by Matthew Head
Miss Finney smiled and said, “I know, but for instance if anybody said anything to you—Schmitty or somebody, for instance.”
“Then of course I always said I doubted it. But that’s all. I didn’t know anything one way or another, when you come down to it. I felt a certain way about Tiny that made me doubt it, the way everybody else in town felt a certain way about Liliane Morelli that made them believe it. In any case, she didn’t mean anything to me one way or another—then.”
Miss Finney cocked an eye at me, and said, “Then?” but I wasn’t finished. I went on, “And anyway, try sometime taking a couple of rumors and dropping them in this town or any other community where everybody is under everybody else’s nose. Drop in a rumor that so-and-so stepped out of line, and drop in another saying that on the contrary so-and-so never has stepped out of line at all. Give them an even start and see which one beats out the other one. Virtue makes awful poor fodder for gossip.”
Miss Finney was looking at me hard, but I had a feeling that I was fading away before her eyes. Her face was taking on that abstracted look that always meant that the set of the random ideas and odds and ends of circumstance that she kept stored up inside her head for ultimate use had suddenly received the catalytic she had been keeping them ready for, and had begun crystallizing into a vision of heads falling. I knew what would happen: in a minute she would be all sweet innocence, because she would be covering up some typical scheme of deviltry that you couldn’t get her to say a word about, come hell or high water, until she was ready to. And sure enough, after a few seconds she turned her head away and fanned her face a few times with one big hand, and said in a perfectly meaningless tea-party voice, “Goodness, it’s been hot, hasn’t it!”
It had been hot. It had been hot in Léopoldville for many years now, and would continue to be hot for many years to come. “That,” I said to Miss Finney, “is the silliest goddam remark I ever heard a bright woman make.”
Miss Finney looked at me with raised eyebrows and said in accents of pained gentility, “Hoopie dear!”
I let it go at that, and we rode along in silence to the hotel to get Emily, but I had a little bit the feeling that I was sitting next to a time-bomb and I hadn’t any idea what time it was set for.
CHAPTER FOUR
DR. GOLLMER WAS IN his middle fifties. He was a very tall man—around six-two, I’d say, and that made him the tallest man in Léopoldville, where, if people tended to run over size, they did it in width rather than length. The most noticeable thing about Dr. Gollmer’s general build was the prominence of his bones. He was not a thin man—spare-fleshed, you might say, but not thin—and yet you were always aware of these bones, which were of great size. Particularly, his joints were big and heavy, and gave the impression that they were less flexible than other people’s, as if formed on a simpler pattern, a more primitive one, or made of a substance more coarse-grained than bone, so that they had had to be more simply executed. As a result, his movements were somewhat slow and stiff, deliberate, although not exactly awkward. He played the violin, and he was pretty good. I imagine that without the primary difficulty of his hand-type, for his hands were not only as long and narrow as the rest of him but also as broad-boned, he would have been very good. The joints of his fingers had the same quality as the rest of his body, the quality of limited flexibility.
But if his body suggested inflexibility, Dr. Gollmer was generally credited with the most flexible set of morals in town, so flexible that although he had come to be something like the town’s official bohemian—he occupied a sort of spiritual Left Bank all by himself—he had a superb tolerance for the conventionality of other people’s lives. If that was the kind of life they were fools enough to lead by choice, he seemed to say, let them lead it.
Dr. Gollmer had a long, narrow, hard-fleshed face in which the nose had at some time been flattened and pushed slightly to the left. It was typical of the impression he made that although I never heard anything about how he got his nose broken, I always took it for granted that it was broken in some kind of disreputable brawl. His eyelids were heavy, and they supported a coarse growth of lashes; his mouth was wide, irregular, and firm. I found his face altogether a good one, but like other Left-Bankers, Dr. Gollmer was always preoccupied with the growing of hair on it. His beard had the coarseness of a heavy fiber brush, irregularly bristled in red, black, gray, and white. These bristles had the same simplified and oversize quality as his bones, so that you could sit across a table from him and be aware of any individual bristle —red, black, gray, or white—as a bristle of a certain shape and size, projecting itself out of its individual follicle with great independence and definition. But Dr. Gollmer never stuck very long to any one arrangement of these bristles. Sometimes he would be growing a mustache, sometimes a beard, and sometimes long sideburns, but none of these ever got very far beyond the preliminary stubbly stage.
When I first came to Léopoldville, Dr. Gollmer was still respectable enough to be received almost anywhere, although even then, at the very best houses, he was asked only to the largest parties. By the time I had left Léopoldville and returned for my second stay there, Dr. Gollmer had indulged his moral flexibility to such an extent that the good people he so easily forgave had found it impossible to forgive him, and he had become the next thing to a pariah.
But at this time, the early stage of the game, he was received even by Madame de St. Nicaise, Morelli’s sister-in-law by his first wife, and the gentility of Madame de St. Nicaise was absolutely closed to any question whatsoever. She spent her life keeping it so. This was the time of the Great Stringed Instrument Schism, with Dr. Gollmer and Madame de St. Nicaise as protagonists, which tore artistic Léopoldville stem to stern, and had more connection with the death of Liliane Morelli than anyone could have foreseen—or, for that matter, ever discerned at all, even by hindsight.
The Fine Arts in Léopoldville, as in most places, were on the town. There is a very good little museum of native arts, with some fine pieces, although all the very best had been sent to Brussels, for the museum there. When Goering had all these pieces packed up and sent to Germany, a lot of people in Léopoldville who had always thought of native art as nothing more than a local novelty to be patronized by tourists and eccentrics began to look at it with a new interest, because obviously if Goering wanted it, along with the Ghent altarpiece and, for that matter, all of Belgium itself, then it must be better than they had thought.
The Léopoldville museum was run by a society called Les Amis de l’Art Indigène du Congo Belge and for a while they put out a magazine called Brousse, which means “bush,” a word meaning the jungle in particular but the less civilized portions of the Congo in general. It was an excellent little magazine and Dr. Gollmer used to write for it. Even while he was still an acceptable member of the social community, he wasn’t too good a doctor to have for anything like an extended illness, because whenever he felt like it and could scrape together enough money for it, he would kite off to Popokabaka to do another article on the arts of the Batshiok. These Batshiok are good-looking people and among the most talented tribes in the Congo, the only ones with a lyrical love poetry, for instance, and with one of the most highly developed styles of native sculpture. They have a formalized ballet, performed once a year on the occasion of the circumcision and acceptance into the tribe of the boys who have reached puberty, and this ballet is supposed to be the finest dance in Central Africa except for the royal dance of the Watusi, which everybody who knows Africa at all knows from movies of it.
From time to time you would hear of Dr. Gollmer that he was off with his Batshiok again, and if he left a patient in the final stages of pregnancy, he obviously felt that the birth of one white baby was of less importance than the investigation of a fine culture which was disappearing by the minute under the white man’s vulgarization. On the occasions of these trips, while he was still in the comparative good graces of the community, there would be a certain coy arching of eyebrows to in
dicate that our dear Dr. Gollmer was indulging his personal taste for the bizarre along with his hobby of research in native arts; after his fall into disfavor you would hear exactly the same thing said, but in tones of opprobrium. But whatever Dr. Gollmer did in the villages, and certainly there was something in his mien which indicated that he wouldn’t hesitate to satisfy any outlandish curiosity he might feel, he always returned with something worth rescuing—some poems or songs, which he would translate for Brousse, a transcription of a melody, or a notation of a drum rhythm, and once some fuzzy snapshots of the ballet, which professional anthropologists had never managed to photograph at all.
He would always bring back another really good example or two of the constantly diminishing store of masks and fetishes used in the ceremonies. He would sell some of these, if he needed money too badly, but no money could buy the best ones from him. In his house, a small decaying structure nearly consumed by vines and bushes, the walls bristled with spears, knives, and arrows; dripped with bead necklaces twisted into ropes as thick as your arm and with strings of leopard teeth; stared at you with the eyes of bush-devil masks; and everywhere, on tables and shelves and window sills, there were figures carved of wood or ivory, or fabricated of raffia and feathers, some of them with little bits of mirror inlaid for eyes, some with real human hair, many with human teeth inserted higgledy-piggledy in their mouths, some stained with the blood and excrement which invested them with magical powers, and here and there one of such repose and serenity that it stood clean and unaffected by the enveloping dark.
That was the Dr. Gollmer of my first year in Léopoldville. Of all the people connected with the Morelli affair, he was the one who changed most from that time until the death of Liliane Morelli. During that first year, even, you could see him begin going downhill after his quarrel with Madame de St. Nicaise. During the time I was away, in the service, I used to hear from Schmitty, and he wrote me all about the scandal involving Dr. Gollmer and Liliane, which brought Dr. Gollmer further discredit. By the time I came back to Léopoldville, Dr. Gollmer looked ten years older, and was well on his way to becoming the town bum. He had very few patients, he owed small sums of money to everybody, and he frequently smelled of whisky before noon.
I liked Dr. Gollmer—taking him on faith, since I had never done much more than exchange greetings with him at parties—and I was glad when he got his first real break in a long time. A small and faintly crack-brained expedition of French and American anthropologists, technicians, and dabblers came over on a grant from some foundation or other to make movies of native dances and records of native music. They were working out of Brazzaville, across the river, up into various parts of French Equatorial Africa, and they picked up Dr. Gollmer to serve as translator and general liaison man in the villages. He spent six months with this bunch, and came back with enough cash to square away most of his debts. He put out his shingle in earnest, determined to re-establish himself as a respectable doctor.
In a funny kind of way, Dr. Gollmer seemed to have got himself married and settled down. His wife was a pair of young women named Mademoiselle Lala and Mademoiselle Baba; they seemed to serve a secondary function as children. The three of them—Dr. Gollmer, Mademoiselle Lala, and Mademoiselle Baba—came back to his little house, chopped away enough vines to get into the front door, and set up a ménage à trois.
Mademoiselle Lala and Mademoiselle Baba were in their very early twenties, no more than that. They were very much of a size, both short, around five-three, and they both smiled all the time, in a sweet, unaware kind of way. Beyond the fact that both of them traveled under French passports, no one ever learned anything about their antecedents. Lala was Lala’s real name, but Baba was a name which attached itself to Baba because Lala and Baba obviously had to have names which paired closely enough to suggest their virtual identity with one another, and because Baba herself suggested the sweet plump bready cake of that name. Baba was a natural brunette, with the short legs, chunky breasts, wide shoulders, and apple cheeks of the peasant of the south of France.
Lala on the other hand was an unnatural blonde. Her hair was coarse, and looked as if it would have been kinky if it had not been kept straightened. It was the hot tarnished brassy color of very black hair which has been crudely bleached, and although her eyes were gray, they had the unnatural look of light eyes in a mulatto, for her skin was the creamy dark beige of a magnolia turned brown—really a beautiful skin. Finally, she had suspiciously long feet with heels projecting sharply back behind the ankle, and suspiciously high, tight-knotted little calves on her skimpy shanks. She had some story or other about an Egyptian father and an Italian mother.
You seldom saw Lala and Baba without Dr. Gollmer. The girls had tidied him up considerably, and they themselves were always neat and clean in cheap sleazy dresses, made of bad imitation silk, with hemlines just above their knees no matter what the fashion was. They were decked with a whole dime-store counterful of bracelets, rings, earrings, necklaces, and pins, set with green and red and yellow and blue glass stones. When they were not with Dr. Gollmer they were together, always extremely cheerful, always open and friendly, but never speaking to anybody, since nobody under any circumstances spoke to them except in stores across counters. They seemed not to resent this; they seemed not to resent anything or to worry about anything, and they always seemed to me the most contented-looking pair I had ever run across in those parts. When the three of them walked down the street, Lala would be hooked on one of Dr. Gollmer’s arms and Baba on the other. When the girls walked together, they went hand in hand, like children. There was something sweet and even pastoral about the whole business. I have always been able to imagine a fireplace in Dr. Gollmer’s house, with Dr. Gollmer sitting in front of it in pajamas and bathrobe, and Lala and Baba symmetrically disposed on low footstools at either side of him, their heads resting on the arms of his chair, and the firelight glinting on the green, red, yellow, and blue glass stones of the knick-knack jewelry their dear protector had given them.
Mary Finney, of course, already knew a lot about Dr. Gollmer. There are legends in the Congo, which for all I know may be absolutely true, about news traveling from one end of the place to the other by drum more quickly than by telegraph. Whatever it was that Mary Finney used as the equivalent of communication by drum, she knew all there was to know about every doctor in the Congo, whether she had ever actually corresponded with him, or been called into consultation with him, or not. So there wasn’t anything I could tell her about Dr. Gollmer’s general character or the general pattern of his career, but she had never heard of the Great Stringed Instrument Schism, which had been social rather than medical in inception.
“This is absolutely beside the point,” I told her. “There’s no reason in telling you this, it’s just something that happened that was awfully funny at the time, but it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with what you’re interested in.”
“Maybe not,” Miss Finney said, “and maybe so. You never can tell. But I do know that I’d rather you wasted your time telling it to me than that I wasted mine trying to figure what I’m trying to figure, without knowing something that it might tell me.”
“What might it tell you?” I asked.
“Hell’s—own—fire,” Miss Finney said patiently. “How do I know what it’ll tell me? Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. I tell you I’ve just got to get everything you can give me. I’ll pick and choose the pieces that might mean something. All you have to do is talk. The less you try to think, the better.” She said all this in the particular way she had of somehow speaking crossly, but letting you know that if she wasn’t really fond of you she wouldn’t be acting cross at all.
We had been waiting at the hotel for Emily Collins, so that all of us could go to the Petit-Pont for dinner, and now Emily came out all set to take off. Miss Collins weighed easily a hundred pounds and always gave the impression of being freshly dusted with talcum and turned out in starched dimity, and frequently when I think I
am thinking of her I discover that I am not really thinking of her at all, but of Lillian Gish in The Birth of a Nation. As a pure matter of fact, I can remember that on this evening she was wearing on her head the companion to Miss Finney’s sun helmet, and on the little contraption that served her for a body she was wearing the curious sacklike garment which one Léopoldville dressmaker had once asked the privilege of examining sometime when Miss Collins didn’t have it on, because she simply could not figure out how several pieces of cloth which had presumably been cut and sewn together by something other than chance could possibly have resulted in anything that looked so meaningless. Miss Finney often said that in their relationship as missionaries she represented the flesh and the devil while Emily ran the soul and hymn department, and certainly Emily’s costume symbolized complete renunciation of the body, for it denied that what was tied up inside it was anything other than a small fragile bundle of twigs. I was extremely fond of Emily, and so was Miss Finney.
She came forward to us now, walking quite straight, I am certain, but giving the impression of creeping sidewise with the particular air of apologetic self-effacement which was her very own.
“Hello, dear Hoopie,” she said, and timidly extended to me the small, ineffectual-looking hand in which I had once, with my own eyes, seen her grasp a forty-five and plug a difficult customer who at that moment had been giving Miss Finney a lot of trouble. It is true that Emily fainted immediately after, but it is on record that she plugged him, all the same.
I took her hand, and she withdrew it quickly. She ducked what I had intended to be a peck on the cheek, with an agility which suggested more practice at that kind of thing than she could possibly have had. She came out of the maneuver a little flustered, pulled inconclusively a couple of times at her garment as if to straighten it, and said, “Let’s eat.”