Rotting Hill (15 page)

    I put down what I was reading very often to reflect on the inner meanings of this sort of book (if you chopped away enough of the humbug of politics to contact the inner truths); of the material with which power worked, the human mass namely, and the numerous disguises adopted by power—disguises imposed by the sensitivity of the human material, by the dangers involved in handling energies so disproportionately vast compared with the physical insignificance of the “master mind”. Power does not like to have a bronco beneath it—meaning a violent or spirited people. Problems of political liberty presented themselves of course. But political liberty is not an Asiatic commodity, and I doubt if it can be a Russian—not as my friends upstairs would have understood the free. You would not have discovered it, in the ancient world, anywhere on the Asiatic or African shores of the Latin Sea. The Romans and Germans practised it at different times. England is eccentric, but it has excelled as a great and celebrated centre of liberty for the privileged.

    The English have bred as spectacular a breed of underdogs as any dog-lover could wish! But at last, approaching mid-century, the
whole
of that great dog has been dragged out from underneath in Britain: and does he shake himself and
bark
hysterically! He does that. And shows few signs of wanting to bite the decadent old top dog, who does not seem to mind much either, but queues up for bones and quietly takes those bottom dog doesn’t want. It is a superb feat! (I grew enthusiastic as I thought of the
whole
of this vast dog.) He will never go back again—not in the same place anyway, or
beneath the same dog.
Whether in Russia they had ever had, even for a few weeks at the beginning, that grand feeling, was very doubtful: that sensation of being free men which our people…
Brrrromp!

    The entire house shuddered with their freedom.

    I sat pulverized. There had never been so inconsiderate a fury of undisciplined joy by the upstairs workers. The longer the job dragged on, the more careless they became. But these men were intoxicated with what I still regard as a sacred beverage—liberty. I was ruled by this great liberal scruple. As they scuffled and kicked around overhead, choking with the hysteria of the Harrow Road, gulping with Hammersmith fun, for a ball they used, I imagined, a wad of my old newspapers, tied up in an oil rag. They had before. Their trampling was atrocious. I put my book away and stood up. The shindy grew in wild intemperance. “Goal,” panted the fat painter.
What
goal? (Once you unchain one who has never tasted freedom, his wild ego will know no limit. But I did not desire to be the person to recall these men to order.) I put on my hat and moved silently out, as in certain circumstances, rather than strike a man, one would abruptly make haste to leave a room. As I went I thought of bread and circuses, of Clodius who petted the plebs in preparation for the coming of a despot—the great prototype of modern dictators. Not that any of the hills of the Rome of antiquity were Rotting Hills. The rot was in the valleys between. There it was worse than with us: frequently, it seems, houses would cave in, shop-property be demolished by spontaneous collapse. Little wonder when we think of the six storeyed tenements, renting not rooms but bunks, so that easily two or three hundred persons could be packed into one smallish building. I have never read anywhere that the Romans had the rot: probably their houses dropped to pieces from other causes.

    As, still absorbed (thinking of Rome partly I suppose in order to clothe raw realities in a classical remoteness), I descended the newly-painted Roman stairway, the sun gilding the shimmering dust of the windowpanes, the uproar from the open door above receded. But I found myself obliged—if I were to continue at all with my parallel—considerably to deromanize my image of the time. Though a dictator might be expected here long before the century’s end, that after all was not because London resembled the Rome of Clodius—which already was like New York or more so. Beside Paris or Vienna, London is a centre, not a city. We improvise ways of civilized living in it, and it
is
a centre, though otherwise a place of about the same natural glamour as Bradford or Nottingham. From our apartment now came a thud, a muffled bellow of blurred noise with it. A goal! The shock-tactics of the fat painter doubtless responsible, the neat footwork of the bricklayer’s mate no match for a rushing avalanche of fat. The young plasterer’s mate passed at a gallop, with a friendly grimace, windmilling with one arm as he forced it into his jacket.

    Once outside I moved quickly along—no further need to disguise the fact that I was in flight from joy. I was met by a contradictory sight—to what went on
chez moi,
I mean, a flat contradiction. Road workers were remaking sections of the road. They worked under the direction of foremen, who never left the road, and the men never stopped: they seldom spoke to one another, except about what they were doing. I only saw them laugh once: a young elegant from behind a bank-counter loftily sauntered a shade too near where a load of slimy pebbles was being discharged. He jumped—but a neat granitic spray pelted all over his nice new trousers and nice sports-coat. The burst of laughter was unrestrained—not insulting. The road-workers were trained to work quickly, they were the same men who had made the airfields during the war, and remade them at top speed. Eight drills, for instance, each as explosive as a motor-bike, were in massed action, blasting down to the eighteen-inch line of the specification, and though there was no rushing but concentrated deliberation—of progressive unmaking, layer by layer, and then of remaking, from earth-line to the street-level—the tension of the time-table was felt. Were these Irish workmen? People said so in the shops. But this may have only been because it was an Irish contractor and the men were small. Here was the gang: and there was the ganger. This is how my house-party of rot-hunters must work one day, when the honeymoon is over. I do not say this with satisfaction: in theory at least I am all for football and song.

    We keep a window box for birds. When there is some sun, watching sparrows rolling in our mould, sparring with one another in featherweight skirmishings upon the rim of the box—but a matter of fifteen feet above the ferocious marmalade cat on the roof beneath: shaking the sooty earth out of their wings, or sometimes asleep, become drowsy in the sheltered warmth—this is very pleasant indeed. The author of
Far Away and Long Ago
did a good job on the London Sparrow. I have always liked the common finch, that plebeian bird, as ordinary as grass. Whatever effort I made, however, I could not, I knew, find the joy of the brick-layers, painters and plasterers, pleasant, or see them as big human sparrows. Their class has no part in this—their dirty clothes and husky voices—there is an obstacle to our sharing the joy of adults of our species indiscriminately, as we can with birds or many quadrupeds. The rich contrive to repel us in
their
way, the poor in theirs.

    Crossing to the other side of the street, I reached, in the next block up, the office of Thomas Cook and Sons. Those ornamental places advertised in the window, the archaic glamour of Cook’s placard-world, were not my destination. I was going to Llanmaerth. I put my hand up to open the door, but found myself looking at the carpenter and stopped. He had come up close to my side. “Where did you spring from!” I enquired. “I didn’t spring, sir, at all. I was walking. I was just behind you.” “Ah!” I gave him a stern look. He admitted he had followed me. The carpenter gave in return his half-grin, in the midst of his discoloured cheek. “If you was going away, sir.” As if some ugly wind had blown upon them, the embers in his tobacco-green eyes sulphurously sparkled, with their minute red particles of fire. “If you was…” But the carpenter was a lone wolf: I felt no responsibility as regards
his
joy—which in any case was confined to destruction. “If I was?” I asked. “Well, there’s one place Harry, that’s the plasterer, told me I’d missed in the toilet, where the rot…” “The rot?” “Yes, the dry rot, sir…” “In the toilet the rot will remain!” I found myself saying, to my surprise. I could never have been rude to the plasterer, or spoken discourteously to the bricklayer, nor have turned my back upon a painter. I turned my back squarely upon the carpenter, as I burst my way almost into Cook’s.
I
was going to taste liberty as well.

    The grate in Eldred’s study had been elegantly boxed in, and painted milk white. Not far below the centre of the milky expanse the bars of a chromium-plated electric fire had the appearance of a grating. At present the thick and gleaming bars reflected the cold flame behind them, from which came a moderate heat. But the house was centrally heated.

    Between lying and sitting, Paul Eldred, on a massive white leather chaise-longue, in a lightish new-looking suit, was stretched level with the fire. A large Buddha sat facing him, benignly gleaming. In a large chair, nearer than the idol, sat a visitor. This visitor was shabby but looked intelligent. He chain-smoked Philip Morris. Seven stubs were in the ash-tray beside him.

    “The specialist I saw last week,” said Eldred, “informed me that some toxin was destroying me.”

    Silence.

    “Some toxin as yet to be identified.”

    The visitor then responded.

    “Such assertions as that made by your specialist,” he said, “are usually a prelude to the administration of a dangerous poison.”

    Paul Eldred gave vent, after a rumble which gathered strength over a space of some seconds, to a burst of stylized belly-jeers. This was a guttural growl rich in insult, simulating the spasms provoked by the comic.

    “You think, do you, Evan, that the fellow proposes to poison me. Just for fun? I should have thought I might be of more use to him alive.”

    “Oh, he might not intend to hurt you at all. Doctors are malignant or benign, like tumours. However, their benignity is more terminological than real. It does not mean they are not dangerous.”

    “They admit their ignorance exceeds their knowledge, and where there is ignorance accidents are bound to occur.”

    Evan shook his head. “It is not their ignorance, it is their humanity. If you are sick, the problem is this: the knowledge and the skills, through the agency of which your health might be restored, are in the possession of certain men—doctors of medicine. But unfortunately they are not morally or intellectually responsible enough for the powers of life and death they wield. Many approach medicine as a business: and then in the very processes of salvation they become brutalized. So the problem is—‘How on earth am I to get at the knowledge and the skills possessed by this small-time businessman by whom I am confronted, or by this callous brute?’”

    “That is a pessimistic simplification, Evan, I cannot allow. I have known many very decent chaps who practised medicine. I know surgeons who are both intelligent and humane.”

    “Certainly such can be found,” the visitor agreed. “Often G.P.s are quite good chaps. They are the journalists of medicine, who know a little about everything but nothing
à fond.
I can see, however, that your experience has been happier than mine. Medicine seems to me to attract a high percentage of irresponsible people.”

    “Most people are irresponsible anyway,” Eldred objected. “Surely medicine does not absorb a higher percentage of irresponsibles than politics.”

    “Just as many,” the visitor maintained. “If it is medical help you need, I would suggest you obtain a report from a private detective agency on your man. A report on his killings.”

    A belly-jeer broke out at this. Eldred gave his sardonic nature full play only with a few friends with whom he had been young. Their chat would be punctuated with coarse insulting noises, as they derided their enemies and mocked their friends or clients, as they sat and drank dry gin.

    His present visitor was not of these, though a friend of his young days. He was one who despised the animal in man and would not sneer and jeer and wallow with an intimate. Eldred belly-jeered all the more and figuratively unbuttoned, without so much as a reciprocative chuckle. Furthermore Paul Eldred sensed the critic at watch in the friend. “Just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a ribbon to stick in his coat,” was the reproach, Eldred knew, silently levelled at him by the accusing eyes, whenever the presence of his late wife’s money accidentally obtruded, or whenever reaction, not to say “fascism”, became indecently visible in his conversation.

    Eldred sold himself as a fake antique. A thick veneer of age much in excess of what was biologically warranted had been serio-comically created. What the analytical visitor had to say about that may be summarized as follows. When young, Eldred developed a sensitive dread of ageing. His was a feminine make-up. In order to forestall the dreadful moment (and rob it of its sting) when people would whisper “Old Paul is getting on”, he began acting old while still a young man. But if this was the true account, the mannerisms had become second-nature.

    When Eldred spoke, it was slowly and portentously, in serio-comic judicial manner. With him all serious deliveries were serio-comic in style, so as to disarm mockery. Whenever an opportunity offered, he played the judge. He had collected a young high-brow following for himself as “creative historian”: and to break off a young follower’s engagement, for instance, to a young woman with money, such a feat would cause him to feel agreeably Mephistophelian—and should the poor little rich girl be discovered gassed or drowned, well, that would make him feel wickeder, that was all. He had no deep organ tones but with the deepest he could muster he would admonish that
money was bad for people,
especially if they were young creative historians—as all his followers were, hundreds of them. People laughed. However he did not need to be told that the more strikingly irrational his behaviour the better material it was for gossip: and Names are nourished with Gossip as plants are with manure, and Names can grow great big Names in an atmosphere of hot air too. He was a hard-boiled gardener, engaged in the cultivation of a certain Name. He had long ago realized that the manufacture of gossip was of far greater importance than the writing of history.