by Earle Looker
Beaumont went livid.
A wave of hot anger flashed across David’s mind. He knew he was baiting Beaumont now, and he was aware of the savage pleasure it gave him. He looked at Rose; her eyes seemed to be ablaze.
“You think me a throw-back,” David said to Beaumont, “or somewhere low down on the social level?” Suddenly he saw he had made a mistake he could not rectify. He had fallen into the defensive, but at the same time he was forced to take the offensive. There was no turning back now. “This class business makes me sick. If you’d lived in the open, in the muck, slept in soldier blankets, loused, made fine friends of men who were bred in gutters, then you’d have some perspective. Obviously, this war failed to do that for you. You and your Bermondsey, your London! Sorry, Miss Shuttleworth; you may well have been to London, but you’re clearly out of this …”
Rose actually laughed. “I definitely have an idea I shouldn’t like to be included. I haven’t heard anything so positively – positive. You sound quite like a British veteran. I’m quite willing – spiritually, of course – to crawl into those loused blankets with you.”
“Execrable bad taste!” Beaumont cried, giving a glare to Rose.
“Couple of more shots in the arm like that,” David said, “and you’d find yourself a Lord Bishop!”
“This is intolerable!” Beaumont exploded.
There was a silence, followed by silence.
“I shall not …” Beaumont began and looked at David for some moments with the manner of one who was coming to a resolution. “Either you or I,” he finally said, “shall leave this pension.” His voice was controlled yet vibrant with passion. “I shall not live under the same roof with this sort of thing another hour. And I’ll not have these people of the streets coming here while I am …”
“This is all extremely revealing,” Rose said coolly. “Like people in delirium. You discover what they’re made of. Quite frankly I’m interested in these ideas. I don’t mean to be offensive, but I vote with Major Atwood.” She concentrated upon Beaumont, gave him a smile in which he must have seen the sarcasm, “Of course, I’m sure, Beaumont, you’re still good for a run between wickets, and you don’t mean this extraordinary remark about leaving the pension, now do you?”
“Of course I should go,” Beaumont said almost before she had finished.
“Oh, I suppose I should be the one to get out!” David said.
“If you do,” Rose said, “I’ll jolly well go with you …”
“My dear child!” Beaumont said to her. “You’ve no idea, really, what you’re suggesting with this person! You can’t possibly think of such a thing! It would be misinterpreted …”
“You needn’t go on,” she said. “This person, as you call him, misinterprets nothing. This person’s got some straightforward soldierly ideas. I subscribe to them. They should be encouraged. I propose to. I’ve never been in a position where it seemed possible. I’m sure I’d enjoy it. If he has to find another dig, then I’ll go with him there – that’s flat!”
“But,” Beaumont protested breathlessly, “you can’t possibly, under any conditions, mean to leave this place together!”
“Yes. Thank you for being so clear. I’m sure I understand. Quite. But I’m of a certain age, you know. I agree with Major Atwood here you’re living in a world that’s quite gone – class, position, doctrine, some kind of hypocritical Victorian morals. I’m sick, too, of the old crowd, its worthless anachronistic ideas …”
David heard, understood. He felt himself to be as shaken as if a mine had exploded. He saw Beaumont looking as if the tea tray had been flung to the stones on the path. He sat, evidently not knowing what to do and hating himself for doing nothing. He must have known, had he dared open his mouth, David would have punched him. David felt his own shock, now, to be far more complicated. Rose was forcing herself into his arms in a manner that prevented refusal unless he deserted her in the midst of the snarl he had himself created. Together, they had crashed the complacency about them, and he was glad of it. Even the appearance of such courage in conviction, he thought, shouted out like a show of courage on his part. But then it might be possible, in trying to justify the action he now seemed forced to take, to refuse her in private.
Yet he knew he had been deliberately outwitted, forced along from one position to the next. What a strength she had kept behind that camouflaged reserve, restraint. If this had been a considered maneuver, then he could still admire its adroitness. He knew himself to be incapable of quick defense or retaliation, even if he wished, through strategy. There could be but one way of reprisal. She might have counted on that from the beginning, the violence of it more closely meeting her expectant desire.
She was looking at him now, he thought, as though she saw in him some dead lover who had already possessed her and to whom she wished desperately to return. There was pathos in it as well as passion. It was not to be lightly or brutally denied. The surface motives, the little words, gestures, expressions that had brought this about were of no consequence. Even the smallness of the immediate action had no bearing. It seemed part with all the surging forces of the time and place. Place, for from the top of the Belfry could be overlooked the Flemish plain to the west where lay four hundred thousand British dead of the Crête de Passchendaele. ‘Time,’ David thought, ‘with shock upon shock, they had not even rotted down; forces moving to adjust the balance between the missing files of the dead in this generation and their replacement in the next not yet conceived.’ He saw passion in her eyes beyond what seemed possible for her thought or his to have generated, and a depth black as midnight. Midnight, he thought, when life is at its lowest ebb, and there is a great dying for the day, but presently all living things move to answer a kind of roll-call of life before dawn.
“Whether we leave this place to yourself is none of your damn business, Beaumont. I’m also of a certain age. Now, I’m not so irritated with you just because you’re English, certainly no fault there, but because you represent the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, the world over. And we’re more strictly middle-class in America than anywhere in the world. I belong to it, but maybe you’ll think I don’t when I say with pride that I’ve slept on park benches before I got my first newspaper job. A fatal admission, probably, to make to you, but I don’t feel inferior. I’m not – and this should be remembered here – not because I am right or wrong but only for my bad manners perhaps. Subservience? No, I’m not subservient. I am disgusted by the classes in England encountering one another like so much lock-pulling, groveling before the noble lord of the manor. You know there’s still a lot of that. I do think the lords rather like it, and would be loath to lose it. This state of affairs makes them feel like the ladies and gentlemen they never were but rather as the exploiters of other human beings that they are. You don’t want that changed, with a lot of other things – so that’s why there’re millions of the best men and women in the world working and living out their lives and dying like slaves in places like Birmingham, Leeds, to say nothing of London. We’ve got our slums and tenements, to be sure – plenty – but every man at least has a chance to better himself through perseverance and intelligence and affordable education for everyone. You’re only real education is for the rich at Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge. Out of the finest intellects come the steadiest courage but the greatest snobs in Christendom. And why? Because your middle-class is inert. That’s what really makes me so mad – this inertia. That’s what holds us back in this story that’s not moving beyond to anywhere. We’re inert, when just a little looking about us and just a little anger about what we had seen would free us of the worst bonds of the past, forcing decent living wages and better health,”
Abruptly Alan ceased his rant and laughed to the obvious consternation of Beaumont and the amusement of Rose.
“There it is, then! An outrageous but expected exhibition by the American who’ll be not quite so shameless after al
l; it’s embarrassing all around. That’s why you’ll not be seeing me at supper tonight. I’ll leave you now to pack my bags and get the hell out of here. I think the story idea’s good. Good enough to take it to my room, where later I’ll try it out on some of my crude and vulgar American friends. And if it works, I’ll bring it through the lower classes until I comfortably get up again to the middle. In the meantime, I hope, I’ll acquire enough experience and tact to not make the same mistakes I’ve made with you, Doctor Beaumont.”
“Now you’re getting nasty,” Rose said sarcastically.
There was a long, uncomfortable pause.
“Well,” David finally said, “I’m out of here.”
Rose looked straight into David’s eyes and smiled, her heightened color giving her dark face an almost exotic beauty. “If you do not object, David, and think the implications not altogether disagreeable, will you come straight back when you’ve found a comfortable place for us? I like a room with the morning sun. Might it be possible for us to move to it within the hour?”
David caught up his cap, crossed the courtyard without looking back, let himself into the street through the wicket in the beautiful, solid wagon-door of the garden, walked until the uneven cobbles hurt and found himself midway down the “Street of the Virtuous Laughing Girls” once again.
CHAPTER 13
English Rose
“A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs,
so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.”
~ Marcel Proust
“Ophelia” by John Everett Millais, 1852
The voice called to David from the open door of the shop, “Monsieur! Monsieur l’officier! It is the matter of the entertainment, oui?”
The old maker of sabots was at his work bench, the floor about him littered with chips and curled shavings. He inclined his head over the half-hollowed sabot in his lap as if he were listening to the clatter someday coming from it. The wood was pallid against the clean, snowy white head and pink of a firm, clean-shaven face. His wise brown eyes seemed the younger for the crow’s-feet at their corners. David found himself wishing not to look too long into them, a conscious evasion.
“Alors,” old Savatier said, “the entertainment – but no? Not yet? By your look, monsieur, it is an item of more seriousness?”
Phrases seemed stumblingly awkward as David tried to cover the preliminary ground. He was leaving the pension; an unfortunate lack of understanding; in all probability the fault was also his; either you do not understand civilians – no, he did not mean that – English civilians, or they do not understand you. And now he wished to find a room, not one but two, two rooms where there would be morning sunlight.
“Even the officer travels with but a haversack, I remember,” the shoemaker said. “Is it not for his baggage that he has need of the other room?”
David felt the old man had spoken without derision. “That is so,” David said, but found further explanation all but impossible.
Old Savatier smiled but away from David, toward the racked sabots at his hand along the wall. He rose, limping with some awkwardness, to range along them as if inspecting his handiwork. His gnarled, brown fingers touched first one, then another. Finally, with a glance at David’s field-boot, he selected a pair, laying them upon his bench. He turned back to the wall. Rejecting in turn several others, he eventually found a pair much smaller, of superior workmanship, varnished almost to a lacquer, with a swirl of lines and carven flowers about the pointed toes. These he placed beside the larger pair.
“To a man of some feeling,” he said, looking not at David but down at the sabots, “talk is sometimes difficult, is it not?” He indicated the larger pair. “Monsieur is trying to explain?” He gestured toward the smaller, “Madame is spared embarrassment. That is right. She need not to speak at all. She need never see this old man, once as youthful as you both. Is that not so?”
“Yes,” David said.
“You have heard the song, Monsieur, ‘Sous les ponts de Paris’? How those two lovers could find no room because they had no money?” He smiled just enough to express sympathy, not enough to give offence. “Monsieur, would twenty francs a day place in you that position?”
He was as tactful, David thought, as it was possible to be. The matter of cost would make it seem more natural to most men, though for an instant he felt it to be an outrageous indignity. “Fifteen francs for the two rooms,” David heard himself say, “would be more like it. That would be seven francs, fifty centimes a day for each person, not including meals.”
“And you would buy these sabots? They would come to forty francs, Monsieur.”
“Yes, I would buy the sabots.”
“That would be satisfactory,” the old man agreed, rubbing his pink chin with his calloused hand. “Merely I asked to see how considered …”
“But only,” David interrupted as much to avoid philosophy as to be specific, “but only if these rooms are clean and quiet – and there is sunlight.”
“Monsieur, I will show you.”
Later, after seeing the rooms, David said, “These rooms seem agreeable.”
“When,” Savatier asked, “do you and Madame wish to come? Tomorrow? Clean linen, Monsieur, the beds are …”
“Yes, of course,” David said, feeling his vocal cords tighten with the same nervousness that had made so difficult the beginning of the interview.
“The rooms could be ready this evening,” the old man said.
“I – have not – decided,” David said slowly.
Suddenly from above, yet so enveloping and penetrating and voluminous and blasting was the sound it seemed to have burst into the room where they stood; the stroke of the great bass bell from the cathedral obliterated all thought. It was but a single stroke, yet it continued on and on in welling waves of vibration, a sustained note echoing back and forth from towers and walls until it finally became a moan.
“My God!” David cried. “What was that?”
“Angelus!” Savatier said. “We are close under the tower of Notre Dame. But it rings only three times a day.”
“But reminding …” David began in English.
“Comment?”
“Je n’ai pas besoin qu’on m’y fasse penser,” David said.
“You do not want a reminding? But of what? The time?” Savatier echoed and shrugged his shoulders. “As for me, thrice daily it reminds me there is no God. If you wish to believe in the good God you may; that is your privilege and you may have reason.” He looked wistful, “But once it used to be a great comfort to me.”
His statement of unbelief, delivered without the sophomoric vehemence with which David had usually heard it, but with the calm and finality of one so old, seemed to carry, for these reasons, a tremendous conviction. “You have reason?” David asked.
The old man looked at the floor and fumbled his work-worn hands together. “Yes, Monsieur, I have raison – from the beginning to the end. Enfin: it makes no difference, I think, what we do except to ourselves. I was not young when I learned yet, but I am glad to see those, like yourself, young and full of life, who can enjoy whatever there is. There are few opportunities. Is it not unwise to take them?”
‘At what moment,’ David thought, ‘a word or a phrase will strike upon the brain? At what moment is a combat action decided? Who had said that? What matter? Decision? Had it not already been made?’
Had he not let the opening pass, from motives somewhat chivalrous in the moment in the garden, when he could far more easily have expressed a negative decision? After all, the compression was greater now than ever in the past, and who could be expected, when one day you were here and the next you were gone? Celeste would find it impossible to believe he had so little dared – the ribbons on his tunic, his rank. She would instinctively know he must have lived a little or he never could have led. Gaspard’s comment, the ad
vice even of the father concerned with his daughter’s happiness, came to David once more: ‘I should feel better satisfied if it were possible for you to acquire, with some quickness, more experience. Do not shake your head at me, Daveed!’
Savatier was speaking: “If you look down against this house, Monsieur, you will see a little boat floating in the canal. It is fastened at a ring in my wall. At the rear of my shop is a door which opens upon the canal. Steps go down into the water. You might find that boat convenient to come and go upon the canal; one forgets canals are also our streets. You can row, monsieur, away and back again for several hours upon the canals, never coming back to the same place, under bridges, under dark buildings to the Lac d’Amour.”
David said to Savatier, “We will come this evening. Within the hour.”
2
Leaving the pension together, unopposed and openly, held nothing either of furtiveness or the thrill of escape. Either, David thought, would have been preferable to the silence of full avoidance. Had she been Celeste, moving softly about the room across the narrow companionway in the attic of this house of Savatier, they should neither have held back the words in their hearts nor longer contained their laughter at the old restraints.
“Isn’t this house,” Rose said to him, “much like a ship with its keel in the canal?”
“Yes …”
“You saw the timbers coming up the stairs. With those doors, each floor seems a bulkhead. Two bulkheads, David, between us and – anyone.”
“Yes …”
“My word! This room is more comfortable than anything at the pension. Yes, I can understand how there’ll be no shadows thrown by the tower in the morning.”
“The old man guarantees that.”
“This is a place where men have fought and women loved. These rooms look out onto history, David.”