He got up and paid his bill, then strolled across the square toward the Grande-Bretagne. He had three days to kill in Athens and there was nothing to do but walk around the city. Alone, and hungry for a girl he could love, there was no savour in it for him now. He went into the hotel and passed through to the bar.
The place had been invaded by passengers from a Strength-through-Joy ship which was anchored at Phaleron, and the corridors, lobby and bar thundered with their conversation. Paul found an empty stool at the corner of the bar, ordered a beer and observed the room. The young Germans lounged easily with their collars open, occasionally running their hands through their hair, and sunburn made their teeth seem brilliant when they smiled. They had a way of lifting their chins and laughing suddenly at each other. There were also a few Greeks at the bar, two French women who seemed to be residents of the hotel sitting at a side table, and an English couple in one corner. But the Germans dominated the room and their massed presence had already caused a mixture of fear, contempt and hostility in the others. With few exceptions, they were not particularly rugged. What Paul noted about them was their self-confidence. They knew they were hated here, that they had deliberately created the hatred, and they were enjoying it. He felt an unpleasant excitement grow along his nerves as he sat sipping his drink. If a fight started, he knew he was the only man in the room who could match any one of them.
Paul’s attention was caught by a woman in her late thirties, evidently French, sitting near the bar smiling at a German who shared the table with her. Her face was soft-skinned and delicate, with large brown eyes and a small mouth. She was quite short, with flesh somewhat plump over very small bones, and her dress had been carefully designed by a couturier in the Place Vendôme to exaggerate the sensuous fragility of her body. Paul watched her. Hundreds of thousands of francs had been spent on her education and upkeep, and her accent as she spoke German was obviously Parisian. She wore a wedding-ring on her left hand, together with a square-cut diamond as large as her thumb-nail. She could not have known the German at her table more than three hours, but already her manner indicated an unspoken intimacy. He was the biggest and crudest man in the room, and many years her junior. His bulging body made him look like a cartoon of a Nazi; his head was shaved except for a stiff brush of hair in front and he had the hands of a prize-fighter. Once he turned to wink at a group of friends at another table and they raised their glasses to him. Then his right hand, thick, square and with broken nails, closed over the woman’s fingers and pressed. An expression of masked pain touched her face, naked and erotic. Her eyes showed a peculiar mixture of gratitude, encouragement and fear, and the German seemed puzzled by it, his confusion at war with his eagerness to get her out of the bar and possess her as quickly as possible. He spoke to her again. She shook her head. He leaned back, baffled, and ran his hand over his shaved head, then remembered that he was thirsty.
“Bier?” he said to her.
Paul heard her answer. “Was du willst.”
The German smashed his hand down so hard the table jumped. “Bier!” he shouted.
Paul paid for his drink and left the bar. He was too restless to sit still any longer and had to keep moving. But now that he was on the street again, Athens seemed more nearly empty than ever. He walked up to the Akropolis, but the scene had nothing to give him. About four o’clock he returned to the lower streets and tried to dull the ache in his mind by reading week-old English and French papers bought at a corner kiosk. He sat in the same restaurant in the Place de la Constitution in which he had read his mail that morning. The afternoon wore on and the city surrounded him like a giant presence of loneliness. It was no new feeling; most of his life he had known it, and now it was recurring again like a periodic disease. This loneliness of all large cities, the solitary man reading his newsprint, the instinctive hope that there is new life just around the corner if you go to it, but around the corner always the same emptiness, the urgency which makes you want to prowl always a street further; and through everything, beating into the mind like a tom-tom, the shuffle of other people’s shoe-leather counterfeiting the motion of life. He wondered if Heather had ever felt as he did now. Two solitudes in the infinite waste of loneliness under the sun. People kept passing the sidewalk café, girls in light dresses, mature women surprisingly smart in Parisian fashion, with smooth, cultivated skins and quiet knowledge, a sense of sex accompanying them like a subtle perfume, instilling into his mind the belief that they were pregnant with a sexual learning he was too immature to understand. At the table next to his own a woman sat smoking a long cigarette as she toyed with the stem of her wine-glass. He exchanged a glance and knew he could have her if he wished. Another time he might have let the routine take its course, but not now. He wasn’t equal to that kind of loneliness today.
He left the café and wandered aimlessly a while longer, then stopped to eat supper in a small restaurant filled with workmen and smelling of cheap tobacco and goat’s flesh frying in grease. He ordered what the menu offered, drank two glasses of vile-tasting resin wine and went out into the streets again.
His novel began to press forward in his mind. For a while he tried to keep it back, not to think about it, but it was useless. He had lived with it too intensely for too long. It was like an obbligato to everything else he thought or did. He remembered the team of Germans at the Grande-Bretagne, the soft face of the Frenchwoman pleading silently with the German to degrade her. Drumbeats began to hammer in his head. The young man of 1933, the individual into which he had tried desperately to breathe life. 1933–Hitler’s year–when the danse macabre had burst out of the unconscious of so many millions, out of the alleys and side-streets into the open until it had become the world’s way of life.
Young man of 1933–the year when farmers had begun to plough under the cotton, to process the hogs, to burn the wheat, when stevedores under the spreading arms of Christ in Rio de Janeiro had dumped coffee into the sea, while in Russia the famine killed off three million people and in the west, in the lands of the Greek heritage, old men took water and washed their hands.
Without thinking how he had got there, Paul found himself back in his room at the hotel. He went to the window, opened it and leaned out. Young man of 1933–the year the brazen cracking voice of Adolf Hitler invoked the new god while the sheep looked up. Eighty million sheep, remembering they were Goths. While in the west the old men lingered, piteous as doves in every parliament and stock exchange, naked to everyone’s eyes and knowledge as they washed their hands.
And behind Hitler, what? The machine. The magic worthy of every worship, mankind reborn for the service of efficiency, the still small voice of God the Father no longer audible through the stroke of the connecting rod, the suave omnipotent gesture of the hydraulic press, the planetary rumble of the conveyor belt, the visions of things to come–whole cities abolished in single nights, populations uplifted according to plan, cloudy blueprints of engineers, millions calling for help and millions for war, millions for peace and millions for suicide, and the grandeur and the efficiency and the solitude.
Below Paul lay the city street. Athens could be London, Rome, New York, Paris, Berlin or any other great city. This was where it had started. In the city. Any city. The flop-houses of Vienna, the Babel of the Holy Roman Empire, emptiness dressed in baroque, the breaking of a dried-out heart sung through the nose in the Danube Waltz, the new city-hatred (contempt for all things but cleverness) of the slum man for the Jew, the owner for the worker, the worker for his fear of himself, the bourgeois for his own thoughts in the dark, the hatred of them all for the old men washing their hands.
In every city the same masses swarmed. Could any man write a novel about masses? The young man of 1933, together with all the individual characters Paul had tried to create, grew pallid and unreal in his imagination beside the sense of the swarming masses heard three stories below in the shuffling feet of the crowd. For long minutes he stood at the window. To make a novel out of this? How coul
d he? How could anyone? A novel should concern people, not ideas, and yet people had become trivial.
After a while he left the window and went to the table where he had tried to work. He laid a hand on his papers, then tamped them together and put them into their box. He got undressed, snapped off the light and dropped into bed. Below in the Hodos Stadiou isolated figures still prowled with the furtive urgency of single men alone in a city after dark. In the far distance, somewhere in the streets beyond the Place de la Constitution, the horn of a taxi with a short circuit in its ignition system howled like a wolf in the darkness. Then it ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
FORTY-ONE
John Yardley lived in a single room on the top floor of an old house in the south end of Halifax. It had once been a fine residence owned by one of the old importing families, but now it was a lodging house. Its change of status had not altered its appearance in any way. He had to climb three flights of stairs to reach his room and he knew climbing was bad for him, but he felt that the view from his windows was worth the risk he took to obtain it. He could look directly over the treetops to the harbour, and on foggy nights the harbour bells seemed to be sounding just below him. They reminded him constantly of other days when he had been free to move where he chose about the world.
During the past three weeks Yardley had been feeling very much better. The weather had been fine and clear, unusually good for a Nova Scotian June. Now it was early July and the lime trees were fragrant after sunset. He could almost persuade himself that his convalescence from the winter illness was real and that he was actually going to recover. No matter how tired or weak he felt, he got up every morning at eight and had breakfast at a table in his room, brought to him from downstairs. For his other meals he went to a nearby residential hotel. Most of the day he spent propped in an armchair by the window, but he refused to go to bed for the night until eight-thirty. Then he usually read a book for an hour or so and dropped quietly to sleep.
Of late he had not been lonely, for Janet and Heather had been in Halifax for a month. The only trouble was that Janet tried to rearrange his habits to something she considered more suitable for him. And she sat by his side hour after hour either from a sense of duty or because she could think of nothing else to do in a place where she had no friends.
As usual she was here today. She adjusted the pillow behind his head and for a moment her hand lingered on his. He smiled at her, comfortable in the armchair, but he resisted an impulse to lay his other hand over hers. He knew she would immediately withdraw her hand in fear of seeming sentimental. She withdrew it anyway.
“Life isn’t easy for any of us, is it, Father?”
He continued to smile at her as he looked at her over his glasses. He wished that her face were less gaunt. It took a good deal of will power to keep the tears out of his eyes. Since his illness he had often been embarrassed by the way tears welled up in his eyes for no reason at all. Poor Janet! She had been worried about something or other ever since he could remember, and surely some of it was his own fault. If only he had been in command of a good education, or even if he had not appeared such a rough man, his daughter might have respected him enough to listen to his advice. He might have been able to teach her to find a little enjoyment in life. But her mother had made the child ashamed of him, and then her own conscience had made her ashamed of being ashamed, and after that there was no end to the impasse between them.
“What is it now?” he said, his voice full of affection.
She sat down in the only other chair in the room, beside the bookshelves which lined one of the walls. Yardley’s armchair was by the window. A bed took up most of the space on the other wall, and beyond was a door leading to the common hall of the house. Except for his years in Saint-Marc, Yardley had never had any possessions except his clothes and his books.
“It’s Heather,” Janet said. “Of course, Father–if you’re not feeling well this afternoon I don’t want to bother you.”
“I guess I can stand anything you’ve got to say about Heather.”
She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Well, when she came back for the general’s funeral I thought she was home for good. I simply took it for granted she was through with all that nonsense in New York. If you only knew how I’d been looking forward to having her at home with me where she belongs! After all, she’s twenty-eight, and it’s time for her to settle down with some nice young man. She’s had plenty of opportunities.” Janet pursed her lips. “If only she wouldn’t be so headstrong about everything!”
Yardley’s eyes twinkled and he turned to look out the window. In repose his face looked shockingly old; all the colour was drained from it and the skin was like soft old leather. His head was completely bald on top and the fringe of hair over his eyes and around the back of his neck no longer bristled; it was as soft as down. But his ears still stuck out, the twinkle in his eyes had not diminished, and the twang in his voice remained.
“What’s she being headstrong about now?” he asked.
“Of course, there may be nothing to it. There may be nothing whatever but my own imagination. But I don’t think so.”
“Come on, Janet. Stop sounding like McQueen. I won’t hold it against you if you make a mistake.”
She flushed. “I’m not sounding like Huntly at all.” She fixed him with her dark eyes, and he admitted ruefully to himself that she had become almost hawklike. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!”
“I haven’t the slightest idea, Janet.”
“Well–since you insist on making me say it–it’s that young man. I haven’t seen him since he was a child, but I know about him. I’ve discovered that she’s been writing to him for years. Imagine! She admitted it to me today.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, Janet, why shouldn’t she write him? She and Paul were children together.”
“So you did know! You knew all the time!”
“Sure I knew,” Yardley said. “He just arrived from Europe a week ago. His ship brought him right in to this port. Nice and convenient for them both, I thought.”
“She insists on having him to dinner with us tonight. Of course, I’m very glad. I’d much, much rather know exactly what he’s like than wonder.”
“Well”–Yardley’s voice was tired–“what are you worried about?”
“You know perfectly well what I’m worried about.”
He chuckled. “Listen, Janet–if she’s got any sense she’ll marry him.”
“Oh, no! Father, that’s a dreadful thought!” Janet’s face showed violent indignation. This had always been her way; to bring into the open something she was worried about and then to show acute distress when what she already knew to be a fact was confirmed by another. The effect of this strained agitation on her father was worse than if she had exploded. Her tension charged the whole room, and he found it unpleasant and exhausting. Anything, these days, rather than tension!
“Try to be serious, Father. You know perfectly well it’s unthinkable.”
“I can’t say I do.” He looked at her hands. Not one of her mannerisms had changed in the past twenty years. She still clasped her hands so tightly together in her lap that the knuckles showed white. And what seemed to Yardley unfair about all this was that Janet reserved her tension and her scenes for members of her own family. She could be completely charming only to strangers.
“Harvey left the children to me as a trust,” she said. “A sacred trust.”
“Any children are thet, Janet.” Glancing out of the window he added, “You’ve never paid much attention to what I say about things. What does it matter what I think now?”
“Is that quite fair?”
“We mustn’t quarrel, child.”
Her face softened. “Do try to put yourself in my position. We’re all alone now. Just Heather and I–and Daphne, of course.” Some private anxiety about Daphne must have crossed her mind
, for her face clouded again. “We’re still the family. I had no sons, but I can’t forget the family.”
“What family?” he said bluntly. “The sisters and cousins and aunts of all the Methuens? Which is more important to you, Janet–Heather’s happiness or what the Methuens mumble over their tea-cups?”
“What they say over their tea-cups happens to have a great deal to do with Heather’s happiness. You’ve simply never even begun to understand what a family like that means.”
“All right, Janet. You started it, so now I’m going to tell you something about Paul you don’t know. Why, his family was riding horses and living in castles and cutting throats for the king of France when the ancestors of the Methuens had only one pair of pants, digging ditches somewhere in England, running errands for country stores, or driving distillery Clydesdales around the Glasgow docks, or maybe not even doing thet much. Now take the other side–” She tried to interrupt him with an indignant gesture, but he kept right on. “This country’s going to be mighty proud of thet boy one of these days. Heather’s a lucky girl, and if you ask me, he’s lucky himself, and he’s had it coming to him. You asked my opinion. There it is.”
Janet looked down at her clasped hands and pursed her lips again. “Really, Father–there’s not the slightest necessity for being so violent. You’ll only upset yourself.”
He passed his hand over his forehead. He was upset already.
“What you say about the Methuens,” she went on stiffly, “is of course utterly ridiculous. General Methuen’s grandfather was an officer at the seige of Badajos.”
Two Solitudes Page 39