rotten acquaintance, Mr. Goodwin, with whom I have just quarreled. We should speak up. They are not silent. If vice shouts from the rooftops, we can engage a brass band and have our slogans painted on streamers. I have made up my mind that while here I am going to protect Dad as well as I can. Parasites, bloodsuckers, will find themselves pinched off. Now I ask myself why it is that I, a novice, a newcomer to experience, compared with Dad, can see what is wrong and Dad cannot.

  “In the first place, I see them with new eyes. He is used to them. But how did he become used to them in the first place? Because he has an amiable, lavish sort of nature. He sees and yet he prefers not to see. He wants company. He lives alone. That is one of the reasons, I say, he should perhaps make some arrangement with Mother. He is lonely. He tells me that till I’m sick of hearing it, but one has to give a man his due, especially at his time of life. I have the greatest respect for you, Dad. I think I understand the whole situation.

  “In the second place, to continue my list, I have had army experience. I believe you can see more in an army in a month than you can in a year outside. I don’t mind admitting, it made a man out of the schoolboy I was a couple of years ago.

  “In the third place, this is purely personal because I am, so to speak, a kind of indifferent man, not involved with life. I have no ax to grind in life, if you like. If you need something, you smell out the people who can give it to you, but by a law of compensation which I can’t explain, for it has no survival-value, you become blind to their dangers. The life of wanting, of passion, is a precarious sort of life. I don’t say it hasn’t its compensations, too.”

  Grant at this laughed a little and murmured, “Who knows? Who knows? Perhaps the boy’s right. Better to be indifferent. Only I can’t, I’m corrupted, my boy, you see.”

  Livy said quietly to Grant, “How the hell did you get a boy like that?”

  “Just like my mother, good north-country temperament, very solid, very honest,” murmured Grant with some pride.

  The young man, at the first hesitation in this colloquy, went on superbly, “When I say my vision is near perfect because of a quiet temperament, I mean it in both senses. Physically, first. The one time I went to an oculist, he told me he had never seen anyone so near the ultimate possible ideal in vision. This was an excellent thing for me, for if I have the slightest headache, I know it comes from some other cause and shall never ruin my eyes as I am sure some do…Secondly, I mean, I have for some reason we shall probably never know, straight moral vision. In dealing with the men, I endeavor to act with perfect justice on every occasion. I weigh, and it seems to me I never could hurt a fellow or carry on revenge or prejudice. But I spend so much of my time weighing these things, and analyzing myself too, that my decisions always come to me in a flash, not only regarding the men, but also when I have some discussion with superior officers. I believe this is because I understand human nature…This all occurred to me when I was about fifteen; for it was then I first began to understand Dad. It worried me. It gave me something to do, to—to protect him. Before that I felt I should protect Mother, for she has not been very happy. And I’ve noticed among Dad’s few real friends, a similar protective feeling—they feel he’s a grand old fellow (that’
s the way I put it to myself), he hasn’t had all the advantages, though his natural genius makes up for all that, he’s worked hard and hasn’t made as much money as he wanted to, because these crooks are around him, trying to sweat him, and they think, the friends, we have no ax to grind, we’ll keep him company and elbow out the gangsters. I think I’ve hit the nail right on the head.”

  “You’re all right, Gilbert,” said Livy seriously.

  Grant burst in, vaguely, “His mother’s an angel, very sweet, good mother, excellent wife, but now I want to go home, lay my head on her lap, say, Mary, I want a mother more than a wife, I’m tired, but she’s lost interest.”

  The younger Grant continued, “You see, this is no new problem for me. I know my attainments are small, I’ve a mediocre mind, yet I got on remarkably well in the army, though no comet or anything like that at school; and after puzzling it out for some time—for I said to myself, I want to square things as they are with what I know about myself, for I do not believe in Santa Claus: why is it that a man not extraordinarily bright, certainly with no academic or paper talent, let us say (had to have a tutor for Latin, for example), and a man who frittered away a couple of years as I did—when I first went to college, you know, it was just as if the light of day had changed. You’ve no idea of how different the world seemed. I got quite punch-drunk. Strange thing, I really saw—girls, for the first time, if you like—I didn’t work too hard the first two years. Thus, I had a lot to make up. This was another drawback of my nature. When I felt this new world, I wanted to examine it, really plunge in and experience it to the limit. What is this new angle on the world, so to speak? This wasted a couple of years for me, that is to say, the problem of women, which, by the way, I like much better than other problems. Yet in the Army I got on rapidly, and soon got the way of things. It at last occurred to me that it was knowledge of human nature that stood by me. Yet I swear that it wasn’t till I was seventeen or eighteen that it occurred to me to really think about myself as an individual. I seemed to emerge from a cloud about that time. You could call that cloud the cloud of flesh, or the cloud of infantile personality, I suppose. My deduction is that Dad has never quite emerged from that cloud of infantile personality. He is obsessed by his own impulses. He sees the world as driven by the same, and he attributes these impulses to others. Hence, monstrous errors in choosing his friends, and even, one might say, of taste.”

  Grant had listened to the end with a grave face. He had been stretching his neck out of his collar, flexing his shoulders, though not jingling his money. He raised a hand, called for the bill, said they all needed dinner. The young man said, “I haven’t half finished what I wanted to say but I can tell you at dinner too.”

  “After dinner.”

  “At dinner, if the mood is in me. I get a real pleasure out of analysis, don’t you?”

  17

  He helped the ladies, and went upstairs beside Livy Wright. Outside he took her arm gallantly, and held it warmly after they had crossed the street. He called back, “Let’s walk a couple of blocks, won’t do you any harm, Dad, to get some fresh air.”

  He led the way, bending over the small woman, with an attractive intimacy. Presently Grant whistled a taxi and they went to dinner at Manetti’s, Grant hoping that he might thus lay eyes on the absconding Mrs. Kent. She was not there. Grant went to the telephone several times, and when he returned, burst forth into some incomprehensible story, about “I’m helping everyone, having a good time, but not myself. G. for example came in, from Montreal, with a British passport covered with limitations in rubber stamps; he must return to the bloody island in six months because he was born in Poland, and the bloody island’s nourishing Poles, won’t let them out of sight, why I don’t know, need food themselves and do nothing but feed Poles, say Edinburgh’s full of Poles. ‘What shall I do?’ says G. He doesn’t want to go back. He’s British now, doesn’t want to go back and mix with the damn Poles. He says Britain’s too much like Lodz, real Polish Poles now. I say, ‘Don’t go back to Montreal, go to Ottawa, they’re dumb in Ottawa, I’ve been there to see. Lose your passport, they’ll give you another, no limitations. If they don’t find the old one. Often been done.’ ‘Thank you,’ he says: he fell on my neck.

  “I thought up a scheme for rebuilding France when this is all over, and look at the possibilities in Russia. I have a scheme for the organization of supplies after the war, in Europe, if they’d only go socialist, that would save the people from famine. But they don’t want that yet. Only one social organization they know, that’s war. Money doesn’t count. They’ve all lost the taste for sound money. Commodities made to burn—arms and after the war, cotton and coffee, just the same as before. Then they grab the state and make the people work for nothing. Don’t know how to count in money any more. They don’t even want sound money. What do they get out of it? They have to pay the people back the money they saved that was clipped off the payrolls…They don’t want commodities, can’t sell them…All they can do is draft the people, squeeze all the work out of them, make them work, reproduce and drop dead, when their work isn’t equal to their food, Hugo March’s paradise. Simple. Only way out unless we have socialism…I want to help people; I’m through with egoism. I’ve been an egoist all my life. Not my fault…But I have a weakness! I’m lonely. Give me some job, I’ll help my fellow man. But otherwise, I’m looking for a woman, three girls in one.

  “For argument’s sake, I see a picture in a window, I think, There’s a beautiful woman—I got to find out who she is at any cost. If she’s as pretty as she’s painted, and she’s not married, I’ll take her out and see if she’s got character. If she has, I’ll say, ‘I don’t know if you’re the right woman. Prove it to me.’ I can’t afford to make a mistake; not a Mussolini, not a commissar. For argument’s sake, say this woman is French. I’ll say, ‘Your people shall be my people, I’ll go over and work out a food commission, they’ll need it—no milk, no coal, no meat, no herds, no iron, no green vegetables, all eaten, stolen, strayed, killed.’…Thieving doesn’t pay. If you start to live off highway robbery, you don’t grow no vegetables at home; you forget how to work, your wife has no clothes, you steal clothes, but you can’t keep on, one day they put you in jail, rope round your neck, your wife’s gone out to beg her bread. Then I go to France, take my French woman, and I say, ‘I want nothing from you. I saw your picture in the window, I said I’ll marry you, even if you’re deaf and dumb. I’ll marry you, I’ll take you to France and I’ll do it anyway, keep my word.’ What do you think of me, Livy?”

  “I’ll go along as your secretary as far as Paris, anyway!”

  Mrs. Lawrence said, “Robbie wouldn’t leave the U.S.A. Europe is going to be a shambles after the war. There’s plenty to do here.”

  “I say so too! Now I realize that there’ll have to be a change after the war and Europe will be the new world while we’ll be the old—”

  But hearing the gears beginning to grind, Grant interrupted with: “Would you take me on, eh? Going to be fifty years of capitalism here, want to go and see a new world coming out of the shambles. A chance to construct a new world and remake your life—how do you like that?” bouncing about, spreading out his hands, grasping both women by the arms, till the young man laughed away his own ill-humor and Grant was able to cry, “Let’s go to a cabaret—the Golden Tassel—I’ve had a shock—”

  Tipsy, gay, he bore them off to the small cabaret. Here Grant commonly met Betty Goodwin, because her husband despised the place. And the place was so radical still that Celia Grimm had once brought here Mrs. Wood, the Negro wife. At the Golden Tassel Grant made another trip to the telephone, came back with a furrowed face, and declared he was going to get good and drunk. He danced with the women and then with Celia Grimm, who was going from table to table of a large group of friends. He brought Celia to his table, told her about some novel he was writing with Flack’s advice.

  “The story of my life. I’m not going to paint myself all white nor all
black: it’s going to be human, constructive. All I Want Is a Woman, that’s the name. A man, Kincaid, made a few mistakes but he never hurt anyone unless they hurt him first. And at the end he wants to be good. He finds a woman like you, and after the war they go to war-wrecked Europe and say, ‘Take us, we don’t want to live for ourselves: we bring the promise of America to blasted Europe, we want to recreate Europe.’”

  Celia Grimm said, “You have such a good heart and do so much damage: I don’t understand it. Do you know Jenny Woods has left her husband and she is waiting for some sign from you?”

  “It’s nothing to do with me, she’s neurotic. I want no part in that. They’re unstable, these colored people,” muttered Grant.

  “Won’t you write a note to her, advise her, help her out? She believed you. I told her she was making a mistake.”

  “I want no part of it. Modern capitalism came down on a simple peasantry and they’re unstable,” said Grant.

  “At least see her and tell her to go back to Woods.”

  “No, no, least said, soonest mended. If she sees me, she’ll expect something.”

  “I’m afraid for her, Robbie.”

  “I want to keep out of anything unhealthy,” said Grant.

  “You’ll slip on a banana peel some day, Robbie.”

  “Don’t worry about me, don’t worry about me: you see her and send her back to her husband. Do that and we’ll forget all this and go to Rome after the war, eh, sweetie?”

  He did not dance with Celia any more that evening, since at the end of the dance she refused absolutely to accompany him to his hotel. Just the same, towards the end of the evening, Celia introduced him to a very beautiful elderly woman who was looking for a companion, and Grant went with her to her apartment. She was richly dressed and her apartment was in an expensive block of flats. Grant told her that she was the woman he had been looking for; they understood each other right away. She must have been of unparalleled beauty at one time, but now all this had begun to crumble, it crumbled at a touch. She wrote Grant’s address and telephone number down in her morocco-covered address book; but he never saw her again.