‘Please sit down,’ he said. A pair of heavy feet moved her with a surprisingly light skip to a chair. She sat down stiffly and stared without expression, like geography.
‘I know you are a very busy man,’ she said. ‘Thank you for sparing a minute for an unknown person.’ She looked formidably unknown.
The words were nothing; but the voice! He had expected Spanish or broken English of some grating kind, but instead he heard the small, whispering, birdlike monotone of a shy English child.
‘Yes, I am very busy,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to give a talk in an hour and then l’m off to lecture in Copenhagen … What can I do for you?’
‘Copenhagen,’ she said, noting it.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said the editor. ‘I’m lecturing on apartheid.’
There are people who listen; there are people upon whom anything said seems not to be heard but, rather, to be stamped or printed. She was also receiving the impresss of the walls, the books, the desk, the carpet, the windows of the room, memorizing every object. At last, like a breathless child, she said: ‘In Guatemala I have dreamed of this for years. I’m saying to myself, “Even if I could just see the building where it all happens!” I didn’t dare think I would be able to speak to Julian Drood. It is like a dream to me. “If I see him I will tell him,” I said, “what this building and what his articles have done for my country.” ’
‘It’s a bad building. Too small,’ he said. ‘We’re thinking of selling it.’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I have flown across the ocean to see it. And to thank you.’
The word thank came out like a kiss.
‘From Guatemala? To thank me?’ The editor smiled.
‘To thank you from the bottom of our hearts for those articles.’ The little voice seemed to sing.
‘So people read the paper in Guatemala,’ said the editor, congratulating that country and moving a manuscript on to another pile on his desk.
‘Only a few,’ she said. ‘The important few. You are keeping us alive in all these dark years. You are holding the torch of freedom burning. You are a beacon of civilization in our darkness.’
The editor sat taller in his chair. Certainly he was vain, but he was a good man. Virtue is not often rewarded. A nationalist? Or not? he wondered. He looked at the ceiling, where, as usual—for he knew everything—he found the main items of the Guatemalan situation. He ran over them like a tune on the piano. ‘Financial colonialism,’ he said, ‘foreign monopoly, uprooted peasants, rise of nationalism, the dilemma of the mountain people, the problem of the coast. Bananas.’
‘It is years since I’ve eaten a banana,’ he said.
The woman’s yellow eyes were not looking at him directly yet. She was still memorizing the room and her gaze now moved to his portrait. He was dabbling in the figures of the single-crop problem when she interrupted him.
‘The women of Guatemala,’ she said, addressing the portrait, ‘will never be able to repay their debt to you.’
‘The women?’
He could not remember; was there anything about women in those articles?
‘It gives us hope. “Now,” I am saying, “the world will listen,” ‘she said. ‘We are slaves. Man-made laws, the priests, bad traditions hold us down. We are the victims of apartheid, too.’
And now she looked directly at him.
‘Ah,’ said the editor, for interruptions bored him. ‘Tell me about that.’
‘I know from experience,’ said the woman. ‘My father was Mexican, my mother was an English governess. I know what she suffered.’
‘And what do you do?’ said the editor. ‘I gather you are not married?’
At this sentence, the editor saw that something like a coat of varnish glistened on the woman’s wooden face.
‘Not after what I saw of my mother’s life. There were ten of us. When my father had to go away on business, he locked her and all of us in the house. She used to shout for help from the window, but no one did anything. People just came down the street and stood outside and stared and then walked away. She brought us up. She was worn out. When I was fifteen, he came home drunk and beat her terribly. She was used to that, but this time she died.’
‘What a terrible story. Why didn’t she go to the Consul? Why-’
‘He beat her because she had dyed her hair. She had fair hair and she thought if she dyed her hair black like the other women he went with, he would love her again,’ said the childish voice.
‘Because she dyed her hair?’ said the editor.
The editor never really listened to astonishing stories of private life. They seemed frivolous to him. What happened publicly in the modern world was far more extravagant. So he only half listened to this tale. Quickly, whatever he heard turned into paragraphs about something else and moved on to general questions. He was wondering if Miss Mendoza had the vote and which party she voted for. Was there an Indian bloc? He looked at his watch. He knew how to appear to listen, to charm, ask a jolly question and then lead his visitors to the door before they knew the interview was over.
‘It was a murder,’ said the woman complacently.
The editor suddenly woke up to what she was saying.
‘But you are telling me she was murdered!’ he exclaimed.
She nodded. The fact seemed of no further interest to her. She was pleased she had made an impression. She picked up her paper bag and out of it she pulled a tin of biscuits and put it on his desk.
‘I have brought you a present,’ she said, ‘with the gratitude of the women of Guatemala. It is Scottish shortbread. From Guatemala.’ She smiled proudly at the oddity of this fact. ‘Open it.’
‘Shall I open it? Yes, I will. Let me offer you one,’ he humoured her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They are for you.’
Murder. Biscuits, he thought. She is mad.
The editor opened the tin and took out a biscuit and began to nibble. She watched his teeth as he bit; once more, she was memorizing what she saw. She was keeping watch. Just as he was going to get up and make a last speech to her, she put out a short arm and pointed to his portrait.
‘That is not you,’ she pronounced. Having made him eat, she was now in command of him.
‘But it is,’ he said. ‘I think it is very good. Don’t you?’
‘It is wrong,’ she said.
‘Oh.’ He was offended and that brought out his saintly look.
‘There is something missing,’ she said. ‘Now I am seeing you I know what it is.’
She got up.
‘Don’t go,’ said the editor. ‘Tell me what you miss. It was in the academy, you know.’
He was beginning to think she was a fortune teller.
‘I am a poet,’ she said. ‘I see vision in you. I see a leader. That picture is the picture of two people, not one. But you are one man. You are a god to us. You understand that apartheid exists for women too.’
She held out her prophetic hand. The editor switched to his wise, pagan look and his sunny hand held hers.
‘May I come to your lecture this evening?’ she said. ‘I asked your secretary about it.’
‘Of course, of course, of course. Yes, yes, yes,’ he said and walked with her to the outer door of the office. There they said goodbye. He watched her march away slowly, on her thick legs, like troops.
The editor went into his secretary’s room. The girl was putting the cover on her typewriter.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that woman’s father killed her mother because she dyed her hair?’
‘She told me. You copped something there, didn’t you? What d’you bet me she doesn’t turn up in Copenhagen tomorrow, two rows from the front?’ the rude girl said.
She was wrong. Miss Mendoza was in the fifth row at Copenhagen. He had not noticed her at the London talk and he certainly had not seen her on the plane; but there she was, looking squat, simple and tarry among the tall fair Danes. The editor had been puzzled to know who she was for he had a poor visual memo
ry. For him, peoples’ faces merged into the general plain lineaments of the convinced. But he did become aware of her when he got down from the platform and when she stood, well planted, on the edge of the small circle where his white head was bobbing to people who were asking him questions. She listened, turning her head possessively and critically to each questioner and then to him, expectantly. She nodded with reproof at the questioner when he replied. She owned him. Closer and closer she came, into the inner circle. He was aware of a smell like nutmeg. She was beside him. She had a long envelope in her hand. The chairman was saying to him:
‘I think we should take you to the party now.’ Then people went off in three cars. There she was at the party.
‘We have arranged for your friend …’ said the host. ‘We have arranged for you to sit next to your friend.’
‘Which friend?’ the editor began. Then he saw her, sitting beside him. The Dane lit a candle before them. Her skin took on, to the editor’s surprised eye, the gleam of an idol. He was bored; he liked new women to be beautiful when he was abroad.
‘Haven’t we met somewhere?’ he said. ‘Oh yes. I remember. You came to see me. Are you on holiday here?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I drink at the fount.’
He imagined she was taking the waters.
‘Fount?’ said the editor, turning to others at the table. ‘Are there many spas here?’ He was no good at metaphors.
He forgot her and was talking to the company. She said no more during the evening until she left with the other guests, but he could hear her deep breath beside him.
‘I have a present for you,’ she said before she went, giving him the envelope.
‘More biscuits?’ he said waggishly.
‘It is the opening canto of my poem,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid,’ said the editor, ‘we rarely publish poetry.’
‘It is not for publication. It is dedicated to you.’
And she went off.
‘Extraordinary,’ said the editor, watching her go; and, appealing to his hosts, ‘That woman gave me a poem.’
He was put out by their polite, knowing laughter. It often puzzled him when people laughed.
The poem went into his pocket and he forgot it until he got to Stockholm. She was standing at the door of the lecture hall there as he left. He said: ‘We seem to be following each other around.’
And to a minister who was wearing a white tie: ‘Do you know Miss Mendoza from Guatemala? She is a poet,’ and escaped while they were bowing.
Two days later, she was at his lecture in Oslo. She had moved to the front row. He saw her after he had been speaking for a quarter of an hour. He was so irritated that he stumbled over his words. A rogue phrase had jumped into his mind—’murdered his wife’—and his voice, always high, went up one more semitone and he very nearly told the story. Some ladies in the audience were propping a cheek on their forefinger as they leaned their heads to regard his profile. He made a scornful gesture at his audience. He had remembered what was wrong. It had nothing to do with murder; he had simply forgotten to read her poem.
Poets, the editor knew, were remorseless. The one sure way of getting rid of them was to read their poems at once. They stared at you with pity and contempt as you read and argued with offence when you told them which lines you admired. He decided to face her. After the lecture he went up to her.
‘How lucky,’ he said. ‘I thought you said you were going to Hamburg. Where are you staying? Your poem is on my conscience.’
‘Yes?’ the small girl’s voice said. ‘When will you come and see me?’
‘I’ll ring you up,’ he said, drawing back.
‘I’m going to hear you in Berlin,’ she said with meaning.
The editor considered her. There was a look of magnetized inhuman committal in her eyes. They were not so much looking at him as reading him. She knew his future.
Back in the hotel, he read the poem. The message was plain. It began:
I have seen the liberator
The foe of servitude
The godhead.
He read on, skipping two pages and put out his hand for the telephone. First he heard a childish intake of breath, and then the small determined voice. He smiled at the instrument; he told her in a forgiving voice how good the poem was. The breathing became heavy, like the sound of the ocean. She was steaming or flying to him across the Caribbean, across the Atlantic.
‘You have understood my theme,’ she said. ‘Women are being history. I am the history of my country.’
She went on and boredom settled on him. His cultivated face turned to stone.
‘Yes, yes, I see. Isn’t there an old Indian belief that a white god will come from the East to liberate the people? Extraordinary, quite extraordinary. When you get back to Guatemala you must go on with your poem.’
‘I am doing it now. In my room,’ she said. ‘You are my inspiration. I am working every night since I saw you.’
‘Shall I post this copy to your hotel in Berlin?’ he said.
‘No, give it to me when we meet there.’
‘Berlin!’ the editor exclaimed. Without thinking, without realizing what he was saying, the editor said: ‘But I’m not going to Berlin. I’m going back to London at once.’
‘When?’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Could I come and talk to you now?’
‘I’m afraid not. I’m leaving in half an hour,’ said the editor. Only when he put the telephone receiver back did the editor realize that he was sweating and that he had told a lie. He had lost his head. Worse, in Berlin, if she were there, he would have to invent another lie.
It was worse than that. When he got to Berlin she was not there. It was perverse of him—but he was alarmed. He was ashamed. The shadiness of the saint replaced the pagan on his handsome face; indeed, on the race question after his lecture, a man in the audience said he was evasive.
But in Hamburg at the end of the week, her voice spoke up from the back of the hall: ‘I would like to ask the great man who is filling all our hearts this evening whether he is thinking that the worst racists are the oppressors and deceivers of women.’
She delivered her blow and sat down, disappearing behind the shoulders of bulky German men.
The editor’s clever smiles went; he jerked back his heroic head as if he had been shot; he balanced himself by touching the table with the tips of his fingers. He lowered his head and drank a glass of water, splashing it on his tie. He looked for help.
‘My friends,’ he wanted to say, ‘that woman is following me. She has followed me all over Scandinavia and Germany. I had to tell a lie to escape from her in Berlin. She is pursuing me. She is writing a poem. She is trying to force me to read it. She murdered her father-I mean, her father murdered her mother. She is mad. Someone must get me out of this.’
But he pulled himself together and sank to that point of desperation to which the mere amateurs and hams of public speaking sink.
‘A good question,’ he said. Two irreverent laughs came from the audience, probably from the American or English colony. He had made a fool of himself again. Floundering, he at last fell back on one of those drifting historical generalizations that so often rescued him. He heard his voice sailing into the eighteenth century, throwing in Rousseau, gliding on to Tom Paine and The Rights of Man.
‘Is there a way out of the back of this hall?’ he said to the chairman afterwards. ‘Could someone keep an eye on that woman? She is following me.’
They got him out by a back door.
At his hotel, a poem was slipped under his door.
Suckled on Rousseau
Strong in the divine message of Nature
Clasp Guatemala in your arms.
‘Room 363’ was written at the end. She was staying in the same hotel! He rang down to the desk, said he would receive no calls and demanded to be put on the lowest floor, close to the main stairs and near the exit. Safe in his new room he changed the time of his flight to Munich.
‘Miss Mendoza left this for you,’ said the clerk, ‘when she left for Munich this morning.’
Attached to the note was a poem. It began:
Ravenous in the long night of the centuries
I waited for my liberator
He shall not escape me.
His hand was shaking as he tore up the note and the poem and made for the door. The page boy came running after him with the receipt for his bill which he had left on the desk.
The editor was a well-known man. Reporters visited him. He was often recognized in hotels. People spoke his name aloud when they saw it on passenger lists. Cartoonists were apt to lengthen his neck when they drew him, for they had caught his habit of stretching it at parties or meetings, hoping to see and be seen.
But not on the flight to Munich. He kept his hat on and lowered his chin. He longed for anonymity. He had a sensation he had not had for years, not, indeed, since the pre-thaw days in Russia; that he was being followed not simply by one person but by dozens. Who were all those passengers on the plane? Had those two men in raincoats been at his hotel?
He made for the first cab he saw at the airport. At the hotel he went to the desk.
‘Mr. and Mrs. Julian Drood,’ the clerk said. ‘Yes. Four-fifteen. Your wife has arrived.’
‘My wife!’ In any small group the actor in him woke up. He turned from the clerk to a stranger standing at the desk beside him and gave a yelp of hilarity. ‘But I am not married!’ The stranger drew away. The editor turned to a couple also standing there. ‘I’m saying I am not married,’ he said. He turned about to see if he could gather more listeners.
‘This is ludicrous,’ he said. No one was interested and loudly to the clerk he said: ‘Let me see the register. There is no Mrs. Drood.’
The clerk put on a worldly look to soothe any concern about the respectability of the hotel in the people who were waiting. But there, on the card, in her writing, were the words: Mr. and Mrs. J. Drood-London.
The Camberwell Beauty Page 17