by Earle Looker
He coughed in bitterness. Nothing was lasting. There was no everlasting life to love even, for there was not strength enough in it to resist momentary passion. There was nothing but the present, and no one could tell how short that might be.
CHAPTER 14
Night of the Long Neck
“Dead towns are the Cathedrals of Silence.
They, too, have their gargoyles, singular figures,
exaggerated, dubious, set in high profile.
They stand out from the mass of grey, which takes all it has
in the way of character, its twitchings of stagnant life from them.
Some have been distorted by solitude, others grimace
with a directionless fervour; here there are masks
of cherished lust, there faces ceaselessly sculpted and furrowed by mysticism.
Human gargoyles, the only figures of interest in this monotonous population.”
~ Georges Rodenbach, “The Bells of Bruges” (1892)
Pont du Cheval, Bruges, by Alec Grieve (1864–1933)
The word he had used, David again remembered, had been “compression.” It was building up once again, but in another way, as a head of anger against the immutable facts and the way they had been made, a more complete realization of the impossibility of changing the present enough to make the future matter. Even the Street seemed static; here and there yellow light seeped about the edges of shutters. He thought virtue retired too early to be entirely virtuous. He looked at the watch upon his wrist; it was no later than three or four minutes to nine. In a moment, the Belfry clock would strike, and there would be that additionally dissonant and jarring jangle of bells announcing that time marched on if nothing else. His compression, a sort of density, seemed not to be restrained. He cursed the Street and the town and all that was in it.
He raised his voice and shouted, “Hey! Virtuous girls! Girls!”
“Girls! Girls!” the echoes responded.
There, he thought, edited by echo, was more the truth.
“Shh-h-h!” a woman said from a window in the darkness.
David shouted again, “Hey! Outside! Everybody outside!”
A casement screeched open. “Hey! Hey!” a man’s voice responded.
“Outside!” David cried again and shrilled his field-officer’s siren whistle.
Shutters crashed open against the wall of a second story, and David remembered how she had done that before. “Redhead!” he called, though he could not see her, “Come out!”
“Monsieur!” There was a pleading note in an old voice David knew to be Savatier’s, “Do not make such a disturbance; come into the house here – maintenant!”
David disregarded him. “Redhead,” he said, “you can start things. Come out and the rest will …”
“But I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“Put on some pants!” a man said from a window across the street.
“I’m going to give a party – tonight,” David explained to the opening windows.
“A party with pants on!” another voice said. “That is not custom! The custom is …”
“Shh-h-h!”
“Monsieur mon commandant!” Savatier insisted over the turmoil. “This disturbance will be heard throughout the whole quarter. The police will come. Come into the house. We will arrange along the street some explanation – that whoever made the disturbance is gone; that it was someone who was just passing.”
“Everybody up, dressed and outside” David said to the Street and then to Savatier, “I made you Secretaire of the Street. Come out here yourself. I’m throwing a party. I want you to arrange for the music.”
“But Monsieur!”
“I want a dozen pieces, instruments,” David said. “There’re three or four players in each of the cafés opposite the Belfry. It’s not too late. Offer them double pay. Bring them here! And a drum, a couple of drums.”
“The colored lights?” the sad voice asked, the voice that had so stirred David the day he had promised the fête.
“You know where to get them?” he asked her.
“Mais, oui! They are still there. To be rented. But – the cost? C’est très cher.”
“Damn the cost!” David said. “When it comes to lanterns, I’m rich. Buy ’em and then rent ’em yourself afterwards. I’m setting you up in the business.”
“Oh! But!” she said incredulously. “Then perhaps, I can be …”
“You can be virtuous, with that business,” someone suggested.
David thought he heard something very like a sob. “No more cracks like that!” he cried furiously.
“Monsieur!” the girl’s sad voice said. “How many shall I get – for the Street?”
“Whatever is needed to make it twice as bright as it’s ever been – fifty – no – a hundred, yes, at least a hundred with candles!”
There was a sudden silence, a little cry, the crashing of a chair. David knew without being told that the girl had fainted.
“Gateaux?” David asked suddenly. “Who knows where we can get cakes?”
“I am a baker,” a deep voice said. “You may have all my stock at my cost, without profit, but I have only enough for one piece for every sixth person.”
“There’re other bakers?”
“Oui”
“Then all their stock together, would that be enough?”
“Perhaps, oui. Two or three pieces for everyone.”
“Make the best terms to get it all.”
“I am putting my pants on!” the baker shouted. “Tout de suite! Immediatement!”
A voice said: “I know where there is a barrel of good wine that can be buyed cheaply.”
“Get two barrels,” David ordered, “and put one at each end of the Street.”
“Each one bring his own cup,” someone said.
“Bowls and pitchers,” David said. “Savatier, appoint two responsible men, one to each barrel.”
“Voila! It is done!”
“There is a great piece of canvas, the only piece in town, that was once used for street dancing, to cover the stones,” the sweet wine voice informed David. “I know where it is.”
“Get it,” David said. “Buy it. It’s now the property of the Girl of the Lanterns.”
“Mon Dieu! She now has a monopole upon street fêtes!”
David thought: ‘Dance floor, lights, cakes, wine – what else?’ He shouted to the Street, “Flowers! There must be a flower for each girl. Who knows about that?”
“Each virtuous girl has …”
“Shh-h-h!”
“Suzon!” the sad voice said, and David knew it was that of the Girl of the Lanterns. “Suzon loves flowers, but she has never had any.”
“Suzon, the flower committee,” David said. “She’s appointed. Now everybody who is going to get anything, come to me as soon as you can, and I’ll give you the money, d’argent!”
A tremendous voice boomed into David’s ear, “Wot’s this all abaht? Wot in t’naime av …?”
David turned. It was the Provost Martial, unbuttoned, huge, breathless and angry. “Hello, Falstaff m’lad,” David said to him, “tonight’s the night, that’s what, and you’re going to make a night of it the way you used to, say, five hundred years ago.”
“Gor, blimey!” the Provost said. “But …”
“Sergeant!” David said in his command voice. The Provost seemed to stiffen from years of habit. “Sergeant, you’re to keep order here. Your post will be from one wine barrel placed here, another there. You are to go from one to the other, understand? To keep moving as long as you’re conscious. You understand?”
“Right y’are sir!” the Provost said automatically.
2
The lights in the lanterns were reeling again. The walls of the houses were swaying o
nce more. Rose had been right about this wine; it was heady. Then David remembered it was all a matter of the mind. You could drink almost any amount if your will was strong and you brought yourself back sharply whenever you felt yourself slipping. The Provost Martial looked quite comfortable in the gutter, David reflected, though he had to be stepped over frequently. David made a note to drag him further out of harm’s way if he came upon the lout again.
Rose’s hair was soft against his face, and her scent was fresh and provocative again, he thought. She seemed to be coming closer within his arms in the press of the dancers about them. He looked down into her face. This girl was not Rose at all, but the redhead. How long, he wondered, had he been dancing with her? Where was Rose? They had been dancing together a moment ago, or was it an hour?
The rhythm of the dancing seemed to be broken now, though the drums went on. They seemed to be slowly receding as if marching away.
Now he knew he had come out of darkness and confusion into light. The music was nearer, hammering away just outside the closed shutter. David wondered how it had been managed, raising the musicians up so high they were on a level with the window. That was four stories above the canal. He laughed; that was impossible, of course. The room must have been brought down to the level of the Street. Was there something wrong, he reflected, with his reasoning? Other changes, he dimly realized, had been made within the room. He failed to remember the couch upon which he was sitting, of a brown sort of burlap, or the pillows. They bore a monogram, or were they initials? He looked at one closely. The letters were “B.R.C.” He said, aloud, “Why, of course, Belgian Relief Commission!” it was obviously a food sack made into a pillow. ‘Profusion of pillows,’ he heard himself think and repeated it, at the same time feeling the meaning slide out of the words, leaving them a phrase, yet of much greater importance somehow than before.
There is strength in the right phrase, he thought. Some fools think words are of vastly more importance than ideas, not distinguishing one from the other. Yet phrases, alone, persuade of real journalistic, even literary, merit, and if the phrasing is strange or obscure enough there are always plenty of people who pretend, and finally come to believe, that only a select few, obviously including themselves, can really understand what is meant, ‘So nuts,’ he thought, ‘to the courses in literature I’ll never have time to suffer through again.’
He kicked a pillow away, across the floor, discovering with the effort that his arms were leaden, almost paralyzed. Abruptly his mind cleared. There was a girl, apparently peacefully sleeping, upon each arm, one dark head in his elbow, the other a brown one against his shoulder. ‘Friendly, even familiar,’ he thought. ‘Not discreet but no, nothing wrong – unless the shutter popped open?’ he felt himself grin. What a story for the Provost Martial! A stranger fact seemed how he had been insensible to these two silken heads and softly relaxed shoulders, substantial and warming and now beginning to be in their own way intoxicating.
Presently, though without a hand against the wall, he found he could not halt the slow turning of the room or his own swaying. He steadied himself to look at them. Rather than a distortion of sight, he realized, when one is at this particular stage of drunkenness, there is a delay in receiving the image, which reduces details to unimportance. He noted less their features than their expressions, untroubled, fresh and innocent and without sadness as if they were little girls who had been masquerading as women in their elder’s cast-off clothing and who were dreaming now in their own simple and not unbeautiful characters. Sympathy for them and affection flooded him. Surely, he told himself, this was not maudlin though that was the least of which he might be accused. Gaspard would have understood his emotions, though Gaspard might have suggested that all girls looked thus as they slept. ‘See her profile against a pillow’, he might have said, ‘and you believe in her. Tiens!’
David’s inner mind began to reconstruct what might have happened. First Rose; she had gone. Then the redhead, who had been lost among the dancers. Then he remembered. The dancing had changed to a sort of folk affair, like a barn or a square dance with a caller shouting out the figures, a line of men on one side of the Street, women on the other, and the men’s line had been filled out with women – again the empty files. Finally, there had been a number where each man crossed to the two girls opposite him, caught them by the waist, and then the three each danced down the line together. With these two, he must have danced completely out of the picture – and ended up here?
David stepped on something on the floor. It was a paper lantern, folded flat like an opera hat. Then he saw one of the girls had dropped a flower, could it be a rose? Or a tulip? On the couch beside her. One, Suzon, the Flower Committee? The other, the Girl of the Lanterns? Both trying to be particularly nice to him?
The light hurt his eyes. It came from the corner of the room, from an oil lamp suspended in a hoop held by chains from the ceiling. There was a burnt match on the bare floor; perhaps he had lit it? He could not remember. Under the light, there was a squat upholstered chair of the type that had been in the common room of the pension, soft armed and deep, though this weary veteran had sagged to lean against a wall as rough and old as that of his headquarters hut so long ago. David sat in the chair, sagged with it and regarded the girls again. Strapping Flemish wenches, he decided. They lay more like healthy animals than the women he had known. They possessed the same rough appeal of the peasant girls of the billeting area, strong limbed; full breasted, ample bodied; relaxed now without the restraints of either clothes or consciousness.
At that moment the brown headed girl turned so that the light gave her face new planes, refined her features, gave a glint and softness to her breasts as she stretched with a luxuriousness and sprawl for greater comfort as she slept. David realized how little he had understood the provocation in such cases, beginning thus, upon which he had sat in severe judgment. ‘Slipping,’ he thought, ‘slipping and must think of something else – Rose – even Celeste.’
He found his hand was at the breast pocket of his tunic, against his last letter from Celeste. He closed his eyes while he unfolded and opened the pages to read:
‘My own Daveed:
‘Your demand for the glove touched me exquisitely. You will not think me the fool for sentiment – of course we have known each other always, and there has been no loss in anything that happened before we seemed first to meet, and I can imagine you wearing my glove in your casque and laughing when a piece of shrapnel struck it.
‘I haven’t told you, and there are hundreds of thousands of thoughts not told, that none of my hatred for this war can dim my pride and happiness in those exploits of yours of which I have heard from my father. Sometimes I am as clever as my father – I have extracted from him with patience of the greatest, how you looked on this day and that and what you did. I have been up and back with you in the mud and the darkness and the wire when you first saved the life of your friend Alan.
‘My dear, take thought of me before ever you are half so courageous again! My father is sometimes so easy. If I were a spy, I could twist M. le general about to tell me everything. I say to him “Has not Paris become an American city, full of Red Indians?” At once he says, “You find them sauvage? But you must not forget they saved our Paris!” So then I think to myself it must be more than true. “But the sauvage cannot fight with intelligence,” I say to him. “Mon Dieu!” he says. “Some of them have real military talent. You should have seen the workings of the intelligence of an American Commandant I know on the twenty-ninth Septembre.” It was like this – and he begins to move the knives and forks about and to draw upon the tablecloth like an ancient in the Hotel des Invalides. So I know, my Daveed, of some things of which I am so proud I have wept over them. Once it was necessary to fight, I think. It was well to fight like a man. And he has told me little stories, but great ones to me, of your compassion when you stayed your hand. He uses different names for you, but all the
time I know it is you.
‘I am sending the glove in a little box by another post. I have done one thing to it, being the daughter of a soldier. I have pressed it with a hot iron, so it will lie very flat and there will be no bulge in your pocket under your ribbons. I think it wiser to keep it over your heart than over your head. Am I not thoughtful? More thoughtful than you suspect or than I almost dare tell – the glove has been upon my hand and my hand upon my heart where yours would be were you here. What folly! How pleasant! Could I love you less, I think, then I would be happier now.
‘It is amusing you speak of practicalities as if they could be divided from all the rest. Is not your love of the first qualite pratique? You say I chide you? My dictionary says you mean gronder, blamer, reprimander, censurer! Have I not the right? Must I not get into practice if I am to help you with your work? But will you chide me for writing so much about myself? I will answer you that with your own La Rochefoucauld, which I have had to smuggle into this house. ‘Ce qui fait que les amants et les maitresses ne s’ennuient point d’etre ensemble; c’est qu’ils parlent toujours d’eux memes.’
‘Is not that true? We shall not tire of talking about ourselves. L’amour est un egoism a deux. Is it entirely practical that I hope to be the chose qui acceler your writing? But yesterday I began with practicality. Yesterday an advanture, because even to find myself free to go where I wish alone for an hour requires the planning enough for the defeat of an enemy army – a surprise I cannot keep from you – I have found the apartement in the Boul Raspail where lived Mme. Alan Cushing. Beaucoup plus! There still remains the albums of the work of our friend. I have seen them and held them in my hand with what emotion. I have arranged for them to be given to us when it is possible so to dispose of her things. There is much in them that will be of use to us. Also, between the pages, have been left his notes upon men and women and conjectures upon events to come. The instant I thought of it, I knew I must find this work and see it was preserved. It was a duty also to your friend. Will we not add albums of our own to his? Are there not children of the mind as well as of the body?