by Nigel Dennis
He became very angry.
Why was I so kind and agreeable, he thought? Renunciation wasn’t what I wanted. Who wants to give up a woman he wants? I was lying all the time. I wanted to have her every day and night, and I do now. Why did I accept everything so meekly? What a pathetic little creature I must be! Do I care about her happiness, or her husband’s? I don’t think I do. I certainly care much more about my own. What I want is to have her naked, all mine, exclusively, whenever I want, and then she can dress and we can go out together to cafés and on bus-rides; I want her to kiss me and love me, and do it so that all the people turn their heads and stare at me. I want her opposite me at one of those round tables, her eyes full of passion, not holiness, and then I want to take her upstairs again; I want to behave like an animal, not like a man of culture; I want to meet her in a room somewhere; I can afford one; I have plenty of money and I’m not ashamed of it. It may be my mother’s money, but by God I’ll spend it. I want to be greedy and go on and on eating her till I’m full. I want to be unselfish when I really want to be, not when her husband falls on his nose. When I saw how holy she looked when she brushed me off, I thought she was wonderful; was I mad? Now, I’d like to see her try that same expression, and I’d give her a good boot; just let her try, just once. Anyone can make their eyes swim, and press hands gently and feel like heavenly twins: ugh! Filth! Stink! Lousy holiness! I should hate her for it, and I do, but it makes me want her more; it’s the phoney part of her that’s exciting, because it makes me savage, as I want to be. I’m not jealous of that old man of hers, and that proves how contemptuous I am of him. What a woman—to get so much happiness out of giving me up! I could shake her till her teeth rattle. How good if she dies suddenly; not over-painfully.
The way I talk you’d think I’d known her for years. I might almost be her husband.
She can pretend if she likes that she only met me this morning, but I’ll think over and over again of how she really met me last night. I’ll remember that she led the way to the elevator, and I’ll remember every single feeling she gave me. I’ll remember that she was not drunk at all. That’s for spite. Perhaps she’ll sense my feelings by telepathy; I hope they fairly pour into her head and make her turn white. He’ll say, “What’s the matter? You’re so pale. Don’t tell me it’s something you ate.” She’ll come running down the corridor asking everyone which is my room. “I am sorry, madame, Mr. Morgan has left no forwarding address. You can always have old Mr. Divver.”
He started up from the bed, horrified. Jesus! Did I think all that? Have I become a monster? Once a thing has been thought it can never be taken back: dreams are not renouncable, like friends. Max was right: I don’t think I have ever had a friend or relative whom I didn’t quite casually often wish to see dead, or degraded—which is much more wicked. I have never been denied the smallest thing without at once imagining the denier dead. I have never had a friend whose silly vanity didn’t cause me to feel happier. At heart I would pay any price for my freedom: if millions had to die to give it to me, I should be ashamed, but more happy than sad.
I am the hypocrite who found Brutus despicable. I would like to see Max, my mother and Harriet lie down on their beds and never wake up again. Perhaps not Harriet: I’ll keep her and let her husband die instead.
My God! Now what am I doing? Am I examining my sins or having pleasant dreams? How disgusting to be able to do both at once! Can that be normal?
I shall now be ice-cold. What is she? What am I? She is a woman I met last night, who did me the favour of giving me what I most needed. I am the man who was a frightened boy until she came along. I am not really a man, yet, but I’ve begun to be. I have acted well in giving her up. That’s that; and let’s not even bother to discuss the matter any more.
He went to the window again with a firm step. The good people below had all become silly. That’s natural, he thought; I’ll get a hold on myself, and then the idiots will improve.
It’s not as though I were in love with her.
A trusting, frank, obliging, gentle sort of woman. I wish I’d held her more. I wish I’d managed to hurt her.
What next?
Perhaps I’ll write mother a stinging letter.
He remembered Divver’s order; he got panicky, and began to pack his belongings.
The job was half-done and his muddled thoughts were criss-crossing sulkily but more quietly when he noticed his pills on the bedside table.
He knew that he must get rid of them at once. The last of my past he said to himself, enjoying the phrase and holding up the bottle. He looked coldly at the pills and said to them: and I would get rid of you, what’s more, if I knew where to throw you. I am a man, and I shall never be drugged by you again. Consequences? That’s my business; it’s my life.
Yes, it is my life, said an inner voice cautiously.
If I knew where to throw you….
Why, into the toilet, of course.
This simple discovery made him laugh, and resolved all his doubts immediately. At least, I can do this, he thought with pride. He emptied the pills into the toilet bowl, and then went back for the large reserve supply that his mother had forced on him. Having emptied that in too, he decided to make a change of heart impossible by getting rid of his prescriptions as well. He tore them up—the pidgin-Latin agents of death—and dropped them in. Last of all, he threw in the card he always carried, which had his photograph on it and a blatant description of his sickness, with instructions to Mr. Everyman: “Loosen the necktie; move, if possible, any heavy objects against which he may strike himself during his convulsions….”
He pressed the handle. The pills rushed to the surface, foamed and struggled to live. His photograph spun in a circle. He looked down at the watery battle with haughty detachment. “You who are about to die, I salute you,” he said. The merry-go-round yawned in the centre, and his boyhood went down for ever. Into the sewers of Mell; by conduit to the Bay of Riga; my wet face nodding past the Cinque Ports; to my prescriptions, a salute of twenty-four guns at Plymouth Sound; a circle round the still-vexed Bermoothes; paddling with Fulton up the North River; “Bless my soul, nurse, what’s come through the faucet but young Morgan’s luminal.”
He returned to his packing. He heard the reservoir fill up again behind him, as he had heard it from his dungeon during the night, and for a moment he felt bitter disappointment.
*
“I’m all packed up and ready to go,” he said, when Divver returned in the evening. He had carefully chosen a phrase that suggested present goodness, in case Divver was still brooding over his past badness.
Divver ignored the remark. He sank into a chair, blew out a gust of breath and said: “What a day! What a day!” His stricken eye was as colourful as marzipan.
Why, you good, gentle soul! thought Morgan. He asked courteously:
“Were you in Tutin, Max?”
“I certainly was. It’s not like here, not a bit like here.” He shook his head slowly. “Oh, brother! They know what’s going on. You can feel the tension just as soon as the train starts into the station.” He hung his hands wearily, and said with disgust: “Well, tension is all I got out of today…. Do you by any chance remember an article I wrote a year or so ago about Polish unions?” He raised his legs and rested them on the top of a packed suitcase.
“I don’t exactly recall it, but I’m sure I could.”
“Well, I got the material for that from a Polish union president who was visiting New York. It was a friendly piece; it recognized all the problems confronting the honest Pole. After it appeared I was sent a card of honorary membership in the Polish Metallurgical and Allied Trades Union. I was careful to bring the card with me on this trip; it’s important in a foreign country to have some person to tip you off to what’s good and what’s bad, otherwise how would you know?
“The card had the address of union headquarters in Tutin on it This morning I showed it to a cab driver outside Tutin station—and that was the way it all
started. The driver was illiterate, so he showed the card to a passing plumber; the plumber was illiterate and took the card into a bar; the bartender handed it around the customers, who all looked polite but completely vague—well, we wasted a half-hour monkeying around like that, and when finally the driver found out the address he didn’t seem to believe his ears. He kept pointing to the card and raising his shoulders and hands, and I kept nodding and nodding—quite a commentary, no? on the average American visitor, when a cab driver just can’t believe he could want to visit a union headquarters.
“He kept on like that all the way through the main part of Tutin. He kept pointing to churches, museums, parks, fountains, war memorials, as though he was sure I would be better off looking at them. At first I responded by smiling and nodding, pretending I was interested, the way one does with strangers; but I soon gave that up, because each time I showed interest he thought I’d really changed my mind, and tried to stop. I think he just couldn’t believe that I was seriously identified with Labour. We drove clear across the town that way, until we came to the industrial section, and then he had to stop at every corner and ask for directions. Finally, we landed up at the entrance of an alley. He pointed down it, and when I paid him off he wanted to wait until I came back. I don’t wonder; he’d already cost me the equivalent of four or five bucks.
“I went down the alley and it opened out into a court, a scrubby sort of square made of the backs of houses. Some of the words on my card were painted across a wall of one of the houses. There were no doors and windows on the ground floor, only a flight of outside stairs, with a handrail made of old rope, leading up to a door just under the roof. There was an old woman sweeping these stairs; and when I climbed to the top and showed her the card we went through the whole damn rigmarole all over again—along with half the people in the court with nothing better to do; old men with stinking pipes, and children and women straight out of the washtub; all gathering around and screaming at each other and looking at me as if I was something out of a theatre: one always feels self-conscious about being well dressed among workers. Well, all that happened after all this debating—and one or two of them seemed to be half out of their minds, they got so excited—was that I gathered that if I cared to wait the president would be along.
“The old woman led me up the stairs and in at the door, where there were stairs dropping down into a typical union meeting-room: they’re the same everywhere I’ve ever been: tables for committees, dozens of hard chairs, a dusty wooden floor, and a bulletin board with printed appeals and carbon copies of manifestoes and dates of meetings, and the usual union art; you know, mimeographed sketches of workers representing or wanting something. Don’t think I’m being snide; art is a natural instinct even when it’s bad.
“So far so good. I sat down to wait. Once in a while the old woman would open the door and stick her head in from under the roof and wave her hand approvingly; and each time she did it, I figured that Mr. Big would be along. Around one o’clock I began to feel hungry, but I was afraid to miss my man if I went out. At two o’clock whistles blew, and some shift must have ended because a couple of young workers came in. The old woman pointed to me and I showed them my card; they were perfectly polite, but they only shrugged their shoulders; and so I went back to my chair. They put a sheet over one of the tables, laid a poolboard on it and began to play.
“I’d got to the stage where since I’d missed half the day I felt I might as well sit out the rest. Lucky I felt that way, because the very same business happened each time someone new came in: the dame pointed me out, I showed him my card—it was beginning to look soiled—he talked to some others about it—then the same shrugging of shoulders, and so on. By four-thirty, three committee meetings were going on around me; there was a whole gang of people talking and sitting but leaving a small space just around me: I began to feel like an electric chair. But when the five o’clock whistles blew, half the people in the place turned and gave me assuring looks, and patted their hands at me to be patient.
“When at last the door opened and the big boss climbed down with his henchmen—I’m joking, but that’s frankly the way I felt—they all sat up and drew his attention to me, and then sat back to watch.
“He came over and bowed. I said: ‘May I see Mr. Korbycski?’; which seemed to surprise him; and then I said, still in English of course, ‘I am Max Divver, your honorary member, from the American magazine Forward’—smiling, because my appearance must have seemed suspicious to him; I was prepared for him not to have the least idea who I was. I handed him the card and he read it over slowly, sucking his lips and frowning; and finally he let out a snort, shrugged his shoulders and passed the card on to his escorts. The escorts examined it in the same grim way, and then gave the same hard noises, looking at me in a tired manner, and shaking their heads. The boss didn’t even wait around; he just gave a short order to one of the escorts and went off to talk to a man at the pool table. The escort spoke English, and said to me, in very slow, exact words: ‘I am sorry. Mister Korbycski is no more president of this union. He is no more a member of this union.’
“I asked, jokingly, was he dead?
“He said: ‘Mister Korbycski is a traitor.’
“I said: Oh, in what way?
“He said: ‘Korbycski is an agent of imperialism. He is dismissed from our ranks as a disruptor of worker unity and a Trotszky politician of power. He is in the pay of General Goering and Lord Leverhulme.’
“I said, how could that be? we ourselves had had Korbycski to an editorial lunch.
“He said: ‘My good friend, you have much to learn about Europe.’
“I said, with a good deal of sarcasm in my voice, that I’d been learning for fifteen years.
“He said: ‘Your gentle nose has not yet learned the stink of a Polish dung-heap.’
“I was getting mad by that time, so I didn’t wait for him to reply: there was something so unreal about the whole place: the president playing pool, everybody staring at me like owls, puffing little brown cigarettes: I was mad and jittery: it was like landing up in some sort of Labour looney-bin. The last straw was when I was walking to the door, and the man I’d talked with suddenly pointed his finger at the old woman on the stairs and shouted: ‘She is the traitor’s mother, yet she will confirm every word that I have said!’”
“And did she?”
“She just looked at me miserably, and nodded, and then began to cry.
“The cab driver was actually still waiting for me. He seemed sorry for me, and tried to make me stop and see the Museum of Science and Industry. I feel like a goddammed fool. I’d depended on the president to show me the ropes. Well, my first article will just have to be plain description, that’s all, a sort of summing-up of the total atmosphere, of the whole sense of social disintegration. I can still hardly credit what happened: either they’ve gone crazy or I’m crazy: I’ve reached the point where I hardly know what I am.” He looked guiltily at Morgan’s suitcases. “Would you mind very much if we hang on here another couple of days: I can’t face collecting my things again and hunting for a place? I just can’t make decisions right now. The thought of deciding any more things makes me want to vomit. I don’t know what’s come over me. First I want to go one way, then another: every few hours I feel a spurt of determination and spirits, and I think: thank God! Now things are going to pick up: and then, half an hour later, I’m back in the same depression again. What with old Grieg turning out to be an intellectual flop, and Korbycski changing into Labour’s dung-heap, and the things we talked about yesterday, and getting out of this dump—why, hell! I feel I’m at the end of my tether without even knowing what my tether is.” He sighed, and added: “Sometimes I despair of helping Europe.”
Morgan sighed too. “I know very well what you mean, Max.”
“Do you? You seem to me to be in fine shape. Incidentally, what did happen to you last night? Did you meet up with a woman?”
“Sort of.”
�
�Polish or American?”
“Oh, she’s American.”
“A tourist, I suppose.”
“In a way.”
“You’re not wasting much time are you?”
Morgan grew in stature, but he smiled modestly. “She was really a very nice sort of a girl,” he said.
“Well, that’s something. But I hope you do understand why I was sore last night.”
“Oh, sure, Max.”
“You just can’t go running around hotel corridors stark naked.” Divver began to smile, rather wistfully. “But you had a good time, eh?”
“I certainly did.”
“Well, that’s an important thing, too … Do you know, frankly, what I feel? No matter what I may have said to you yesterday, or may ever say, for that matter; however ashamed I may feel of being here, however much I despise this sort of dump—believe me, I know that no place is as terrible as one’s own living-room. Sometimes, when I just hear the word ‘home,’ it gives me the feeling of terror I used to get when I was a kid and came to the part in a play where it said ‘Enter Torturers.’ I think that if I deliberately said ‘home’ over and over, I could drive myself insane. When there’s been a war, it’s terrible to think that half the heroes in it were men who, whatever they said aloud, went down on their knees in their hearts and thanked God for giving them the only valid excuse for leaving home—as though, really, peace had been declared. Sometimes I think of war as a huge sigh of relief. And since we’re being so frank, tell me now, honestly: if you were only able to get away from home by war, wouldn’t you want war to come?”