The Black Laurel

by Storm Jameson

  Gerlach felt a terrible weariness.

  “Oh, have those started again?” he asked.

  His indifferent tone alarmed the young man.

  “I beg you not to treat it lightly,” he said. “There are people — I can’t tell you names, and you mustn’t, please, ask me to tell you how I know — who look on you as a traitor. Not only that. As a dangerous traitor, a man they want to get rid of.”

  Gerlach allowed himself to speak with the — almost tenderness he felt.

  “And you — what do you think of me?”

  “I respect you very much, sir.”

  “Yes —well?”

  In a still lower voice,

  “I’m disappointed, too. I’m not the only one who has been expecting you to say or do something more definite. We know things have been going wrong for a long time — we know we’ve believed in all the wrong things. Why don’t you tell us what to believe in? Why not make us real Germans again?”

  Holding out his one hand, in a curious gesture,

  “Why haven’t you helped us to find our way back from —from despair?”

  “I see that you’re still looking for a leader,” Gerlach said softly. “It’s no use. You must find your own way to the other side of despair, my dear child.”

  The young man was silent. Through the door he had left ajar, with the scent of herbs, sounds came: the rumour of heavy lorries, a woman’s voice calling a child, anxiously. He began to speak half inaudibly.

  “But what is the other side? We know what it’s like this side — oppression, disease, poverty, the child without milk, the old and sick without warmth, a girl selling herself for two bars of chocolate, or forced; our future taken from us, no work for us, no. . .no remission of sins. You don’t see young men in the streets, unless they’re like me — mutilated. . . I don’t mean that we’re unhappy, I’ve had quite a good time, even since the end of the war. It’s really not that, sir, it’s more — ” he hesitated — “is there any other side?”

  That one of Gerlach’s hands which was not touching a wall felt the freedom, the dizzy air, of empty darkness. Not wholly outside him. As a familiar landscape is within and outside the gazer, it passed through him and became the horizon.

  “Yes, of course,” he answered. “But it may not be anything you hope.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only that for the first time — perhaps it’s not the first time! — we have power to force on the world the designs of our hearts. Even the most secret. Among the others, we shall see the ape’s thumb-marks.”

  The young man looked at him, with a slow smile, contemplative and ironic.

  “We haven’t begun thinking so far beyond our own defeat yet, sir. I — I’d thought of trying to get away — say, to America. But I shan’t, it would be indecent.”

  Gerlach felt a sharp happiness.

  “Yes, you should stay in Europe. But be careful — one can commit fearful crimes against men, out of a pure love for a country —”

  An image of Hugo von Rechberg’s staring uneasy gaze and soft face.

  “— or for a field or two. . . . Another thing — whether our world is blotted out or escapes — escape isn’t probable — the real, the only problem is still there. How can we create a man sane enough, with a desperate enough courage, to live with his discoveries? He must — it’s absolutely necessary, for his freedom — make discoveries. Our anguish — the fear which is the only thing modern men have in common — springs from what we’ve forgotten. To be safe, our discoveries should serve God.”

  “Why not men?”

  Gerlach said softly,

  “Because men will never love you enough.”

  He saw Kalb’s face in the moment when his disgust made him pull his hand back from the touch of Kalb’s. I failed, he thought: and another time, I should fail again.

  A silence.

  The young man started as if he had been caught behaving badly, and said,

  “All this is very important — I should like to talk about it again — but you must save yourself, sir. Don’t you understand that it’s terribly serious? Perhaps you don’t believe me? I ought to give you the names —” he frowned — “I can’t do that. But please believe me. And do something. Quickly.”

  “What do you suggest I should do?” Gerlach asked, smiling.

  “It would be best if you left the country, and in the meantime if — I don’t want to offend you, but it really is urgent — if you asked the English authorities to protect you. I mean, at once. I know that you know English people. It’s one of the things they have against you —”

  He checked himself. The knuckles of his hand gripping the edge of the table were bloodless. He watched Gerlach with something between apology and mistrust.

  “You don’t offend me,” Gerlach said slowly.

  The odd ways a temptation can disguise itself, he thought. His friend; the American; and now this decent intelligent boy.

  “I don’t altogether understand you —” he began.

  The noise made by a car interrupted him. Even lorries took the street nearest this ruin in bottom gear; it had been cleared only in the most haphazard way. The car stopped. Jumping up, the young man went to the door to look; he turned his head with a murmured, “They’re coming here,” and hurried away.

  Gary came in. He walked with difficulty still, leaning on two strong malacca walking-sticks.

  “Who did I bolt out of your fox-hole? He gave me a black enough look.”

  “Nonsense,” Gerlach smiled: “you’re the man he hopes will save me. Will you have the bed or a chair?”

  “Chair. What do you mean?”

  “He came to tell me that there are people who don’t approve of me.” The absurdity of it took him aback suddenly, and he laughed. “Even, it seems, to the point of wanting to assassinate me — unless he was talking through his hat. They do, of course, these young fellows. I must say he was calm enough.”

  Gary looked at him. It was dark in the room, and Lucius was standing with his back to the white wall: his immense height, the long head thrust forward from drawn-up shoulders, the elongated face, nearly fleshless — is it, he wondered, the oldest as well as the most enduring of human gestures? Repeated again and again?

  “You’ve got to get out of this isolated hole,” he said, with a suppressed anger. “Quickly. And the sooner you’re out of the country the better.”

  “I can’t leave Germany.”

  “Why not?”

  So — if you belong to a country which has disgraced itself, and been punished, crushed, you leave it at the first chance? Even if you prefer its chokingly hard bread to any other? He smiled.

  “There are young men who come here — and others, prisoners, who will be coming back. What would they think if I bolted?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Perhaps not — but I think it does,” he said curtly.

  “That’s your vanity,” Gary said, with irony. “You enjoy risking your life — do you see yourself as a martyr? I warn you, they’re a drug on the market.”

  Lucius felt a malicious affection. How he turns everything to serve himself, he thought. He fetched the lamp and lit it; then seated himself at the table: the lamp spread a ring of light between them.

  “I must talk to you. If you hadn’t come tonight, I should have tried to see you tomorrow. It’s about this fellow Kalb. Yes, yes, it bores you,” he said vehemently, “but I can’t help it — you must listen. I haven’t the least doubt he’s innocent. Not the least.”

  He lowered his gaze, and added in a dry voice,

  “I’ve never been surer of anything.”

  “If he weren’t a German, would you be sure?”

  Without reflection, he answered,

  “The point doesn’t arise — he’s a Jew.”

  The meaning of Gary’s smile eluded him.

  “You keep on boring me with him,” Gary said smiling, “but what the devil can I do?”

  “Probably —
are you listening? — save him. A word with the reviewing authority in Lübbecke — Brigadier Charles George Gregg Patterson — your chief legal adviser, a friend —”

  Gary interrupted him:

  “How d’you know he’s my friend, or I his?”

  “Exactly! The friends of the great are — oh, very politely — slaves; since your brigadier depends on you he’ll want, if he can, to please you: he may be surprised that you take an interest in the sorrowful little monkey, but —”

  Gary interrupted him again, sharply impatient:

  “Sorrowful? Nonsense — men like Kalb are only a nuisance.”

  He saw that Lucius was going to speak, and said,

  “No, for God’s sake, don’t say any more. I quite see your dislike of Jews, and compassion, and all that. . . will you smoke a cigar?”

  Lucius refused.

  “Do you mind if I smoke one?” He lit it and went on, “People like Kalb are born clumsy, and sooner or later their clumsiness ruins them — he’s a social error. If I have any power over the future, there won’t be any such debris. Sorrowful or not.”

  Lucius looked at him with a smile, half closing his eyelids: an ironical gleam escaped from the corners.

  “Oh, you’ll get rid of grief, will you? But, you know, there’ll always be the last moment but one.”

  “No doubt there are ways of expediting and softening it,” Gary said, yawning.

  After a moment Lucius said,

  “Have you decided which members of your Order you’ll allow to know that they die and to taste themselves dying, and which others, I suppose most of them, you’ll cheat?”

  The instant when Gary knew he had been defeated was so brief that he was able, without an effort, to say in a light voice,

  “Tell me, is it because I’ve become personally boring to you that you refuse to work with — I say with — me?”

  “No,” Lucius said.

  “Then what? . . I’m not proposing to pay you, you know. Only to get your own money, and the house, released.”

  A silence.

  He was unable to feel anything behind Gerlach’s immobility. He had a sudden reckless impulse to trust himself to their long intimacy, and said,

  “I’ll make a bargain with you — a year, only one year, of your help, against the promise I’ll give you to save Kalb’s life, if it can be saved.”

  “Scoundrel,” Lucius said softly.

  Gary felt a suffocating rage. He controlled himself at once: the thought of allowing Lucius to slip from him was unendurable; he drove it off, with all his force, and in the same instant a grotesque and spitefully comic idea jumped into his mind. Get him to consent, get him to leave Germany, and deliberately, making a joke of it, then not use him. He shook with a suppressed silent laughter, full of malice. It had the curious effect of uncovering his real and deep love for Gerlach. His mind felt lucid, almost, with a dangerous excitement, playful.

  “I offered you a great and honourable work,” he said coolly. “Someone must put an end to the disorders of this small planet — and quickly — before a madman calling himself a president or a political leader gives the order to blot out civilised life. . . I may be too late. . . You can thank God that a few men — I am one — control the means — I intend, let me tell you, to control them even more closely. . .”

  Through cousin Hugo, thought Lucius.

  “. . . but so long as men infected with politics are in charge, war can’t be put off. The prayers of all the women and mothers in the world won’t halt it for a single minute. If one of them is listening, she can hear its steps under every sound made by her child ... If she must pray, she’d do better to pray to me. . . The absurdity of this hovel of yours, Lucius — on the edge of a second Renaissance! The first was only a squib. It lasted long enough to free us from the illusion of eternity; just long enough, my God, to start us off on the track leading to the recesses of the atom. Not only are we at the end of it now — but society itself has been reduced to atoms; and the atoms mobilised. It’s the first moment -— the last, too — for a messiah to step forward and give his orders to these human atoms and atomic bombs —”

  He kept himself carefully still. He had reached a degree of lucid excitement when the brain of his listener lay open to him — he could move about in it:

  “Yes, yes, tell me that there is a difference between my Renaissance and theirs. The men who escaped with their consciences from the priests deserve better than to lose them again, to me, etc., etc. . . Look at them for yourself! Look quietly at the society you want me to respect. Politicians who call themselves the leaders of the workers, and send their sons to Eton — scoundrels: women killing the germ in their bodies — frightened murderers: intelligent men who can be flattered — talk of the dignity of human beings, you should see them as I do, on all fours. Always, power has the last word. Power can save even Kalb — and only power! I know what you’re going to say: power is unjust, absolute power is absolutely unjust, men rebel against injustice, and so on and so forth — love is what finally moves men — and etc. . . Exactly. And love without power ends where? In a crucifixion. . . I give you everything — all your senseless truths. It’s true that I shall be unjust. But why not? Ought I to behave as if one of my clerks is as valuable as you are? Ought I to ask his advice? It would terrify him. He knows better than you do what will make him happy. To be told what to do, and to be cherished. To live tranquilly his simple irresponsible modest life as clerk, as husband, as father, as retired old gentleman. I can think of nothing wickeder than inciting these nobodies, these atoms, to rebel against an authority willing to cherish them and answer all their questions with a clear yes or no. . . Do you remember how free you were as a child, before you became, as they say, responsible for yourself and your life? Your mule of a life? The freedom that simple men and women can bear is the sort I shall give them —”

  He smiled,

  “I shall be the only man who is not free.”

  It had begun raining, slow heavy drops, striking the dry earth with the sound of birds pattering on a roof. Gerlach thought of his herbs.

  “Very well,” he said gently. “If it pleases you to be the slave of your slaves. But why should I give up my freedom? To please you?”

  “My God, Lucius, when did you become a coward? You still pray, don’t you? For peace? Yet you won’t dirty yourself to prevent it. . . I know what I’m offering. Every sort of cruelty, brutality, lies, will be necessary — to force order on men. No cause — I say, none — not the most just — ever succeeded without crucifixions. If you engage yourself, you’ll be forced to take part in them — I shan’t be able to hide them from you. From others. Not from you. If you don’t take part, if you refuse, if you bolt somewhere to be quiet, even if you kill yourself, you’re a coward. A traitor.”

  Lucius had laid his hands on the table: they rested in the circle of light, cut off by it at the wrists, and he looked at them. In the same gentle voice, he said,

  “Do you think I refused because, without being able to help yourself, you’ll use violent means? You’re wrong.”

  “In God’s name, then, Lucius, why?”

  The rain had ceased as suddenly as it began: a smell of mint and wet earth came into the room through the torn frame of the window. Turning his head to it, eyes half-closed, the line of his face visible in the form of a curved knife, Gerlach said,

  “Why? But you know. . . Because there must be a reasonable hope that your plan, however vile, will succeed. Yours — the servitude of men — will succeed in that precisely.”

  “And why not? Why should I be afraid of that?” Gary asked.

  Looking at Gerlach’s hands, he felt the impulse to place in them his deepest belief, naked, as it had just shown itself to him.

  “Why should I respect a myth?” he said softly. “Hasn’t it lasted long enough — the myth of man’s indestructible spirit? Indestructible, and under God, free? Let me tell you and all the other nursemaids that men can be created in any for
m. With X-rays we can break into the chromosomes and shake up the genes in them. As for their minds. . . what nonsense! If order — that is, peace, bread, children, wine, salt — depend on making men less unreliable, it can be done. The only thing needed is a man willing to take it on himself.”

  “You,” Lucius said.

  His smile, on the immobility of his face, made a painful impression of insincerity. He added,

  “You’ll fail, too. Even if they don’t revolt against you — if you can persuade them to live in a world without conscience or freedom, without justice — even then, your human atoms will die of boredom. Of the starving to death of their curiosity. You’ve forgotten something — ludicrously — obvious. Men can’t go on living, can’t endure themselves, unless once in their lives they can act as if they were more than men. As if there were an impulse in them. . . of God.”

  “Don’t move your hands,” Gary exclaimed.

  Taken aback, Lucius said,

  “Why not?”

  He drew them back, out of sight. The broken catch of the door had worked loose; it swung open suddenly, on the dusk crowded with spectral ruins, and he got up and closed it. Seating himself again, he shut his eyes wearily.

  “Forgive me,” Gary said in a light voice. He hesitated. “I ask you — for the last time I ask you to help me. Even without you, I shall find a way of persuading enough men or atoms that I’m peace on earth.”

  Gerlach opened his eyes quickly. He looked at Gary as though he were appalled. Taken aback, Gary felt, in his body itself, a nearly unbearable excitement. The room, with its threatened walls, circle of light, penetrating smell of dust, pressed them together. At last we’re coming to it, he thought.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Lucius smiled with the same air of insincerity.

  “So you see yourself as not only making but ending history?” he said, in a light voice. “I ought to warn you that history isn’t so rational as that — nor so meaningless.”