William had come in and was standing against the door. Jules said cheerfully, ‘Yes. Am I right or not? Eh, Michel? Would you steal it? Tell me. I’d like to know. You wouldn’t. I know you. You couldn’t.’
Alphendéry said slowly, with some regret, ‘I’m afraid you’re right, Jules.’
William laughed shortly. ‘And no one’s making him try it out.’
‘Would you, Michel?’ Jules was curiously persistent.
‘I’ll make a deal,’ said Alphendéry: ‘thirty million I’d be honest, sixty million and I’d be a crook.’
‘If you gave it back, even the thirty million, you’d be a fool,’ said Jules roughly.
‘He wouldn’t, you needn’t worry,’ said William; ‘and I say that, having as much respect as you for Michel’s honesty and principles. A man with thirty million doesn’t have to be honest. Honesty is another word for an empty pocket. What is honesty? It’s being too poor to buy yourself a ticket across the Channel where they can’t catch you. You think you’d get the money back out of Michel because you think he’s soft and a neurotic, don’t you, Jules? Well, that’s where I know him better than you. The hardest man to break is the softest. People know that, by instinct. Everyone suspects Michel of having dark designs round here and of being in the thick of something. Only because he’s so nice and sweet. Could you argue Michel into giving back the money? Michel can argue you into a cocked hat. Ah, haven’t you got something else to think of?’ He stretched his legs, his contented chops set firmly as if he had said all that needed to be said for evermore.
Alphendéry harked back to their own conversation. ‘I don’t like stupid people to work with. They don’t know what you’re driving at and they get angry and sore.’
William said sagely, ‘The only reason you don’t want smart people round you, Jules, is that you don’t want to work.’
Jules only laughed at this brotherly candor.
* * *
Scene Seven: Jean Frère’s Garden
Alphendéry was filled with longing. He wanted to see people who ‘spoke his language.’ After work, he waited for the teller, Adam Constant, and strolled with him down to a little bar, near the offices of l’Humanité where they usually saw some of the workers. Constant was somber.
‘What is there to live for in France today?’
‘I thought you lived for your poems, your workmen’s classes, and The Workers’ Almanac.’
‘It’s not enough—for me.’
‘You’re young to feel that.’
‘Twenty-four!’ Adam laughed bitterly. ‘I don’t know enough to write. That’s the trouble.’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘Go out to China, maybe,’ said Adam.
‘To join the Red Army?’
‘Yes. You see Chiang Kai-shek has started a new campaign against them. The first Congress of Chinese Soviets opens in November.’
‘With a little alteration of the muscles, you could pass for some brand of Chinese.’
Adam Constant laughed cheerfully. ‘I was born in the East, although I’m pure French. You see,’ he added, rather shamefacedly, ‘I feel I cannot teach till I have learned. And I have my way of learning.’
‘And so you’ll go?’
Adam nodded. After he had finished the apéritif, he said rather confusedly, ‘You see, I’m not very happy here. I still have the feeling that all communists ought to be angels and work together singing psalms. Ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s like asking them all to be virgins before you go in with them: something like that. Oh, I suppose it’s some troublesome heritage of my Protestant ancestors. It leaves a mark on you to be born a Protestant in France.’
They were both silent, sipping a second small vermouth, when some husky-sweet vocables exploded in Alphendéry’s ear. Only two men had that voice, Henri Léon (who was in Belgium) and Jean Frère. Alphendéry spun round, with the ardor of Jean Frère already in his entrails and his throat, his limbs, even before he visualized his face and form. This was how Jean Frère appeared to everyone: first, like the warm and vigorous somnolency that precedes healing sleep, a period of shadow redolent with the most splendid blooms of the imagination; and again, in the same breath, like a seasoned barge captain particularly good in the grain, with a slight sea roll, freshly rank with the cargoes in lighters, one who sings out frank but not lewd compliments to all the girls along the banks.
Although he was forty, with his youthful, vigorous, and engaging aspect, his well-knit walk, he could have been twenty-five or twenty-eight. His variable, unaffected voice had the low-pitched rich, somber, or sentimental tones of an old-fashioned oboe, or became fresh and hopeful as a schoolboy’s. He had a dark broad face, smaller and shorter than Léon’s, a dark rosy skin, shining dark eyes and a rather large, but well-formed mouth, with the lower lip pouting often. He had not the compressed mouth of adults, but there was often about his lips that slight damp pout that children have who are under two years old.
One of his great characteristics made him very different from the bald Léon: he had extremely thick long curly coarse brown hair, growing low and irregularly on the broad forehead. When he smiled his eyes went into slits the shape of snowshoes and his mouth elongated like a longbow over his regular white teeth. He was thickset with a short thick neck, a large widespread nose, with a faintly Negroid air. His hands were firm, wide, and brown as a farm laborer’s.
The clothes of Jean Frère also merit description more than those of most men because he wore the very same, summer and winter, year in and year out: they were therefore a part of him and painted themselves in any point on the memory as well as he did. A suit in heather-mixture sports wool bought ready-made for the type ‘broad stub,’ too large for him, unpressed, so baggy at the knees that chickens could have been hidden there, worn unpolished brogues, an old cotton shirt close round the neck, and an old shoestring tie were in no way concealed by an immense old rough tweed overcoat two sizes too large, in the great patch pockets of which some dozens of newspapers, manuscripts, and periodicals were stuck. Precariously on the decidedly uncombed hair an exceedingly old soft hat hung sideways. When anyone looked too long at this hat, Jean Frère took it off, turned it round on his hands, and with some bitterness spoke of having it ‘renovated.’ On occasion he wore a large workman’s cap. The dark, curly hair fell down from under the hat in a wild, unchecked style of its own, sometimes over an eye, or ear, sometimes in the middle of the forehead. Nevertheless, Jean Frère always looked engaging.
Two suns rose in his eyes when he saw Constant; he threw an arm round the shoulders of each. ‘I’m going to take you two boys out to see my garden! A Pernod! It rained yesterday and now it will be good to dig. They threw me out of The Almanac and so I’m going out to let my garden nurse my sorrows. Michel, you will come! Adam’s coming, aren’t you, Adam?’ Michel flinched and drooped.
‘You are coming tonight to see the garden?’ said Jean, seeing this and rightly interpreting it. ‘Look—my second Pernod. I’ve been off it for three weeks. I—I saw a doctor. He told me to lay off cigars, cigarettes, and strong liquor. Of course, I have that small wine at home. I didn’t feel so good … I’m getting old,’ he said with a faint breathless apology and smile.
It was strange to hear it. Alphendéry had to say to himself, in so many words, every time he met Jean, ‘This boy is over forty: he has been through the War,’ and then he always had a contraction of the heart. But Jean did not worry over the prospect of growing old: he was sure he would be killed in a street fight one day with the police, and so avoid the long agony.
After his two Pernods, Jean Frère wanted to eat. ‘Today I’m as hungry as a bear because I’m not going back to the office this afternoon. Gee!—’ he shook his head a long time.
‘What was all the trouble about?’
‘An article of mine. I was after Levilain for the way he attacked the new playwright B
onni. Why do they have a man like Levilain for dramatic critic? He hasn’t got even a hair of the hide of a dramatic critic on his—hoo!—skinny—hoo! I think skinny people are naturally jealous.’
‘They’re hungry,’ said Alphendéry, with sympathy. Skinny he had never been.
‘Yes. Jealous and hungry. Everything—chimney pots, loaves of bread, moneybags, pillars in art museums, big gilt frames round masterpieces, rolls of carpets, horses, women—all bigger than they are. They want to bite the sides of houses. Bite, bite, they never get enough!’ He laughed ruefully. ‘And Bonni, to make matters worse, has a juvenile embonpoint and is the handsomest man that ever rose to take a bow, not handsome, downright beautiful and soulful. And Levilain looks like sin, injustice, and poverty in one person.’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s go. We’ll have a bite in the little Spanish dump, shall we? And then we’ll go out home. My garden! Judith’s out there. She’ll be terribly pleased to see you.’
Alphendéry made a last faint attempt. ‘Are you sure there are enough beds?’
‘Oh, of course: why, there are lots of beds!’
Alphendéry immediately had a grim vision of what sort of beds those lots of beds must be.
But Adam suddenly said, ‘I’d really like to go, Jean. I stifle for the country. I’ve been wanting to see your garden.’
‘Neither of you has ever seen my garden,’ said Jean joyfully. ‘What does it cost to eat here? I generally have a plate of soup in the bar along the street. Let’s see. H’m, h’m. Well, we can stand it. I’m hungry. Hey, comrade’ (mumbling). He said aside to Alphendéry, ‘I don’t know whether to call him comrade: I suppose he must be at least a socialist? I suppose so. Hey—er—have you got a special daily dish, anything like that?’ His face was suffused with laughter, as if he and the waiter had spent their boyhood tumbling about the roads together. When the waiter went away to get the card, Jean said, ‘He’s a nice fellow, isn’t he? Eh, don’t you think he’s a nice fellow? They look all nice here. I like it. I often look in here but I never came here. Do you like it? See, the pretty pots of flowers and things. Shows genuine taste, doesn’t it? I generally take onion soup at lunchtime down the street. I like it! They make it wonderfully down the street. Sam Convient he calls himself!’ He laughed, full of glee.
‘Sam Convient, Sam Convient!’ They all laughed, in fact, shook with fun. Alphendéry had not had such a good time for weeks. ‘Have you seen that café opposite the cemetery of Père Lachaise: Ça roule.’
‘Not bad! H’m—when they come out of the cemetery—a philosopher.’
Even Adam Constant cheered up and they all began to look forward to the night in the country.
Everyone who knew Jean Frère had heard about his garden but very few had seen it. Someone had murmured rather darkly to Adam Constant at one time, ‘Wait till you see it!’ Jean Frère regularly reviewed the garden annuals and agricultural handbooks for The Workers’ Almanac so that he could have the books for himself afterwards. He always found them excellent.
After a dinner they enjoyed intensely and several carafes of wine—for each was under the impression that he was treating the others—they took a bus to St. Germain-des-Prés and after waiting for some time for the tram at the terminus there, started on the long, long ride to Fontenay-aux-Roses.
Ineluctably they reached Jean Frère’s home in the country.
A little clean wooden staircase ran up through the ceiling of the front room. ‘I can sleep up there,’ said Michel, ‘certainly, why not?’ and he ran upstairs, bumped his head on the ceiling, stared over at them a moment, with an expression of surprise, and with another step brought his head level with the attic floor. He had no words when he saw it. A mattress lay on the floor, with a candlestick and a half-used candle next to it. Tobacco had spilled out of a little pouch, matches lay on the wooden flooring. There were low bookcases, books half opened lying face down: a discarded pajama suit lay near the bed. Clean new rafters came so low to the floor that there was no standing upright: two skylights looked out sideways to the black sky line, where he saw dimly the waving tips of trees. But the attic was very dusty. Nothing had been moved since the last scurried Monday morning. The rumpled army blankets lay as they had been thrown back in that hour of alarums.
‘Of course,’ said Michel loudly and cheerfully, still standing at his post, so that they could not see that his face was not composed, ‘I can sleep here: it’s just the very thing.’ His eyes were fixed on the candle and matches standing on the naked wood.
But Judith Frère insisted on installing him in the bedroom, in the proper bed. There was a built-in wardrobe of unpainted wood, a box at the bedside with scarf, lamp, and book. Jean, his wife, and a square-built girl installed Alphendéry in the bedroom with the most amiable generosity, asked him if he would like some coffee, and all smiling, went out, shutting the door. But first Judith showed him the bathroom and the various little compromises with recalcitrant plumbing that had to be made, and showed him how to wedge his door to, and where to get coffee if he got up first in the morning. And Jean said, ‘If you get up early, just go straight out into the garden and get some fresh air.’ It was a long time since Alphendéry’s sleeping had been attended with so much love and good will.
He wedged the door and with a stricken look sat on the bed. He felt very sick, not morally, but physically. The floor was uncarpeted and not even planed. It was covered with sandy loam, brought in on the shoes of enthusiastic gardeners of the previous week. The walls were unpainted, the bed coverings thin and rumpled, and the bed linen was the sort one might expect to find in a boy’s shack. Michel found that he could not sit upright. His head swam and even the sweet air did not attract him. At no time in his life, perhaps, had he wished more passionately for a loving, decent, quiet, intelligent wife. ‘A working girl,’ he said to himself. He visioned, in a moment, what ‘a working girl’ would make of this room in no time. He lay on the bed in the bedroom so kindly given him and closed his eyes, pale, mortified, ill. And he was ill.
Adam Constant, a silent and rather tenderly smiling witness of the previous events, now poked his sharp nose and chin through the door, which was not very tightly wedged, and looked at Alphendéry lying there with closed eyes. He came in, took off Michel’s shoes, hung up his waistcoat and coat, and covered him with a blanket. Then he tiptoed out and shut the door carefully. He had observed what would scarcely have been conceivable to Jean. All the rest of the house was quiet. Adam went and sat for a long time on the veranda, looking across the wide stretch of garden, over the trees, into the hills and the distance. He was thinking of his own fate. He was convinced his life would be a short one. But the thought of where he was going and how he might die, as well as the soft night air, filled his lungs with an almost divine gust. Into his thoughts for the future stole a recollection of a moment just past. He had gone first up on to the veranda, to meet Judith, as if he had some message to give her. But he had none. She came forward and said in a low, secret, urgent voice, ‘Did you come? I thought you said you could not come so far and get back to work. It does not matter. I am glad. There is room. There are a few others here, but it doesn’t matter.’
That was what she had said so secretly and rapidly. And he had answered her, in the same quick, hushed voice, ‘Yes. I know. But I needed the country so much. And I have never seen Jean’s garden.’
He thought this incident over for a few minutes and smiled faintly in the dark and nodded to himself. He muttered to himself, ‘There are moments when the air is rarefied.’
Judith, on her pillow, on the mattress beside Jean, in the now dark attic, was thinking, ‘How bizarre was our conversation! What we said and what we meant—why, the voice was the whisper and the thought was the voice. I am happy.’
But now Adam Constant was thinking once more of China, and Judith began to dream that she was telling Jean, her husband, all that had been happening all day.
When
Alphendéry woke in the morning he heard sounds all round him and knew it was late. He had tossed and turned, expecting to smell fire at any moment, and had only fallen asleep when the night began to pale. The sheets and pillow slip were also witness to the love the Frères bore their garden. He saw Judith pass the window, dressed in a shirt and trousers and marveled at the girl’s becoming embonpoint. Adam was rearranging the white little stones that stood round a pond in the middle of the lawn. Someone was moving round cups and saucepans in the kitchen. The hungry animal, Alphendéry, got up, and putting his things on without washing (he secretly blessed the country for this) followed his nose to the kitchen. Mme. Lucide, the girl guest, gave him coffee, cheered him, and sent him out into the garden. He picked his way quickly through the house which looked as if a wild wind had passed through it that very morning, and out on to the veranda.
A great shout from Jean Frère greeted him. Jean was digging on the other side of the clay path. Alphendéry had the illusion for a moment that he had gone blind. He blinked. Where was the garden? Jean Frère’s eyes shone. He smiled his golden infant smile at Michel, let his spade fall into the tussocks, and said, ‘There, do you like it! Gosh, I feel a different man out here. There is my garden!’ He pointed without any self-consciousness to the tangled weeds, grass, shrubs, and lumps round him. Then scrutinizing Michel’s expression and hearing Adam laugh, he explained, ‘My two brothers dug it up a bit last year. Now it needs doing again.’
Two or three square yards of ground showed the color of earth and were drastically heaved about. The earth was sandy loam and very stony. Behind and round this a wild half-acre stretched away to a flat marshy spot where water still shone. The half-acre went up and down, a vale of a thousand knolls in miniature. The pasture grass was thick, high and knotted, while along the side of the path were old garden shrubs gone to seed and choked in weeds and rubbish. Round the house, however, Judith had planted soft-leaved herbaceous plants, mostly lifted from the grounds of a deserted burnt house. They spent the morning now, picking out the best plants from the encroaching weeds, and even Michel was able to distinguish a few good-looking plants which he indiscriminately named ‘lilies.’ Jean was so extravagantly happy all the morning and Judith and Adam seemed so cheerful that Michel could not help feeling that he had missed one or two good points which might be urged for the country.
House of All Nations Page 9
