The Spider's House (28 page)

“Work?” she inquired, not understanding.

“Or so you said. You were going to make financial calculations and call the hotel in the morning.”

“Yes.” Her voice had no expression. They got into a cab, and were off, around corners and through crowds, with an incredible racket of banging metal, wheezing motor and constantly bellowing horn.

“Thank God there are no cars in the Medina,” he said. “The casualty list would be something.”

“I’m really awfully tired,” she answered, as if he had inquired how she felt. He did not believe her.

In front of her little hotel with its single light over the door they got out, and he paid the cab. “Aren’t you keeping it?” she said, surprised.

“My restaurant’s a ten-minute walk through the Medina.”

“Well, thanks again,” she said, holding out her hand. “It’s been delightful. At the moment I’m just knocked out.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he told her.

“Good night.” She went through the door into the office. He stood outside in the dark a moment, and saw her pass the doorway with her key in her hand. Then he turned and went up the quiet road to Bab el Hadid.

The next morning as he lay in bed working, Abdelmjid came up from downstairs with a telegram in his hand. It read:
THANKS JOING MERNES LEE.

He stared at it and worked no more that day.

CHAPTER 19

It had been a shock, her sudden departure. On the one hand it obviated the necessity for an explanation to Moss and Kenzie of his failure to keep the rendezvous, for she had sent similar telegrams to both of them, and that permitted him to lie vaguely, saying that he had been around to her hotel and found her already gone; they put the incident down to feminine caprice and American ill-breeding. But on the other hand it set in motion a whole machinery of self-questioning and recrimination. He was completely convinced that he had somehow frightened her off. The question was: at what point had she taken alarm?

A good many times he went back over, in as much detail as his memory allowed, the sequence of their conversations, trying to force himself to recall her expression and tone of voice at each point. It was a difficult task, above all since, obviously, even though he might arrive at isolating the precise moment when he suspected that she had been put on her guard, there was no possible way of being certain that he was right, or, indeed, of knowing whether he had had anything at all to do with her bolting from Fez. Nevertheless, he continued with his attempt at recall and analysis of the afternoon and arrived at the conclusion that the whole thing had taken place at the very beginning, before they had ever left the hotel.

What brought him to this, was, of course, his very clear memory of leaning against the balustrade looking down into the garden, the feeling that everything had gone wrong, and the inability he had met with in his effort to explain to himself the sense of nervousness and frustration to which he had been prey. “I was right about her!” he would think with triumph. All the tortured little turnings of her mind that he had imagined he had observed had actually been taking place, then; her replies
and remarks had been a welter of subterfuge. But a moment later he would return to doubt. A few days of this went on, and then he determined to talk to Moss about it.

“Alain,” he said one day as they sat at lunch in a restaurant of the Ville Nouvelle, “What did you feel about Mme Veyron? What was your impression of her?”

“Mme Veyron?” said Moss blankly. “Oh, that rather intelligent, pretty American girl that Hugh had us to lunch with. You ask my impression? Well, I had no particular impression. She seemed pleasant enough. Why?”

“But you did have the impression that she was bright. So did I. And yet, if you think back, I’ll bet you can’t remember her making one intelligent remark, because she didn’t.”

“Well, really,” Moss said, “I can’t say that I remember very much at all about the conversation. Certainly it wasn’t brilliant, if that’s what you mean. It seems to me that it was Kenzie who did most of the talking that day. In any case, Mme Veyron made no shining contributions, there’s no doubt about that. But I must say, I did have the distinct feeling she was not at all stupid.”

Stenham beamed. “Exactly. The reason I’m saying all this, and you’re going to laugh your head off at me, is that I’ve been thinking a lot about her. I think she’s a Communist.”

Moss did laugh, but discreetly. “I should think it was
utterly
unlikely,” he said. “But do go on. How extraordinary you are, really! No, really, how extraordinary! Why on earth would you imagine such a thing about that poor girl?”

“Well, you know my history,” Stenham began, feeling his heart beat faster, as it always did when he began to refer to this particular episode in his past. “I was with them night and day when I was in the Party, and you get so you can recognize them almost infallibly.”

He suddenly wondered what had prompted him to talk about all this; Moss could not possibly have anything helpful to say, could throw no light on the dark sections of the subject, could not even share his interest. “As far as I know,” he went on, “I haven’t met a Communist in fourteen years, ever since I got
out. But my sense of smell is still acute, and I’m convinced I’m right about her. And if I am, she’s a lot brighter than either of us thought, because she put on a magnificent little act for herself.”

“Really,” complained Moss, “how can you believe a person’s political convictions will change him to such an extent? Why shouldn’t she be like everyone else, even if she is a Communist? I daresay I’ve met dozens and never been aware of the fact.”

“You’ve got a lot to learn about them, then. That’s all I can say. A real Communist, a consecrated one, is as different from us as we are from a Buddhist monk. It’s a new species of man.”

“Oh, balls, my dear John, balls.” Moss signaled the waiter.
“La suite”
he said. “For a normally intelligent man you have some of the
most
unconsidered opinions. And you? I suppose you were a new species of man for the term of your adherence to the Party?”

Stenham frowned. “I never was a believer. I joined just for the hell of it. When I found out what it really was, I got out fast.” He stopped for a second, then corrected himself. “That’s not quite true. I don’t think I remember my exact motives for getting out, but I do know I stopped being interested the day we became Russia’s ally, in the summer of 1940. And a month or so after that I went around and told them I was leaving. The crowning touch was that they told me I couldn’t leave on my own initiative.”

Moss had listened to this with obvious impatience. “It wouldn’t be, by any chance, that you admire her and suspect she has the constancy of mind and purpose that you lack? It couldn’t be that?” He looked at Stenham with a droll expression, reminiscent of a robin listening for a worm.

“Good God! Are you mad?” Stenham cried. He waved away the platter that Moss tendered him. “No, none of those cardboard string-beans. I’d rather go without vegetables. All I can say is, you’re absolutely, completely wrong.”

“It’s always possible, I admit,” Moss said complacently. “But my personal conclusion is that the very instability that originally
made it possible for you to go to such extremes—and it is an extreme, joining an organization like that—now makes you suspect everyone of being equally capable of such fanaticism. And of course, the world isn’t like that for a moment. Good heavens, John, stop seeing life as melodrama. From the moral viewpoint you’re fundamentally a totalitarian; you realize that, I hope?”

Stenham smiled. “That’s the last thing I am, Alain, the very last thing.”

The unpleasant accusation remained in his mind, however, and on his walks he thought about it. What disturbed him, he told himself, was not the fact that he believed there was any truth in it, but that Moss should have known so well exactly which dart to throw and where the unprotected spot lay. He was not sure that Moss himself had known what he meant when he had made the indictment, but that had slight importance beside the fact of his obsession with the meaning which he himself had unconsciously chosen to read into Moss’s words: the imperfections in his character which once had caused him to open his arms to the Communists were still there; he still saw the world in the same way. That in essence was what he imagined the other had meant, and if it were true, then he had made no progress whatever through all the years.

In his mind he followed his retreat from where he had been to where he was now. First he had lost faith in the Party, then in Marxism as an ideology, then slowly he had come to execrate the concept of human equality, which seemed inevitably to lead to the evil he had renounced. There could be no equality in life because the human heart demanded hierarchies. Having arrived at this point, he had found no direction in which to go save that of further withdrawal into a subjectivity which refused existence to any reality or law but its own. During these postwar years he had lived in solitude and carefully planned ignorance of what was happening in the world. Nothing had importance save the exquisitely isolated cosmos of his own consciousness. Then little by little he had had the impression that the light of meaning, the meaning of everything, was dying. Like a flame under a
glass it had dwindled, flickered and gone out, and all existence, including his own hermetic structure from which he had observed existence, had become absurd and unreal.

Accepting this, he had fallen back upon the mere reflex action of living, the automatic getting through the day that had to be done if one were to retain any semblance of sanity. He had begun to be preoccupied by an indefinable anxiety which he described to himself as a desire to be “saved.” But from what? One hot day when he was taking a long walk over the hills behind Fez he had been forced to admit to himself with amazement and horror that there was no better expression for what he feared than the very old one: eternal damnation. It was a shocking discovery, because it revealed the existence of a mysterious, basic cleavage somewhere in him: he had not even the rudiments of any sort of faith, nor yet the memory of a time in childhood when such faith had been present. He had been shielded from faith. Religion in his family had been an unmentionable subject, on a par with sexuality.

His parents had told him: “We know there is a force for good in the world, but no one knows what that force is.” In his child’s mind he had come to think of the “force” of which they spoke as luck. There was good luck and bad; that was the extent of his religious understanding. There were also millions of people in the world who still practiced some form of religion; they were to be considered with a spirit of tolerance, like the very poor. Some day, with the necessary education, they might advance into the light of rationalism. The presence of a religious person in the household had always been regarded as something of an ordeal. He had been carefully coached ahead of time. “Some people in this world have strange beliefs, like Ida with her rabbit’s foot, and Mrs. Connor with her crucifix. We know those things don’t mean anything, but we must have respect for everyone’s beliefs and be very careful never to offend anyone.”

But even at that early age he knew that his parents didn’t really mean
have
respect; they meant that it was good manners to pretend to have it in the presence of the person concerned.

Above all else, any reference to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was regarded as the acme of bad taste; he had seen his parents shudder inwardly when a guest innocently touched on it in the course of the conversation. As a child of six he had known that when the physical organism ceased to function, consciousness was extinguished, and that was death, beyond which there was nothing. Until this minute the idea had been there, one of the pillars in the dark at the back of the cave of his mind, as much an axiom of practical life as the law of gravity.

Nor did he have any intention, if he could help it, of letting it change its status. His first reaction, that day, when he had identified his fear, was to sit down on a rock and stare at the ground. You’ve got to get hold of yourself, he thought. He could usually discover the origin of a state of anxiety; as often as not it was traceable to some precise physical cause, like insufficient sleep or indigestion. But what he had experienced in that flash had been almost like a momentary vision: he had seen consciousness as a circle, its end and beginning joined so that there was no break. Matter was conditioned by time, but not consciousness; it existed outside time. Was there then any valid basis for assuming that it was possible to know what went on inside the consciousness at the moment of death? It might easily seem forever, that instant when time ceased to function and life closed in upon itself, therefore it could prove to be inextinguishable. The immediacy of the experience had left him with a sensation of nausea; it was impossible to conceive anything more horrible than the idea that one was powerless to stop existing if one wanted, that there was no way to reach oblivion because oblivion was an abstraction, a fallacy. And so he sat, trying to shake off the nightmare feeling that had settled on him, thinking: What strange things happen in the mind of man. No matter what went on outside, the mind forged ahead, manufacturing its own adventures for itself, and who was to know where reality was, inside or out? He thought with passing envy of the people down in the city below. How wonderful life would be if they were only right, and there were a god. And in the final analysis what more commendable and useful thing had mankind accomplished
during its whole existence, than the inventing of gods in whom its members could wholly believe, and believing, thereby find life more bearable?

When he had sat awhile, smoked three cigarettes, and let the intensity of his vision pale, he got up and went on his way, reflecting ruefully that if he had not originally had the senseless impulse to confide his suspicions concerning the girl to Moss, Moss might never have made the particular remark which, no matter how indirectly, was responsible for the mental agitation that had finally produced the unpleasant vision of a few minutes ago.