Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783)

by Ritchie, Charles

  19 July 1937.

  There was no hot water. Vernon’s face was thunderous. I ate breakfast nervously conscious of his mood and feeling unable to cope with it. “There’s a heap of small things in the house that just have to be attended to,” he said. “Mr. Brown forgot to have the boiler filled. I spoke to him about it before he went away too.” He spoke with the grim, tight-lipped disillusionment of the stern father of an incurably feather-brained offspring. I felt that I could hardly admit this tone in speaking of a fellow “white master.” “Oh, he forgot,” I said, with a nervous attempt at nonchalance. “Yes indeed,” said Vernon, allowing his magnificent, sultry, dark eyes to dwell on me for a moment in contemptuous disapproval. Then he withdrew to the pantry. I turned again to Anna Karenina. In a minute or two I would have to shave, but what with? There was no hot water. Then unfortunately for my peace of mind it occurred to me that Vernon could quite easily heat up some water – not that it really mattered – I have often shaved in cold water. Why go and face him? Am I afraid of him? I thought, putting down Anna to look this disagreeable thought in the face. No, of course not, but I do not like meeting those sullen, disgusted eyes. This is getting too much, I thought, and went into the pantry. “Vernon,” I called in quite a loud, confident voice. He was in the kitchen sitting beside the table with a black silk stocking twisted around his head – I suppose to keep the kink out of his hair. “Vernon.” He did not get up, but rolled his eyes at me. “I wonder if you could heat up a little water to shave in.” I spoke rapidly. “Well, I will have to get some kind of a pot or pan, and it will take some little time to do.” This brought me to myself. I said sharply, “Of course, only get it heated up.” I felt better after that. Later I was able to go down to him and in quite a calm voice ask him the road I should follow to get to the town in Virginia where I was lunching. Feeling my change of mood he became more amiable himself and gave me the directions I asked for. “What is there to do when I get there?” “Well, there are some places of considerable interest,” he said gravely, “there is the home of Nathan Freeman, the great Negro Emancipator, now turned into some kind of museum, and then also there is St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane.” “Indeed,” I said politely. I was so pleased with this information that on impulse I nearly asked him to make me a small picnic luncheon, but although I felt better about Vernon I did not feel equal to this.

  3 November 1937.

  Michal Vyvyan1 said on the telephone that he would come around in twenty minutes to show me the draft of the telegram of greetings to Canadian War Veterans. With him came a new man just out from the Foreign Office, a smooth-faced Etonian with an air of sophistication. What happens to them at Eton? However innocent, stupid, or honest they may be they always look as though they had passed the preceding night in bed with a high-class prostitute and had spent the earlier part of the morning smoothing away the ravages with the aid of creams, oils, and curling tongs. This graceful young man handed me an elegantly worded little draft message typed out on a piece of paper. I said it was very pretty – “Good morning” – and when they had left went down to tell the Minister about it. “What,” said he, “was the significance of this move on the part of the British Embassy?” “A gesture of politeness – of co-operation,” I hazarded. But no, it was not as simple as all that. He had to be very careful in his dealings with the Embassy. “They are a queer lot, Ritchie.” I was to call Vyvyan and ask him the significance of the whole thing. On second thoughts he would do it himself. Then Vyvyan must needs come down and explain it in person and the Minister explained that we would have to consult our Government. And this was all because they had shown us a message of welcome to Canadian Veterans. The Minister is obsessed with the dangers of any dealings with the British Embassy.

  Miss C. the accountant is reading a book on How to Make Friends and Influence People. She says that she goes down to see the Minister and after five minutes, despite all the lessons she has learned from the book, she is longing to say, “Oh, to hell with you, you damned old fool.” He wears down one’s tolerance and amiability like a dentist’s drill.

  17 November 1937.

  The secret telegrams sent by the Dominion Governments to the Government of the United Kingdom during the Rhineland occupation crisis in 1936 have been an eye-opener to me. I have just been reading them. Not much “rallying around the Mother Country in time of danger,” and if a similar crisis blew up tomorrow would it be the same song? If the United Kingdom Government could publish these telegrams it might give their Collective Security critics something to think about. The Dominions are not going to fight on account of the rape of Spain nor an indecent assault on Czechoslovakia. The United Kingdom must choose her ground very carefully. I am not sure that a German invasion of France would do the trick. Perhaps not until the first air raid on London.

  I was sitting at the bar in the Club tonight beside a man on a visit from New York. “So I took this woman out to dinner,” he said, leaning his two elbows on the bar and looking into his brandy and soda. “Marvellous-looking woman and from what my brother had told me I thought it was, well, a foregone conclusion.” “An open and shut proposition,” I suggested. “Exactly as you say – an open and shut proposition. First of all she ordered three chops straight off like that. That was not all.” He twisted his ragged moustache in an agony of remembrance. “I picked up the menus – one was table d’hôte. I really shoved the other at her more as a gesture. It was à la carte – everything three times as expensive in it, of course. She chose a dollar apéritif – there were several at forty cents – then right the way through, a three-dollar entrée, lobster mornay, always the most expensive thing in sight, and after dinner seven double whiskies in the course of the evening, and I never came near to first base.” He said, “There must have been something wrong with the woman – physically I mean.”

  17 February 1938.

  At the Soviet Embassy hordes of fat, bespectacled women, young and old, “Radical” newspaper columnists with jowls and paunches shouting their phrases the second time lest they should not be heard or appreciated the first time, a few senators and political big-shots whose faces give one a feeling of familiar boredom like picking up an old twice-read newspaper.

  The Soviet Embassy was first the house of Pullman, the inventor of the Pullman car, and then the Imperial Russian Embassy. It is full of tasteless carving, red silk panelling, heavy chandeliers, and marble. Now everything is slightly soiled and shoddy, the silk is frayed, the carved floral designs are encrusted with dust. Paunchy Russian Jews wander about through the marble halls in their shirt sleeves with cigars dripping ashes on their ties, or muttering together in the corners of the big saloon.

  18 February 1938.

  Reading Shakespeare’s Henry IV, the scene between Hotspur and his wife. From that glimpse we know what Hotspur is in bed and at table, how he would make love, how he would flick impatiently through his morning paper, how he would drive a car, how he would bring up his children. Hotspur the falcon-eyed aviator, reckless skier is easy to imagine. The jesting, unsentimental tone when talking with his wife and his quick come-backs are startlingly “modern.”

  7 March 1938.

  I went for a walk in the country with the Australian Minister at the British Embassy. His blue, candid eyes, his silver hair, his ruddy cheek, his kindly, wholesome air all announce the fair-minded man of good digestion. He takes snapshots of old forts and churches, he observes the lie of the land, the names of the plants – he walks a steady pace, stout stick swinging at his side, pausing to appreciate a pretty stretch of country or to smile with good humour at a child playing in the village street. He is so nice – why then does one feel stealing over one a faint disgust at the man? Is it because for the best of all possible reasons his bread is always buttered on the right side? His house is in excellent taste, his dinners are not fussy but well cooked, suitable for a manly bachelor, his guests are sensibly chosen, the conversation is cheery and pleasant. On his shelves are Foreign Office
reports, official war histories, biographies, and the novels of Galsworthy. In his garden are crocuses planted by an ambassadress. In the mirror in his neat, manly dressing-room are stuck dozens of invitation cards from those who appreciate his jolly niceness. He is too shrewd and too dignified to let the cat out of the bag, but it is for these invitations he lives. They are wife and children to him. The man of the world with his silver-clasped evening cloak, his signed picture of the Duke of Gloucester on the drawing-room mantelpiece, his brandy in old glasses. The Australian without an Australian accent.

  8 March 1938.

  I went to the district jail to see a Canadian who had been kept thirty-five days awaiting trial for illegally entering the United States. I sat on a bench in the stone-flagged rotunda where visitors may talk to prisoners. The rotunda is in the centre of the prison and is lined with iron grating, beyond which one floor on top of another of the prison is visible, rising right up to the glass roof of the rotunda five floors above your head. The floors are connected by iron staircases. It is like being in the central hall of a zoo, an impression which was heightened by the figures sprawling on the staircases in attitudes of recumbent boredom. They were some of the prisoners and seemed mostly to be Negroes. Why they were sitting about on the stairs instead of being in cells I do not know. It is one of those illogical details which usually occurs in dreams. My prisoner came towards me across the floor. He was a pale boy with romantic, brown eyes and a shadow of a moustache. His features were delicately chiselled and rather trivial. He had on a very clean shirt open at the neck. He must have put it on a minute or two before coming to meet me. He seemed from his name to be of Greek origin and was in show business. “My brother,” he said, “had sworn out a warrant for my arrest.” “What did he do that for?” I asked. “I do not know what he would do a thing like that for,” the boy replied in a gentle, speculative tone as though pondering the vagaries of human nature. I felt my question had been impertinent. His reply was so gracefully said that it could hardly be called a snub, but I did not pursue the subject. I left him a tin of cigarettes. “It has made me feel good to have you come here,” he said with cordiality as I got up to go.

  9 June 1938.

  How many nights have I sat alone in my room listening to the laughter in the streets, looking furtively at my watch to see if I could get up and go to bed. All those nights in my stuffy little room in Paris, in my room at Oxford with the clock of Tom Tower striking nostalgia on the night air, at school with the movements and muffled voices of the boys in the corridors, and at home at the table which faced the window looking out on the lawn with the single oak tree. And always this piece of staring, white paper in front of me with the few and feeble words strung across it. These wasted nights are most remarkable. Nothing could be more stubborn than my devotion, nothing more stupid than my persistence. After all, I have written nothing – I will write nothing. Twenty years have not been enough to convince me of my lack of talent.

  23 June 1938.

  After dinner at Dumbarton Oaks1 our hostess Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss led us by circuitous paths to the little lake in the “wilderness” beyond the formal gardens. The night was cool, the sky clear, and there was no shiver of breeze among the box hedges that line the path. When we reached the lake she went ahead of us alone with a flashlight to spot the path under her feet. We remained standing in a little group on a high bank that overlooked the water. We watched her treading lightly and gracefully in the spots of torchlight as she went around the edge of the lake to the other side. There she vanished beyond a tree and touched a switch so that an electric light cleverly placed high in the trees above shone down with a clear, bright, but not too bright, light on the surface of the water. She pressed another switch and a second light shone. The lake and the trees around it were illuminated so that every shadow was given its precise value. When our hostess was within earshot again we murmured our admiration of the ingenuity of the lighting and the beauty of the scene. Quietly she accepted our praise. There was a pause while we stood there gazing at the discreetly illuminated lake conscious of a scene which must be photographed on our memories. In the silence created by our dumb appreciation our hostess’s voice sounded in a tinkling falsetto, “It has I think a quality of stillness about it which is most appealing.” We nodded agreement. It was a sentiment which could not be enlarged upon. Meanwhile with surprising stealth the moon had slid up over the trees and was regarding us with an expression of indifference.

  3 July 1938.

  We walked beside the lake arm in arm and stopped every now and then to kiss. The lake and its surrounding circle of trees was still as the empty sky. We saw a white house on an incline among the trees with a big plate glass in the front like the window in a shop. The glass was a blinding gold from the setting sun. “What a view they must have from there over the lake.” We wished the house was ours, but then we had said that about so many houses and we nearly always found some objections. This time it was the mosquitoes. “There must be clouds of them rising off the lake in the summer.” Instead of the houses we would have we talked for a little about trips to Bermuda, to Provence, or to rocky coasts with inlets of pale sand somewhere in Donegal or Nova Scotia. One place would be too far, another too expensive, another perhaps dull. It was not that we disagreed, but we both knew that none of these things would happen to us – that we would not have a house together nor visit the coasts of Donegal or Nova Scotia.

  5 July 1938.

  With no rules that I put faith in, no instinct to guide me except the instinct of self-preservation, a soft heart, a calculating head, and a divided mind, is it any wonder that I cause confusion when what I want is so simple – a woman who will love me and who will sleep with me sometimes, who will amuse me and listen to me and not flood me with love.

  9 July 1938.

  Until I touch her she seems not to be made of flesh – her clothes are of one material, her skin is of another. It seems madness to kiss her cheek, which is made of some soft stuff not silk or velvet. As one might put a piece of velvet to one’s face to feel its texture I put my lips close to her skin. I feel a casual pleasure in the softness of her cheek. A moment later a miracle has been achieved – her body is no longer a stubborn material thing of painted wood covered in velvet. It is now fluid and sparkling and electric with life. I can bathe in this moving stream and drown in this strong current.

  12 July 1938. Dance at the Leiters’.

  The house built in the nineties is rightly famous for its appalling ugliness. The ballroom of inlaid marble was a monument of frigid vulgarity. Other interesting features included the enormous green malachite mantelpiece in the dining-room and the portrait of old man Leiter in the hall which justifies the worst that could be said of the Leiter family.1 I suffered less than usual during this party as a result of consuming one glass of champagne after another in quick succession. I realized that this was necessary when somebody came up to me and said, “You look like Banquo’s ghost.” After that I felt I must go home immediately or get tight. I am glad I chose the latter course. I danced with Mrs. Legare who was the local beauty. Platitudes dropped from her lovely lips, each platitude as smooth and flawless as a perfect pearl. “Paris is so beautiful in spring when the chestnuts are out.” “Women should wear what becomes them, not what happens to be the fashion.” Her beauty too is that of a pearl – smooth and flawless. She wore a full-skirted dress of some stiff, shiny material which seemed to radiate a sort of moonlight brightness. Her gestures with her arms and hands, her way of dancing, were of a liquid grace.

  15 July 1938.

  I am longing to get to Nova Scotia. I want to breathe air from the Atlantic, to lie in bed at night and listen to the fog bell’s warning and to live in a family again – tea and gossip in the middle of the morning – my mother sinking exhausted into a chair, lighting a cigarette, beginning an impassioned attack on the stupidity or the ingratitude of the worldly-wise or telling one of those spontaneous masterpieces of mimicry, humour, and pat
hos, which give such depth of variety and colouring to a small incident.

  23 July 1938.

  Walked home last night through the dark jungle of the Negro quarter. The groups of Negroes – women sitting on the steps of their houses, young braves under a street lamp at the corner – are waiting for an artist who can render the grace of their movements, their natural nobility of posture or repose.

  31 July – 1 August 1938. Newport (Staying at The Breakers, the Vanderbilts’ house).

  When I stepped out of the station there was the car gleaming like patent leather and a small chauffeur in a greying livery, a pink and crumpled face and an accent which I presumed to be Hungarian.1 “Two things in the United States not good – dogs and children – both too fresh,” wheezed the chauffeur in a piping, choking voice as he swerved the car to avoid a dog and again to miss hitting a child. “How much must I tip you?” I thought. “There is the home of Mrs. Vanderbilt,” he said. Our Mecca was in sight. In another minute we passed through high iron gates, past great trees – even the grass was a rich man’s grass. No house was grander than ours I thought, as we curled in through the iron gates under the massive trees. After glancing at the immense marble hall, I was in the lift and then along a red carpeted corridor and then in my room. It appeared to have been designed for an Edwardian lady of fashion. It was panelled in faded chintz. There was her upright piano, her chaise-longue with its frilled and faded pink cushions. On the walls hung the pretty pictures which one sees nowadays only in the darkest corner of a second-hand dealer’s shop where they are piled on dusty shelves asking a shilling a lot for them and glad to get rid of them. I went out into the upper stone terrace and looked over the perfection of green lawns, the fountains and two little groves of trees which framed the seascape beyond. There was the sea – a magnificent blue carpet spread in front of the house, the breakers broke obediently at the foot of the cliff as if performing for the special benefit of the Vanderbilts and their guests. It was all very gratifying.