Antinous.—Would they make me a coward?
Ulysses.—Try your insults, my friend, on a man who hasn’t seen the change in many young men’s faces when they died. You can believe me. The absence of a weight of earth on your mouth and eyelids, if it is not peace, is a passable likeness. Well worth having. Friendly.
Antinous.—I see. To enjoy a few years, or only a few months, of an illusion — you’ll sacrifice a generation.
Ulysses.—I felt sure we should have that! You think, perhaps, that yours is a unique generation? It would be a scandal to lay hands on you?
Antinous.—And you lie. You tell people there’s nothing to be alarmed at, they can go on horse-racing and arguing, no need for them to store weapons, oil, corn. In a less honourable man, it might be cowardice. I think that in you it’s a mortal laziness and the fear of change. Ulysses the far-sighted. Perhaps you find these epithets in poor taste now. . . .
Ulysses.—What do you want me to do? I’ve lived, remember, through one war. And through the twenty years since it ended in a victory. We’ll go on talking of it as a victory. . . . They haven’t been easy.
Antinous.—Yes, yes, I know all about the causes you weren’t able to control. Do you still prefer to call them gods? They wrecked your plans. Had you one, except to get home to Penelope and your bed? And they started disasters from which somehow you always escaped. Others of your friends were less lucky. Yours has been a hard fate, Ulysses. All during the war you were a leader, not one of the first, but in a responsible position. You were respected; you made a name for yourself as a clever patient statesman. The mental habits you share with the more cunning animals became, before the war ended, marks of prudence and common sense. Even in the last difficult years you enjoyed some delightful intervals. . . . You have earned your Penelope and you want to enjoy her. How natural! And us?
Ulysses.—I am an elderly man, Antinous. The future is in your hands. You will live it, you are responsible for it.
Antinous.—Good. You are going to abdicate. . . .
Ulysses.—My dear Antinous!
Antinous.—The future is ours. The responsibility is ours. And the power, all the power, yours. Hypocrite!
Ulysses.—Tell me — suppose I retire in your favour — what would you do?
Antinous.—Warn the barbarians. And re-arm our people. Quickly!
Ulysses.—Too late. Their army is ready and your warning would begin the invasion. Do you imagine they would give you time after it to re-arm? Out of politeness? … My dear boy, I implore you to go on writing poetry. It limits the amount of harm you can do and leaves me in peace to find the safe way out of our danger. I’m used to it. I’ve done it for twenty years. And, if I may say so, I’ve done it well.
Antinous.—Ah, you admit they mean war!
Ulysses.—I admit nothing. Least of all, that the way to prevent war is to begin one. . . . When you go out this evening, look round you. Look at the hands of the men who have been sweating in the olive-fields all day and are seated, arguing or drowsily silent, over their glasses of dark wine. Listen to the women talking as they chop herbs to put in the soup. Watch one of them take her child up to carry him indoors, and imagine what you won’t forget when you have seen it — I have — the moment when he is taken from her and killed, there, under her eyes. All this peaceful life, these early mornings of waking in the clear light to another long day of work flavoured with garlic and rough wine, these long evenings of half-drunken talk, the nights lying beside a familiar but still pleasurable and useful body — days and nights which are nothing in the eyes of a clever young man, and in the life of a nation, everything it has … you want to wipe it out at once — because it may, perhaps, be attacked next year or in two years. Poet!
Antinous.—Actor! Your love of Ithaca is one of your most moving traits. How touching! And how useful it has been to you.
Ulysses.—Antinous — you make the usual mistake of a clever man. You imagine that because you see through me you see me.
Antinous.—I see a subtle politician, swollen with honours, and afraid of losing his lands and his wife.
Ulysses.—You know Penelope’s opinion of you.
Antinous.—And Penelope, too, is middle-aged.
Ulysses.—How fit you are to govern!
Antinous.—Go on governing us, Ulysses. We are not rebels. We only ask to be governed. And told the truth. And armed.
Ulysses.—In the middle of the olive harvest? Impossible. For the next few months I need every skilled man I have. You want to turn my pruners and goatherds into soldiers, and at the same time you want peace! No doubt I’m senile, but I have my ideas.
Antinous.—We ask nothing better than to understand and obey you, Ulysses. Go on.
Ulysses.—Has it never struck you that with a little encouragement the barbarians may turn on some weaker country?
Antinous.—And afterwards? When they are excited by easy victory?
Ulysses.—Or sated. . . . We can, I think, leave the future to the gods.
Antinous.—Is that your plan? After all your promises and admonitions you can only offer an excuse for doing nothing? For falling asleep after dinner and waking to bore us all with another version of your travels. Poor Penelope! … Very well. You refuse to warn our people. I shall. And at once.
Ulysses.—Antinous, I ask you not to begin brawling now. Between ourselves, I’m at the most delicate stage of my negotiations with the barbarian leader. Everything depends on it.
Antinous.—Another excuse!
Ulysses.—I forbid you.
Antinous turns away. During the whole scene Ulysses has been handling and adjusting his bow: he lifts it quickly, and the arrow pierces Antinous in the side.
Antinous.—Old — coward — and disgraced. . . . The future … He dies.
Ulysses.—My poor boy. And what nonsense. The future is always on the side of the records. And you and your friends will not have written them. Admit, too, that I tried to spare you. I’m nothing if not patient. And reasonable. . . . These young men are very unlucky. There are men who are born unlucky — he was one of them — and it was not that I disliked him. In fact I liked him. . . .
*
The first important scene of the play — between Penelope and Ulysses — was unfinished.. It took place the day after his return. Penelope, her author said, was modelled on the prefect’s wife of a department, south of the Loire, not rich, not much visited, none of its vineyards known outside the commune which cherished it, a modest handsome county, with its due share of scandals, envy, young marriageable girls, cousins, and easy happiness. The prefect’s wife had smooth heavy arms, which could still make the gestures of her angular girlhood, just as her mind, in some disregarded corner, kept the vivacity and warm-hearted malice of the young girl. . . .
Ulysses.—Penelope!
Penelope.—My love?
Ulysses.—Ah, it’s really you. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. Is this our room? Is that really your great-grandmother’s mirror?
Penelope.—Yes — I’m sorry to say it is. And just as cloudy and unsatisfactory as ever. You really must ask the captain of one of your ships to bring me a new one from Massalia. I hoped — but, there, my dear Ulysses, I suppose you had more important things to remember. And when you left, it was less necessary than it is now that I should see myself clearly.
Ulysses.—You have changed during these years. You are another and lovelier Penelope. . . .
Penelope.—Thanks from all the others — the Penelopes you missed.
Ulysses.—Were there many of them?
Penelope.—Several. There was the one whose waist you were able to span between your hands — she was rather a little idiot. A second, though she could still outrun her women — but perhaps they cheated — was occasionally a little, oh a very little tired after a long day when the bailiff and her dressmaker had been tiresome. Another discovered quite suddenly that it’s not in the least amusing to walk barefoot in the wet grass. And yet another — but
you don’t want to meet all these strangers.
Ulysses.—I have my faithful, my adorable wife—
Penelope.—Middle-aged, a good housewife, and easily made happy — by things her younger self took without noticing … a perfectly ripened fig, the new wine, and, how rare and marvellous, one of those hours when everything, from the air to one’s less young body, feels new and light.
Ulysses.—Do you find me very old?
Penelope.—You are all I remembered you as being.
Ulysses.—Dear Penelope!
Penelope.—And now, my love, I must talk to you a little about Telemachus. . . . How thankful I am that we had only one child, and there will be no trouble about the estate. . . . He is a dear boy, more like your family than mine, but he hasn’t, alas, your placidity. Perhaps I spoiled him just a little. . . . I think marriage — not that I intend to lose him. . . .
Ulysses.—We can discuss it. But I haven’t told you anything about my voyage—
Penelope.—Another time — this evening — or during the winter, if you can keep awake after dinner. I’m longing to hear it. But now I simply must go and talk to them in the dairy. You’ve no idea how lazy and flighty girls are now — and with these boys about, and the men coming back — I expect the worst.
Ulysses.—I’m afraid you’re not interested.
Penelope.—My dear!
Ulysses.—And there are some things I ought to explain. . . .
Penelope.—No. Certainly not.
Ulysses.—But why not? Surely you don’t think that anything I have to tell you will offend your ears, your — small — neatly-curled — ears. Let me touch one of them.
Penelope.—You would be careful not to tell anything that could offend me.
Ulysses.—I don’t understand you.
Penelope.—My love, I have the most complete trust in your discretion and knowledge of human nature. Of my nature at least. Like any sensible woman of my age I would rather you deceived me than made me cry. Tears would be fatal to my skin. The maids are already telling each other stories they have picked up from the sailors — I am sure that if I could hear it the whole quarter down by the harbour is as full of murmurs as those shells children hold against their ears — stories about young women they call sirens. Now, now, my dear Ulysses, I’m not a girl, and you needn’t explain that a siren is a sort of tropical fish. Nor do I want you to tell me anything about Calypso except whether she still plucks her eyebrows and makes all her guests uncomfortable by begging them not to leave on the day arranged … dear Calypso — even as a girl she was tiresomely intense, and I always knew she would be unhappy. If Madame Circe gave you the recipes of any of her dishes I should be glad of them. She must have a marvellous cook. And Nausicaa, the dear child — you shall tell me how tonguetied she was and whether she is worth considering for Telemachus. But that’s all. If you’re tactless enough to try to tell me anything I don’t wish to hear, I shall close my ears. Like this. My love, you understand me perfectly. When I was a young woman, I adored excitement and turning my life upside-down. Now all I ask is peace. I want to grow tranquilly old, with my dear tables and curtains and fig-trees round me. I do want a mirror, but if it means any trouble I’ll put up with the old one. Dear Ulysses. . . .
*
At no moment in their discussion — it went on a long time — did the danger which plainly threatened France move their minds except as a ball thrown and rebounding from one to the other. They played with extreme brilliance. None of their English contemporaries is capable of such grace and wit. Nor were they showing-off before the foreigner. When timidly I asked what they were going to do, to rouse their countrymen, they made my question the spring-board for another flight of analytical wit. Clearly, except in this way, they could not take it seriously. Their duty to France wa$ finished when the figure of Antinous had been invented to carry their fear, contempt, insight — and to die of the prudent greed of his elders. No doubt it was a form of protest. It seemed to me equally a desertion. I was afraid to say this.
We were joined by their English friend, an adolescent of forty, lazy, narrowly cultivated, an admirable essayist by his skill in weaving ideas, not complex, not his own, into a neat border. It must have been he who began talking of our debt to France. To neither Frenchman would it have occurred to say in so many words that, apart from Shakespeare, we had nothing, no one, to set with the glorious crowd of French writers from Ronsard to Eluard. Certainly they believed it — half deliberately, and half by a firm instinct. French writers are drawn, a gleaming thread, through the life of mediaeval and modern Europe. And certainly in the nineteenth century they ran, athletes and nervous, outstripping our complacence and vested beliefs. But — all our Elizabethans, all the complex harmony of our seventeenth century, all our superb Augustans? A coward as usual, I sat and morosely said nothing, but thought, about my countryman: You snob. Only a strange snobbery could bring an intelligent man to abolish, so lightly, his inheritance.
His French listeners were amused, and I was aware of their not quite hidden contempt. They were far from denying anything he said, and they were surprised he said it. It confirmed, I think, their belief, ironical and instinctive, in the mental poverty of all countries except their own.
“There are,” I said at last, “English writers, even alive, who are worth reading, and in their own language.”
“I am sure of it,” the younger Frenchman said gravely. “It remains true that both of you have read Gide, Mauriac, Valéry, Claudel, Giraudoux, and learned French simply in order to read them, and I suppose Mallarme, Baudelaire — I won’t list the others. Where neither of us reads English. Nor — which is really significant — feels he need. You must need us. Your own literature leaves you hungry — or why come to ours? ”
“We have more curiosity.”
He smiled without kindness. He knew they had a greater share of curiosity and intellectual courage than any other people. What he didn’t — still doesn’t — recall is the fate of Narcissus. Almost every Frenchman is absorbed in the image of his wit, elegance, the superb dance of his faculties. He looks at it, as pleasure, as a duty, and finds there depth on perfect depth of charm and meaning. And while he draws these back into himself, and sees nothing except the one exquisite face, other peoples are forging from themselves new — perhaps grosser, perhaps only other — images, of which he knows nothing. His ignorance is a danger — not only but first to him. Unmolested, he will in time die into his image. No doubt a charming death, and nothing forbids us to believe in his future life. But the gross stammering of other words can break into his perfect syllables and obliterate them.
Or so I feared — and listened. I had no spirit to argue.
I sat drinking my coffee — quite abominable, as French coffee is — trying to understand my own need of the literature of this insular insolent people. And my love, a passion more than of the intellect, of France. I couldn’t allow that I, too, am a snob! Nor, I thought, looking at my wordy countryman again, are you, except when you chase away all our great shades to make a space round the French. What is it I respect?
Two virtues, above all, of the French spirit. A suavity which seems to belong to the skeleton itself, as though it would be easy in that country of the Marne where they lie together to separate a French from the English bones touching it. An inborn sense of the possible — forming out of wine, bread, and leisure, a living classicism, a mode of life which comes nearly to employ without straining them all the human qualities. That the suavity exists in the same mind with an intolerant vanity and rudeness; that the spiritual tact can become sterile or break down into lawlessness — alters nothing. A world in which, to defend herself, France became less human, would be very disappointing.
It is perhaps enough if she were to become a shade less insular.
*
The Exhibition was still on. We went several times, and tired ourselves in that hot sun, walking from pavilion to pavilion, looking. The great nations, self-conscious and cruelly spo
iled by it, tried to make an impression. The Germans and Russians noisily of power; the English of middle-class comfort; the Americans of a massive technical efficiency — dull, if you believed it. Only the smaller peoples had natural good manners and came forward politely and eagerly with their treasures. Some of these were exquisite. There was the clearly straight furniture, recalling forests of birch, strawberries growing wild by the side of steep paths, and the long cool northern summer nights, sleepless. There were glasses which did not need wine to be full of light. And, worth going back to again and again, the fountain of rose-water in the pavilion, small, unpretentious, of Bulgaria. This fountain, simple, almost plain in its scented elegance, asked to be liked. To be grateful was easy. Beside it, everything else was unreal and forced. So much in the Exhibition, if one had not forgotten it quickly, would have been an intolerable weight of ugliness and boredom.
The whole place was a nursery, full of toys. Some of the toys were alarming, some only pitiful or amusing, and others, a very few, were made to be drawn gently into the mind and stored there against the day when the hand groping among the rubble touches a headless doll or a cup, miraculously whole, filled with dust.
*
Paris is a province; it has its towns, its villages huddled below a vast church, its wide river valley, its palaces and strong old trees. There is the Paris of the Tuileries, of the Sorbonne, of the hospitals and the great boulevards, and the so different Paris of the poor, poorer here than in any other European city; in the other cities the poorest people turn into animals, where here vestiges of humanity cling to them; they become a sort of human spittle at the foot of walls and under arches and in foetid basements. But one Paris is unlike all the others, and pitiful; the Paris of the refugees.
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 9