by Nigel Dennis
As the days had passed—days of walking, prowling, stops to converse with passing cats, grins at people in whom he had no interest, recollections of pleasures and fading dreams of achievements as Caesar or Casanova—he had lost so many illusions that only one refuge remained. The backstairs of the hotel were as attractive as they had been on his first morning; he invariably left and returned by them, feeling some energy and happiness as he tripped down their four flights, curiously re-examining the stacks of mops and polishers, the big drums of oil and wax. The chambermaids either looked puzzled at seeing him or broke into friendly smiles: when they smiled he smiled back with all his heart and, feeling sure that a braver man would have his way with them on the spot, only sighed and continued down the stairs to the ground floor. Here he paused, leaning against a wall from which he could watch, through a stone archway, the shining engines of the huge kitchen, the chefs and their assistants shouting about in their white aprons and tall hats: and he would exchange a nervous smile with a couple of boys of his own age who sat at a heavy table peeling dumps of vegetables.
But, only yesterday, as he took up his stand at this place, he seemed to see a signal pass from one man to another, until it was carried out of sight, and he heard an invisible man call out to somebody. Next minute, one of the manager’s assistants, dapper in his black suit and stiff collar, came picking his way through the kitchen, and stood in front of Morgan. “I am sorry,” he said, with a little bow and a rather disdainful smile, “but these stairs and kitchen are not open to our guests. Is it that you became faint in elevators? No? Then you will forgive me if I request you, on behalf of the manager, to make use of them in future.” He was polite but his voice was firm, and Morgan, looking away from his strict eyes, saw that his expulsion had made a dramatic occasion. The chefs and the peelers had stopped work and were staring at him in cold, dead silence, as if they had long been waiting for the moment when the parasite would be removed from their bodies. He felt not only ashamed but afraid; he turned quickly toward the stairs; at which the manager’s assistant laughed tolerantly and said: “I do not mean you should trouble yourself to climb all the way up again”: at which Morgan had obediently turned back, passed by the icy servants, and walked out into the backyard, smaller and more desolate than he had ever felt before.
Tonight, the activity and excitement of the evacuation practice had at least distracted him; but now, while the gangs held together in the bar and the undertaker dreamed of what was coming to Senator Fitch, Morgan could only open his mother’s letter:
“… it is not that I am hysterical, Jimmy, but simply that in not so much as replying to my letters you are being rude, thankless and, as I see it, most foolish. I admit that my first letter was possibly dictatorial—and certainly tactless, since it called you back when you had barely arrived. But I have written twice since then in quite another tone, as if there were no differences of age and experience between us: in other words, I have written not as a mother but as one who is eager to help. In return you have written me precisely one letter, telling me of your arrival, and describing scenes in which I could, to say the most, share your natural excitement at finding yourself in a totally new environment. This was some pleasure to me, but as the weeks pass with no further word, I begin to feel that perhaps I am the one who is being foolish—because I am allowing you to decide what and how I shall write to you, letting you be a dictator through your silence. I think this is both bad for you and more than I should put up with, and so now I am going to speak to you frankly, as most mothers would have done long ago.
“I want to know if you are well.
“I want to know what plans you have made for yourself about coming back—presuming that the plans I have suggested have not made the slightest impression. I credit you with enough sense to believe that it is not your intention to sit dreaming happily in the Polish Corridor until you are woken up by Hitler.
“Now I am going to go on and say something that I find more painful than you will care to believe. I think that for reasons unknown to me, some strain of blind stubbornness has come up in you, so that anything constructive automatically seems something to which you should pay no attention—it would not be the first time. And so, if I do not receive a cable with a statement of your plans, sailing-date, etc., in a few days, I shall have to appeal to someone who will be more concerned than you are with your welfare. So far, I have taken special care not to communicate my anxiety to Max, but it is to him that you may force me to turn—a course that will be as distasteful for him and for me as it will be humiliating for you. It is, incidentally, only thanks to him that I know you are still in existence. He, too, I believe, might, as your guardian, have written a word or two more than a few lines attached to a manuscript. But at least he did write those, despite the burden of his work.
“You will think this a hard, dictatorial letter. Perhaps you will not forgive it. I must take that chance, my patience is exhausted.
“One question, in closing: Don’t you think it might occur to you that in following a personal whim that threatens to take up the time of two very busy adults, you are rating your individual happiness and ‘freedom’ somewhat higher than you should?”
If he had been at home instead of in Mell, smug instead of bored, this letter’s last paragraph would have been impressive, placed like a thong on the end of a whip to cut through adolescence’s noisy assertions of mature rightness and lay open the silent, rooted conviction that it is, and forever will be, inevitably and childishly wrong. But Morgan, clutching the letter, gave this paragraph no more than a nominal blush; boredom fled, and he recoiled from Divver’s door as if his mother had in one step covered four thousand miles and was at this instant pinning her eye on him through Divver’s keyhole. He thought abruptly: Well, this is final: I may as well pack up and go: what’s there to stay for, anyway? But this admission of failure and obedience to authority worked him into such a rage that the room turned simultaneously blood red and brilliant yellow and he had a terrifying feeling of being whisked into eternal space. Wholly against his will, his mind’s eye was invaded by the most humiliating spectacles: visions of the brooks and fields of his own country, homey vistas littered with inhabitants far more hoary and benign than the dames and priests of his European fantasies: they stirred him into such spasms of homesickness that he suffered a sensuous wrench in kicking them out and replacing them with visions of himself, blood streaming from his nose, resisting illusion and dependence to the last. The thought of Divver as his mother’s instrument made him cackle maliciously; an enjoyment which soothed him into a more normal state. But he was too harassed to sleep: perhaps, he thought, I should have kept just a handful of pills for times like this: after all, there is nothing ignominious about waking up refreshed. But there were no pills; the clock struck one; he knew that only activity would put him in the right stupor; he left the room.
He crossed the darkened lobby and the square, and sat on a stone bench beside the cathedral, twisting his hands. He could see the little balcony of the Archduke Suite; he could tell by the colour of the drapes that the lights were burning in the drawing-room. His heart jumped when he thought he saw a familiar bosom move; but it was his own head that had moved, and the bosom was a sleeping pigeon. I bet they are all too drunk to stand, he thought: really, when I consider the things that man Divver has told me about how he has spent his life escaping from everyday reality, he can hardly have the nerve not to help me escape from exceptional tyranny: in the morning I shall confront him—before the gorgon can get at him direct.
The drawing-room lights went out; the bedroom lights came on: he shuddered and walked back to the hotel.
His fate, Divver himself, was crossing the lobby from the gold elevator. Morgan stood still in a wing of the revolving door. Divver’s big figure slouched along with the naturalness of a man alone, still absorbed by conversation he has just left. He had presumably drunk and spent the evening well, because he was talking to himself and his face was runnin
g through quick changes of hearty agreement, smiles, solemn consideration, sage nodding and lip-twisting. In his own elevator he clenched one fist and hit the sleeping operator smartly on the shoulder: he rose from Morgan’s sight gazing amiably at the roof of the car like a man who has found a route to the stars.
*
“Hi! Come in!” he shouted, when Morgan knocked on his door in the morning. Barely glancing around, he snapped the metal clips of his underwear and exclaimed: “By God, this is the life! I must say, time and tide spring strange tricks on a man.” He reached for his trousers. “If you had told me even a few weeks ago that I was destined by fate to become a gold-miner, I would have called you crazy. Now, I feel that something more robust than pen-pushing should have been my vocation all along. Be a pal; take a gander through your window and tell me if the Big Chief’s car has arrived.”
Clutching his mother’s letter, Morgan looked down into the square. “All clear … No; wait; it’s just turning in from the street this minute.”
“Thanks, mein freund,” said Divver, “that allows me precisely fifteen minutes. We gold-miners adhere to the strictest routine … And how are you this fine day? You don’t look too rested, I must say. No more hunting naked women down corridors, I hope? As your guardian, I don’t wish to reprimand you.”
“I attended the evacuation practice,” said Morgan spitefully.
“Oh, yes. Old man Simon said something about one.” For a moment Divver looked disturbed, but then added: “Larry had some pretty important schemes for Area B, which kept us in conference.” He put on his jacket and walked to the full-length mirror. “How do you think it looks?” he asked. “A frank opinion, please. My feelings were made to be hurt.”
He had put on a pair of square-toed boots and a brand-new set of Polish miner’s workclothes; a stiff, grey, threadbare outfit that transformed him to a state in which only his large, puzzled head suggested an editor and an enemy of intolerance. Morgan was about to hint at this when Divver drew out a peaked cloth cap and, cocking it on his head, obliterated the last vestige of his old self. “Frankly,” he said, snapping his fingers: “I think it’s pretty damn good. It’s rugged. It’s functional. It’s positively handsome. Of course, as my wife would say: ‘It’s the hat does it.’” He studied his new reflection without modesty, smiling wantonly, peering closer like a man enamoured. “Well: do I look like a man of action? Or just a proletarian Sherlock Holmes? Of course, when it no longer fits my life, when it becomes phoney, I can always hand it to some Bucks County intellectual who apes The Man With a Hoe … On second thoughts,” he added, fingering the cloth cap and taking it off: “I think I’ll manage without this. As the Greeks said: ‘Nothing in excess.’”
“Are you going to be like Larry, and walk in and out of the lobby like that?”
“Certainly. Which do you think the more honest: to dress frankly for what you are going to do, or sneak out in a summer suit with your real clothes hidden under your arm?” But although Divver spoke confidently, some of his crazy pleasure in himself seemed to have been dulled, because he went on to say sharply: “Don’t think me rude, but it’s precisely your sort of question that typifies progressives. They yammer half the day about fundamentals and class-consciousness, and spend the other half keeping a check on their lapels and fly-buttons. By God!” Divver exclaimed, swinging away from the mirror. “I’ve yet to meet one, a single one, with the simple directness of Larry. In many ways he takes me back to the old farmers and individualistic small businessmen in my father’s office when I was a kid. Unenlightened for the most part, no idea of theoretical fundamentals; you might say that history had never given them a chance to straighten themselves out. Tough and hard-bitten, as Larry is: but somehow knowing in their collective unconscious how and when to go about things: just as Larry, a man who doesn’t know a moose from an Edipus, is somehow on the job, digging out gold when it’s most desperately needed. It makes one think … Do you know something? Until I ran into Larry I had a favourite delusion of grandeur. I hoped that I might someday become”—Divver flushed—“a columnist, with all the trimmings: my photograph at the head of a column, next to a standing head like ‘Joking Aside’ or ‘Honourable Estate’; believe me, I thought up hundreds of titles. Now, do you know, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s a world crisis and I’m under contract for it, I’d throw my goddamned portable into the Baltic, like Prospero, and really start leading a real life.” Divver’s eyes became truculent, he stared like a man with a vision, then all at once he glanced at his watch, hurried over to look down into the square, and came back wagging his finger: “But don’t tell that to your momma in your next letter.”
Morgan looked outraged.
“Now, now,” said Divver, laughing, patting him on the shoulder: “I was only kidding; I know you wouldn’t do a thing like that.” He began to pocket the oddments he needed for the mines, glancing at Morgan. “How are you doing?” he asked kindly. “I have a feeling you’re not adjusting too well these days.”
“Oh yes I am. A little bored occasionally.”
“You should play tennis. I’m told the courts are good. Are you taking your pills regularly?”
“Sure.”
“That’s the way. Sleep and plenty of baseball at your age, as my old man used to say—and he was by no means the old fool I’ve often thought he was.”
“But I do have a bit of a problem that I’d very much like your frank opinion on.” Morgan began to open the letter; at which Divver firmly raised his hands and said, “Not right now, if you don’t mind. I’m not only in a hurry, I’m just not in a mood to grapple with problems. Won’t it keep until this evening?”
Morgan said yes, he guessed so.
“You didn’t happen to see any mail for me, did you?” Divver asked; and when Morgan shook his head, Divver gave a happy wink and said:
“I guess my spouse has stopped writing. I must say I don’t blame her: she’s not heard a word from me since I arrived. What a louse I am,” Divver said with great satisfaction.
“Well, she must have got one letter; from that evening we both wrote; remember?”
“Frankly, I never mailed mine,” said Divver. “That’s the truth, and if you think I stink—well, sir, that’s your privilege. I was never made to be a model of decent, social behaviour, if you must know.”
Dumbfounded, Morgan watched the strange caricature of his old guardian prancing around the room: Why, anyone would think, he thought, that he, not I, had just emerged from years of drugs.
Divver burst out laughing. “I can frankly confess now,” he said, “that that experience of yours your first night here was hilarious: I laugh every time I think of it. I once read about a man, an actual, real man, who spent his whole life moving from one town to another, seducing a woman in each. I bet there’s not a living man who wouldn’t, at heart, like to spend his life that way … But that doesn’t mean that you ought never to get some sleep occasionally. You look washed-up. Why not stop by at the Archduke once in a while? Harriet was asking after you only yesterday. She said she had a feeling that you were a very intelligent young man, and she hoped she and Larry hadn’t offended you in some way.”
“I suppose I might, thank you: I don’t really know.”
“I remember when I was your age,” said Divver, relaxed and genial, “I remember having a quite paranoid delusion of not being liked or wanted by people. I guess it’s a phase we all have to go through. I’ll say a word to Larry or Harriet, so they won’t think you’re just plain rude … Well, le Maitre is probably descending in that golden bird-cage right this minute, so …”
He was moving to the door when Mr. Plezeck, the organist, entered with a swatch of newspapers. He was taken aback by Divver’s proletarian effect; but it was Mr. Plezeck’s presence rather than his astonishment that made Divver apologetic. “My God, Mr. Plezeck,” he said, “you’ll simply have to excuse me again. I must rush to the mines.” To prove it, he dived into a sidepocket, took out the cap and set
tled it on his head.
“Not spare even five minutes?” cried the organist, waving the newspapers. “An address given in Danzig by the Archbishop, of high importance.” He smiled suddenly and said to Divver: “But perhaps you are not a believer in the word of God.”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Plezeck,” said Divver, grasping the door handle. “Not that I would dogmatically exclude the entire supernatural, sight unseen.”
“No matter!” cried the organist, smiling more than ever. “You are an apostle of the noble Rousseau; you believe that in our hearts lies a spontaneous will to good; you are a Jean-Jacques of the New World.”
Divver was very pleased by this compliment, but he edged out through the door. They heard him hastening down the passage.
“But, alas,” cried the organist, “with due respect to your honourable friend, see what the spontaneous in man is preparing for us today!” He unfolded one of the newspapers. “Danzig! The very name is terror; our Scylla, our Circe, and where is our Odysseus? Sit down; I will read it to you.” He felt for his spectacles.
“Mr. Plezeck; there’s no point in reading to me.”
“You too have become a gold-miner?” exclaimed the organist.
“I have to go,” said Morgan. “I have an appointment.” Then, ashamed of the lie, which he dearly wished were true, he said: “No, Mr. Plezeck; the truth is that I don’t feel too steady: for some reason I am very nervous this morning.”