A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (15 page)

After dinner we accompanied him to the Gare de l’Est. French railway terminals are all somewhat alike, I suppose, and surely the Gare de l’Est is not the largest and shabbiest, but that night it seemed so. It had an atmosphere of limbo, it was as cold as limbo.

There were hundreds of friends and relatives saying goodbye on the platform, a long rough fringe of average humanity all along the train that poor Roger had to take. Having been away from France for years, I was affected by this crowd as if it had been music, memoryladen and homesick. Indeed it was not my home but it was a place wound into my thought and my senses too closely, too long, ever to be unwound or forgotten. I had not forgotten the particular body odor of Frenchmen in a mass like this, rather like a vaseful of stale carnations, it seemed to me; carnations and a little garlic. I noted once more how many of their commonest faces have visionary eyes and, once more, I was made uncomfortable by their jostling which is less innocent and friendly than the American way but no less democratic.

Until the whistle of departure blew, some young men with their darlings and a few couples probably married kept embracing as it is done in France, face to face, with their arms round each other rather low, clasped in the small of each other’s back. Now and then they took deliberate kisses and then seemed to be brooding separately on love, each staring up and straight ahead over the beloved’s shoulder.

There were as many mothers as wives and sweethearts; and when the whistle finally blew, peep peep, all this female assembly, maternal and enamored alike, suddenly appeared to sag and shrink, left behind together, deprived of their chief interest, their fond hearts without focus. It changed the physical aspect of the crowd a little all the way down the platform.

It was a long train composed of those small wooden coaches which are a peculiarity of France, like little old chicken coops on wheels. I was pleased to see that Roger, the giant, could indeed stand up inside one, but in order to talk to us from the window of his compartment he had to stand with his legs bent, his tight shoulders more than ever like those of Atlas, with a world of self-pity and sophisticated sense of humor on them.

Peep, peep, and the long lightweight train, low on its wheels, slid out into the dark, eastward. And then a hundred hands were flung up, very white; even the grimy hands looked white in the weak illumination of the train shed. It was one long flutter of farewell so intense that it was rather like a desperate beckoning to come back.

Of course there is great love everywhere in the world, and the abuse and defrauding of pleasure everywhere. But France was the place, I suppose, where the average man and woman got the most out of their faculties of love. In this way and in their close family ties they probably always have been more vulnerable than other nations. Now indeed it is obvious how bad for them it must be to have a couple of million of their men in the prime of life kidnapped and kept away; the best breeding stock of the country rounded up behind barbed wire. That was one thing which in my darkest sensibility to Europe in 1938 I did not anticipate. Yet this departure of men, this farewell of women, seemed to me almost sinister. I knew that men departing to military service were the hope of France; one hope of the whole world for that matter. I really had no reason to fret about them except that their raiment and paraphernalia and even the coaches in which they traveled looked a hundred years old.

When Roger returned two weeks later it was near the end of my European holiday, and engagements and errands had so entangled me that I had to put off seeing him. Then he invited me to spend a day at La Miel, which I did, on the second, or perhaps the third, Sunday in April. I had tired myself out in certain difficult intimacies in Paris, and was in a mood to be amused by such a careless companion as Roger; and furthermore Linda Brewer also had a house in La Miel. She is a really old and fond friend of mine, one of my generation, a fellow-writer whom I really admire, not a novelist but a journalist in the great way, personal, unpretentious, and scrupulous, which I admire almost as much as the art of the novel. As she had a better judgment of the French, and a more courageous prophetic feeling for entire Europe, than anyone else I knew, I wanted to see her once more before I returned to our country.

She had a stint of writing to do that Sunday, so she could not invite us to lunch. Roger and Alain Raffe and I spent all the middle of the day outdoors; Roger at work in his garden with a serious breathlessness and an earnest account of the why and wherefore of everything, Alain and I pretending to work and to listen. For two weeks I had been thinking of Roger as deep down inside the mysterious Line, in a labyrinth, in a cellar. It surprised me to find him a little tanned or at least weathered. He looked well. Now he was taking an almost gluttonous pleasure in his flower beds, kneeling and crawling, poring over every infant bit of green, plunging his hands out of sight into the mulch and the soft dry sifted soil.

I had no spirit to gossip, I could not listen, I could scarcely think, in a spell of the admiration and melancholy of France, now that I was about to leave it again. Over Roger’s low orchard walls one could gaze a long way into the valley of the Chevreuse, a landscape with no flatnesses, with no heights, with scarcely any character except its mere attractiveness. The sunshine was so clear, the blue of the sky so sharp, that the earth seemed lacking in color. For several kilometers around it looked like a drawing in pastel, with the color a little rubbed off or blown away from the design, and some color blowing powdery in the air, in the breeze. The breeze was what they call a wind in France, and it had been so for almost a month, with extraordinary brilliance day after day, and drought and quite cold nights. It was a bad spring for fruit trees. Even Roger’s sheltered and rugged apple trees were affected, blooming now with what was rather like a bud broken open than a proper blossom, and the brownish pink of the petals indicated that they would open no farther. But all the milky sweet-sourness peculiar to apple blossom exhaled down the heavy branches, in which bees were working stubbornly, reeling and blundering in the bad energy of the air.

About four o’clock we strolled over to Linda’s for tea and sandwiches and whiskey. It was chilly then, and our tired Frenchmen were glad to sit by the fire with Mrs. Lavery, the beautiful friend with whom Linda lived. Linda and I sat by ourselves on the far side of the room and talked our politics, international politics—Great Britain and America, America and France, France and Germany—with a certain wisdom, I do believe, relatively speaking, though surely we were unpretentious enough about that. We were quite honest in our narrow hopes and great general dread; no doubt we were very clever, and we felt that we were intelligent, but we did not pretend to be wise, even to each other.

We have in common—at least we have together—moods of an odd combination of unashamed sentiment with some toughness or hardness. And now little by little, in allusions amid what we had to say about politics, we were bidding each other an extraordinarily fond and significant kind of farewell. “When are you sailing?” she asked, and I told her.

“You know, you’re quite right not to stay here,” she said. “No one is going to be able to write fiction in France from now on. Do you think you will be able to, even at home, when the war gets going? Oh, I wish I could go home with you! How I envy you, in a way.”

But she corrected herself. She did not envy me, she said; it was only her sentimentality and imagination. To stay in France as long as it was humanly possible was her fate. Because it was fate of course she herself did not altogether understand why it was. “But I shall be the last to leave. The last Middle-Westerner on this peninsula of Europe, of Eurasia.”

I approved of her staying. If she must she must, I said. But then I rather made fun of her or, you might say, fun of the evil fate coming up to engulf perhaps everyone on earth. “Don’t be too brave, don’t stay too long. You will be a great nuisance to us.”

“Why?”

“We’ll have to come and rescue you. We’ll have to send a destroyer to get you. We’ll find you in the fog on the sands at the foot of the Phare d’Quessant, or up on one of those crazy pinnacles of the Finistere coast, waving your silk handkerchief. We’ll take you off the rocks in a breeches-buoy.”

I thought it a good joke in my way, a pretty scene, and it still sticks in my imagination: one of those inlets or coves of a matchless crazy beauty in Finistere, a dead extremity of the body of Europe, a broken tip of the index finger of Eurasia. There is a seashore of dead-white stone which the ocean has half eaten; it is as if a cave had opened and its stalagmites had come out and were standing about. There are enormous skulls of the stone lying there and the ocean keeps cleaving them open, pulling the teeth and washing the sinuses, and the wind meanwhile preys upon the ocean, goring and sawing it and gagging it and hurling it into the stalagmites and the skulls, with its gray blood and disgusting spit spattering in the air for kilometers inland. It is one of those scenes which are impressive because they are reminiscent of human passion at its bitterest, of human physiology at its hardest, of starvation and sex and surgery and the like; but amid which actually a human being looks and feels as minute and shabby and functionless as a trained flea, badly trained at that!

“You have powerful friends, dear,” I told Linda. “And you’re worth a destroyer.”

I have a loud voice, and across the room Roger and Alain and Mrs. Lavery heard this. They sighed and shrugged and smiled, probably regarding us in spite of affection as persons of excessive fantasy and wild talk. Just then Linda’s old housekeeper entered with the tea and whiskey and bread and cheese, and we moved over to the fireside.

“I wish we were powerful,” Linda said. “We,” she insisted, with emphasis on the first person plural, “are not powerful.”

It charmed me to find on the tea-table a poor old copy of
The Methodist Hymnal,
the earliest book of my life except perhaps
The Wizard of Oz.
Linda had bought it for five francs from a stall on the Quai Voltaire and had just been looking in it for a quotation. It started us talking of the great moral effects of congregational singing, Catholic versus Protestant, and then we spoke of national anthems. Mrs. Lavery was a musician, a lifelong student and practicer of singing who intended to make a career of it. The month before last she had been engaged to sing our excessively difficult “Star-Spangled Banner” at a Washington’s Birthday banquet.

Meanwhile I had been turning the pages of the hymnal, with pleasure and almost pathetic reminiscence of my Wisconsin childhood. Thanks to my mother’s teaching and devout influence, this kind of simple Protestant music is second nature for me. I told Linda and the others how, as a boy soprano with high notes like those of a strained flute, I was sometimes paid as much as three dollars to sing at funerals, standing beside the coffins in little country parlors fumigated with tuberoses. It impressed them. Then I suggested our singing a few hymns. Roger and Alain refused but Linda and Mrs. Lavery were charmed to.

The latter had a fine high voice, trained as the French train their singers especially for the German repertory, with a golden tubular tone. The difficulty for her seemed to be that her exquisite physique was not stalwart enough for the volume of sound she had learned to produce. It made her pretty neck, which was like a water bird’s, throb, and the note would slip. I played the piano. Linda sang now the alto, now the tenor notes.

I love looking at Linda when she talks, as I think everyone does; and there is much the same charm when she sings. She is not what is called a pretty woman; all her features, her nose, her brow, her lips, are somewhat too strong or too distinctive. And when she is silent you can see how her spirit and excess of expressions have aged her face, a little in anticipation or in advance of the way she will look in due time anyway. As it is, I think her appearance is not likely to change much as she grows older. I regard her as fairly typical of our generation of emancipated, vagabond, international American, with a naturally worried mind but never discouraged in the least, cynical but conscientious—a pleasant enigma to most Europeans. Sometimes, when the matter of her talk or her thought is unhappy she has a look of almost ugly indignation. Then in the other extreme, her good humor will turn to a kind of wildness and glee which is extraordinary, like a Greek mask. She dresses her hair in a lovely rough bob all round her head; it is gray hair, filaments of iron or spun ashes. In those old days in France she wore a monocle.

To sing, she put in her monocle and held her head a little to one side. We sang Watts’ “Man Frail and God Eternal,” most appropriate: “Like flowery fields the nations”—that is, I thought, the democracies—“stand, pleased with the morning light.” We sang poor insane William Cowper’s “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” We sang “Joy to the world,” to Handel’s tune, which would have made a better national anthem than the one we have.

I happened to look up over the grand piano and observed that our Frenchmen could scarcely bear it. Their large figures were slumping in their armchairs. Their faces, in the mixed daylight and firelight, showed no more animation than a pair of carvings in white wood. It was as if all feeling had moved out of them somewhere else, as if their hearts had fled, because it had become intolerable to feel anything, in proximity or in conjunction with whatever it was they were thinking. They were both Roman Catholics, although neither of them professed any belief. Perhaps the hue and cry we made was hard for them in the theological sense. We were real American Protestant-pagans, all three of us.

Upon second thought I suppose it was the matter of nationality rather than the matter of faith. Superior French of the class and schooling of Roger and Alain do often regard us as not quite civilized people, which does not hinder them from generally liking us. Roger and Alain particularly liked us three and must have assumed that we were a good deal less than one hundred percent American. But there we were, with loud united voice and absent united mind, unabashed, absorbed in a native Sunday-afternoon ceremony. As it must have struck them, this was the old Adam coming out in us too, the old American Adam. We were powerful, we were happy, and furthermore, we were somewhat outside civilized history; and they loved us; and presently we would withdraw from them in fact as well as in spirit. Heathenish and cold-blooded and heartbreaking, we doubtless would go away and leave them.