Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  Well, Edna would be glad to see him, anyhow.

  And he would be very glad to see her.

  Chita

  I don’t think I’ll get off the plane at Chita.

  A town in the Soviet Republic of Mongolia.

  Seimchan

  Not much of a town, but Chennault’s report caught up with him there. That was one thing he could do, at any rate. And the Department of State, goaded into action, had agreed publicly to waive America’s extra-territorial rights in China. They weren’t worth much any more, anyhow. We had last agreed to do that in 1934, but this time, apparently, it was actually to be done.

  The last stop in Asia. Is there any agony in the world like that of going home? One starts to get anxious even before the first familiar landmarks appear. And once, all alone, at dawn, on the boat-deck, to the baying of a foghorn, he had felt himself crying, at nothing more than a flotsam of orange peel and lettuce crates, floating out of the fog near the Ambrose Light, just because he couldn’t help it, and they would be docking in an hour or so.

  Despite the season, to one side of the landing strip a clump of blood-red Siberian poppies swayed and tugged in the wind, as though that grey-green tough little plant had blood and the flowers were the drops of it. Fascinated, he watched them. Such stubborn plants. They looked so lonely there, and so firmly rooted—like floods of poppies on a California hill, before the people came, the silence went, and then you did not see them there any more.

  It is something, at least: whatever we do to it, the world will still be there. It was time to leave. The motors were tuning up. And looking at those poppies, suddenly he trotted over, picked one, and put it in his lapel, as he walked back to the plane, took a last look round, and then went aboard.

  Such clean air.

  On the Plane

  One of the magazines aboard had colour reproductions in it of Goya’s dining-room, now in the Prado. Yes, it would be like that. The world would explode that way, all around us, while we sat there eating, in a dim light, so as not to see the murals too clearly. Behind the host’s chair, Uranus, like the tall shambling monster we are afraid will come up the stairs at night, when we are overtired and cannot sleep, is eating his children, holding them in both hands, the way a dog holds a bone in its paws. We may have ortolans when we please, which are eaten bones and all. Behind us, our own bones crunch. Along both long walls the world roars like a tempest in the pine crowns, high above our heads. The landscape itself is perfunctory, and Michelangeloesque, as after the flood. On one long wall, behind the polite diners, a cyclone of human hornets, leering, avaricious, and horrible; whirls out of the Manicheaen dusk, filthy and screaming. The polite diners affect not to hear. On the other long wall, behind no less polite diners, who bend their backs in rhythm over Coquilles St. Jacques, a ragtag humanity has taken refuge on the limb of a blasted tree, careful to keep its bundles about it, even there, and peers out at the highest standard of living in the world with the weak, predatory, red-rimmed eyes of an owlet, and then scornfully moves over to make room.

  At the far end of the table, opposite the host’s chair, so he can see it, if he peers over the flower arrangements, the bon-bon dishes, the Duke of Wellington’s Portuguese service, or his own glasses, there is a burnt rise of ground, over which the master has vanished to some delusory and fraudulent Compostella festooned with seawrack in hell, and there a dog looks out at you from cover, with a reluctant and curiously reproachful look.

  It is the last living creature in the world.

  Meanwhile, the Coquilles St. Jacques are finished, the covers have been removed, and the diners are eating an old-fashioned Tammy beefsteak and kidney dinner, hamburgers, TV plates, beef teriyaki (we did at least beat Japan), creamed chicken left over from the last Jackson Day dinner, melon-balls with sour cream (the Russians didn’t exactly win, either), and crow.

  That would have amused Goya, no doubt, but Goya never uses the dining-room any more. He is a very old man. He’s lost his appetite. Goya is at Bordeaux, finishing up the Disasters of War. There is so very little time left, in which to get the new set ready.

  Fairbanks

  Nothing is fair about it. But the mountains were there again, on every side, the customary judges. It is such a little way, up there, between America and Asia. But then so few people ever go up there.

  At Fairbanks he learned that he was not to be allowed to deliver at Minneapolis, as he had planned, a public address on his trip. Security reasons, said the President, who had to bottle him some way, and perhaps in this instance was not altogether wrong, but was getting tired of the way in which, no matter how he was defeated, the man came bouncing back. Report to Washington first.

  There was also an offer to speak over the radio on October 26th. Well, thought Tom, that would take care of the bottling operation, if he had his way.

  Unfortunately the world, like the mouse’s tale in Alice, had a tendency to dwindle away to nothing, when you got back to America, except that in this case it was no mouse, but a lion they had by the tail. Didn’t they realize that?

  He glanced at the mountains, whose snows were gold with sunset. Who was it, somewhere during his travels, a wit, so perhaps it had been in Turkey, where Noumen Bey, the Foreign Minister, had seemed, like his mind, a little sad, a little cynical, very strong, and very subtle, had referred to life in America as “Life behind the Gold Curtain”?

  He could not remember, but he remembered the remark.

  There were forces abroad (the war had let them out, as ghosts come out in a thunderstorm), out there, across the seas, which would have to be reckoned with, and which, if they were ignored, would disturb the whole world.

  The trip had taken forty-nine days. That was almost exactly the length of that other trip he had taken, during the election campaign. That had not occurred to him before, but now he saw that they were the same trip, or at any rate, one on one side of the mirror, and the other through it; the one through a world that preferred to dream, the other through a world that was the nightmare America feared. It is true: the dream of reason produces monsters. But in this case it was an irrational dream. In this case it was the monsters who had reason on their side.

  America is fenced with mirrors. They are our spiritual defence against the truth. And since we refuse to shatter them, there was nothing to be done now, but wait until they had been shattered from the other side, which would happen soon enough; though what would the world find on the inside, then, but broken glass? The creature was shrivelling away from sheer mirror vanity. It was too late.

  It had no dignity. Therefore it was a comedy, but only because one forced one’s self to smile. For it was also a tragedy, which broke for good the hearts of those who still loved the place, no matter how ashamed they might be of what their government had done. There are a good many of those, and always will be, for the land means everything, even when those who rule it mean little or nothing at all. So it is sometimes nobler to be Tom Fool. Nobler, and of better use.

  In the Plane

  Flying south-south-east. So this is what the world sounds like, when it falls about your ears. It makes no sound at all. Or, at any rate, no more than when the moon lies fair upon the straits, in this case the Rockies, swept with confused alarums of struggle and of flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. The darkling plain would no doubt turn out to be Edmonton. For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

  At least, he had been true to Edna. After his fashion. He wanted to see Edna now.

  As for the sea of faith, which was once, too, at the full, that is what was wrong: it had dried up. It had shrunk away from its natural shores. Like that reservoir of goodwill, it was draining away, while all over the world, people were impatiently waiting to pull the plug out, so they could draw their own bath in the same cracked tub.

  Since no one would repair it, their bath wou
ld be a quick one.

  Yes, that was what was wrong. That was what one missed in America: the shimmer of the sea of faith, that had once been there, which was there no longer, but which he had glimpsed in Asia.

  As for the salinity of that sea over there, that was another matter. He had his doubts about the buoyancy of that. But that could be worried about later. What bothered him now, was the curiously matt surface of what had once been ours. That was what brought the eternal note of sadness in.

  No. It was no use. What was the use of having a constructive solution, when nobody wanted it, and nobody would implement it? It was too late. We had sucked our own insides out, the way you suck an egg, because it was the appearance we wanted, just the shell; we didn’t have the guts to hatch out of it. So now there was nothing inside it.

  The world will pass us by, have a good laugh, and collect us the way rich Americans used to collect Fabergé Easter eggs, ghastly, meaningless, made of the best materials, a souvenir of the way things used to be, of what we could have been.

  Oh God.

  It was dreadful. There were no words for it. And the really dreadful thing about it was that we were so sapped, we had forgotten what shame was. Like that young woman in California, who had said nobody had time for conscience any more.

  In that case, there would not be much time for anything else. That made the world Manichee. We live on a credit that steadily diminishes and we do not sleep well.

  “I have never taken a sleeping pill in my life. I would almost like one now.”

  It began to be dawn. The Rockies were behind them, curiously lit, splendid and remote as judges who say nothing, who just sit there. The Altai. The Himalaya. The Tien Shan. In a moment he would not even see them any more.

  He had always seen them so clearly. They had kept him going. They had kept him in order. Now nobody saw them, they climbed among them only for recreation, seldom did even that, but preferred to stay indoors at Banff and get up a really good game of cards.

  The intercom came on.

  “Edmonton ahead. We will be setting down in about ten minutes.”

  It was not time enough.

  Epilogue: 1942

  So there he was, waiting out there, on the strip, at Edmonton, smiling and shaking hands affably enough, but a rather tired and shabby figure, looking and feeling like an old sheepdog or a partially decayed owl. Or perhaps like someone in a parable. Wasn’t every life a parable? Wasn’t his own? He would have liked to be able to say not. For Mr. Goodman and Mr. Badman, and Christian, and even Mr. Zeal-of-the-land-Busy, were not only a little too elementary for our day, they were also a good deal better than anything he had been through.

  A ridiculous man. The model for that kind of appearance was a lot of things everybody had forgotten, men like Heywood Broun and Irvin S. Cobb, but his own fat was firm, and his policies conservative, in the truest sense, which is perhaps why some people found them so shocking. He didn’t drink much. He had put on that fat just living and working, the way a bullock builds its hump.

  Just for a moment there, he felt afraid. It was a question of the soul. Nobody talks about the soul any more. It isn’t supposed to be sophisticated. Yet, whether talked about or not, people do have them, usually in bad repair, crippled or starving, but there, and his was feeling afraid.

  No. Not afraid exactly. Fear was something he had never felt in his life. But cold, and somehow like a foreigner or an immigrant. It was understandable enough. If you’re an old-style American these days, even if you never leave home, you’re living among foreigners. The breed has changed. Like the wire-haired terrier, it’s almost bred out. It’s lost its sense of humour.

  There remains the iceberg. Somewhere, in some unknown place, it has already fallen from the barrier. It will right itself in time.

  “Departure in five minutes, sir. You’d better go aboard.”

  “You know,” he said to himself, that tired old sheepish friend he’d hauled round with him all these fifty-one years, old reliable, the best friend he had, the guy who’s always glad to see you, even if you have changed, “I haven’t the heart to go back in.” It was too much like saying goodbye.

  But being a man of character, and a citizen of Rushville, as well as of the world, which is to say, an American, he climbed aboard the plane and went back in. After all, it was his country.

  “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

  Saddlebag-Berlin

  1960–1

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © David Derek Stacton, 1962

  The right of David Derek Stacton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–32083–7