The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  “The sort of ship that will take on a man with neither suitcase nor identity papers is fairly primitive, but I found one, the Bella Acqua, and signed on to work my way across the globe. No drugs, no parties, no paints, nothing but hard work, bad food, sea air, and a drawing pad for entertainment.

  “I grew brown, I grew muscle, and at night—you can't imagine the dreams I'd had, before, but under that regimen, I'd fall into my bunk and sleep like a baby. Do you know what a blessing sleep can be?”

  “Yes,” Holmes said.

  Damian's question had been rhetorical, but at Holmes' answer he paused to squint at him through the smoke, then gave a thoughtful nod. “So, six months: across the Atlantic, working our way down the coast of Brazil, taking on rum and coir in one place, trading the rum for timber in another, buying hides farther down, transporting the odd passenger who might have needed to leave a town quickly and without notice—whatever took the Captain's fancy. We rounded the Horn and worked our way up Chile to Mexico and San Diego, then set off across the Pacific. The Hawaiis, Japan.

  “Finally, we came to Shanghai. Have you been there?”

  “Once, briefly.”

  “A seething mass of corruption and vice—I think you'd enjoy the straight-forward criminality of the place. I found it filled with temptation, which you'd have thought a poor choice for a man in my position, but I was hungry to join the world again.

  “With nothing to spend my pay on, I'd accumulated enough to take a small room in a … well, I thought at first it was simply one of the compounds they have in the city—Wong houses, they're called, with a number of units set into a series of courtyards, and a single entrance from the street. Within a day or two I couldn't help noticing that there were rather a lot of young girls living there who had a series of older male visitors. The whole Wong was one pleasure-house compound. I eventually found out that my landlord had three such, and made a habit of installing one or two large young men in each to help keep the peace. He may have expected that I should eventually become a client myself, but in fact his girls were little more than children, and my taste has never run in that direction. I became a sort of brother to them, and they could practice their English and come to me with problems. I took a job in the afternoons, washing dishes in a noodle shop. It paid a pittance—I still had no identity papers, so my choice was limited—but it gave me two meals a day and mornings free.

  “The mornings I needed for the light, because I'd started to paint again. Er, I think you knew, that…?”

  For the first time, the young man's self-assurance faltered, with the question of what his father had or had not known. Holmes rose and walked into the house; Damian gave me a sharp look that called to mind his father's hawk-like arrogance, but I could only shrug.

  Holmes came back carrying a flat object a foot wide and eighteen inches tall. He set it on the stones, propping it upright against an unoccupied chair.

  “That's his?” I exclaimed. “That's yours?”

  The unsigned painting had hung for years on a wall of Holmes' laboratory upstairs, a puzzle to me, although I'd caught him studying it from time to time. Holmes owned little art, and had showed no interest, before or since, in a thing as jarringly modern—weird, even—as this one.

  Damian picked it up to examine it by candle-light; his expression softened, although I could not tell what he thought of the painting, or of finding it here. “Yes, this is one of mine. From before the War.”

  “I was told 1913,” Holmes agreed.

  “I would have been nineteen. Imagine, being nineteen. It's not bad, considering. How do you come to have it?”

  “It came on the market in March 1920.”

  Damian turned his hawk-gaze on Holmes. “It was one of Hélène's?”

  “Yes.”

  Damian put the painting down again, and we all three studied it.

  The canvas showed a bizarre dream-image of the sort that came to be called Surrealism. In technique it was masterful, closely worked and as detailed as a photograph. Its background was an English landscape: neat fields set inside hedgerows, a lane with a bicycle, a cow in the distance. On the horizon, white lines described the chalk cliffs where the South Downs fell into the Channel—not far from where we sat. In the foreground was a table, the weave of its spotless white cloth clearly shown, and on the cloth rested an object from a madman's nightmare: Its front half was an everyday English tea-pot, blue and white porcelain, but the back of it became a huge, distorted honeybee, every hair painted with precision, its wings set to quiver, its stinger exaggerated into a tea-pot's handle, throbbing with menace.

  I'd thought it an oddity, but now it was a revelation: At nineteen, a year after his mother's death, Damian had definitely known who his father was. He had known of Holmes' beekeeping avocation in his so-called retirement. He had painted this as a portrait of the famous man who had, to his mind, coldly abandoned mother and child. He had painted it with the consummate skill of a man, impelled by the fury of a scorned adolescent.

  The Father (1): The boy knew no earthly father. He was

  raised by the feminine, moon-lit side of his race. All men

  were his father, all women his mother.

  Testimony, I:3

  SO,” SAID HOLMES. “SHANGHAI.”

  “Yes.” Damian took a breath, either summoning his thoughts, or rousing his determination. “As I said, you might think the city was the very worst place for a man vulnerable to temptation, but after my long sobriety aboard the Bella Acqua, it was as if my body came to value its natural state, and my mind found the tight-rope act of daily life in Shanghai exhilarating. It was a challenge simply to walk down the street for a newspaper, passing two gin-joints, an opium den, and the Sikh who sold bhang from a tray.

  “And there was another reason Shanghai felt right. Do you know André Breton?”

  “I have heard of him,” Holmes replied. “The self-appointed spokesman for the movement known as Surrealism.”

  “Now, yes. During the War, André worked at the hospital in Nantes, where he came to adapt certain psychological theories of Sigmund Freud to treat victims of shell-shock. That was where I met him, after I… after I was injured.

  “André's idea was that if one could break through the madness of shell-shock and regain access to the unconscious mind, the conscious and the unconscious might, as it were, join forces, and wholeness would be regained. He used what he calls automatism, a pure up-welling of dream-thought and dream-images, without the guidance of rational or even aesthetic concern, in various forms of art: writing, painting, sculpting, drama.

  “Before long, it became clear that automatism was not merely a source of healing damaged minds, but a philosophy of life, a means of bringing together the separate realities of the human experience. Anyone who has spent time on the Front knows that, when one lifts his head from a barrage and finds dead people all around, there is a moment when life is immeasurably sweet and intensely real. In a similar way, the shock of the unexpected in a piece of art can forge a momentary link between light and dark, rationality and madness, matter-of-factness and absurdity, beauty and obscenity.

  “As you see in that painting, I'd already been feeling my way in that direction before the War—the Dada movement, although Dadaism was intellectual and political compared to what André had in mind.

  “Shanghai—and particularly, being a foreigner in Shanghai—might have been purposefully designed by André to illustrate and encourage the ‘surrealist’ impulse. Every moment there possesses an air of peculiarity, every corner brings a new gem of crystal-clear absurdity. My landlord, it turned out, was a policeman with a side business of child prostitutes. One of his girls used to sit in the courtyard playing the guitar and telling me of her dream to become a Catholic nun, once she had finished putting her older brother through university. The head of the missionary school where I taught for a while spent his every lunch-hour with an opium pipe. One discovered purity in the gutters and filth in the glittering shop-windows,
every hour of every day.

  “I found Shanghai to be the very essence of Surrealist doctrine: If the world is mad, then the maddest man is the most sane.

  “So: I became sane by embracing madness. I became intoxicated by sobriety. I moved from one job to another, earning just enough to keep me fed, sheltered, and in paint. I walked and walked, I learned the language, I opened my eyes in wonder. And the images simply poured out of me.

  “What I painted were intensely realistic renderings of impossibility. As one of the catalogues put it, I was their ‘Max Ernst of the East.’

  “Yes, within two years, I was in a catalogue. Let me tell you how that came about.”

  Holmes stirred in his chair, betraying a trace of tension. I saw the non-committal look on his face, and realised, as surely as if he had murmured it into my ear, that Damian wasn't here by accident. I don't know why it took so long to put it together—Damian's almost dutiful embrace; the lengthy formal narrative in place of conversation; even his presence the moment we arrived—but I finally saw that Damian had come here to Sussex, not to establish contact with his family, but because he wanted something.

  Whatever he was after, Holmes' slight motion confirmed that we were circling in towards it now.

  “I'd been there less than a year, painting furiously all the while, when a friend gathered up half a dozen paintings and took them into the International Settlement. She'd asked around, you know, to find which of the Western art galleries might be interested in my sort of thing. When she came back, she brought more money than I'd seen in years.

  “Before I knew it, I was popular. More than popular, I was a Sensation, the darling of Shanghai's international set, proof that one did not need to live in Paris or Berlin to be avante-garde. At the drop of a hat, I had money, I had a house, a studio, servants—and I had problems.

  “I'd managed to balance myself against the temptations of the city while I was poor. But success proved a greater madness than I could manage. One night I was at a party and dope was going around, and I reached for it, the first time in three years.

  “And again, Yolanda saved me. She physically slapped the stuff out of my hand and dragged me away from the party.

  “However, I haven't told you about Yolanda. She's the reason … No, I should start at the beginning, so it all ties together.” He took a deep draught from his glass and crushed out the half-smoked cigarette, then fiddled with the case; in another minute, his fingertips would begin to pluck at his buttons.

  “I'd met Yolanda my first week in Shanghai. She worked in a bar down the street from my Wong, but I met her in the courtyard outside of my room. She was visiting one of my neighbours—one of my landlord's girls, who was ill. Yolanda is Chinese, and although she worked in a bar and hadn't much education, she spoke good English because her family was Christian and sent her to the missionary school until she was eleven.

  “Then her father died, and when she was sixteen, she found herself out on the streets. She went through a period of what she called ‘hating herself.’ She drank, did any kind of dope offered her, and—well, suffice to say she lived a pretty wild life.” He did not look at Holmes, who sat with his fingers steepled to his lips. Damian played with the catch of his enamelled case and pressed on.

  “The self-hate period lasted for a year, until one day she woke up a little more sober than usual, and she knew that one morning she would not wake up at all, unless someone dragged her out of it. She didn't think she had the will to rescue herself, so she went to the missionaries, and told them they had to save her.”

  He must have caught something of my reaction, because he gave me a crooked smile. “You like the image? Little painted bar-girl standing at the door to the local Christian do-gooders, throwing herself at them as you would a glove in a challenge.

  “And give them credit, they tried their best. She stayed with them for three months until their rules became too much for her—but then, instead of giving up, she walked down the road to the Buddhist temple. She lasted a month there. And then it was a Shinto shrine, followed by some stray Hindus, then American Spiritualists. One after another, she worked her way through half the religions of the world, only at some point, it became more a hobby than a necessity. She went back to her bar, but only to serve drinks, and during her free hours she continued to sample the rich buffet of temples and churches and meeting places Shanghai has to offer.

  “Until one day she encountered an odd French-American-English painter in the run-down house where one of her childhood friends was dying of syphilis. He saw a tiny little thing dressed in a tartan skirt, a Chinese silk blouse, a moulting rabbit-fur jacket, and a French beret, with cropped hair and painted eyes. She saw a tall, thin foreigner reeking of turpentine and blinking as if he'd just come from a cave.

  “‘You need to eat,’ she said. ‘Take me to lunch.’

  “What could I do? I took her to lunch, took her for a walk along the riverfront, and before I knew it, she was in my life. It was Yolanda who loaded up a rickshaw with my paintings and took them to the gallery. And Yolanda who haggled over the prices of the next batch. Yolanda who suggested that I become known, professionally, as ‘The Addler’—a sort of trademark. And as I said, Yolanda who kept me on something resembling the straight and narrow.

  “In the end, it was Yolanda who suggested it was time to move closer to the centre of the art world, she who besieged the British Embassy until they told her how I might register as a citizen whose papers had been lost. I did not want to leave Shanghai, not really, but it was hard on her—there are many places where the Chinese are not welcome. I thought of Paris, which is as colour-blind as one can hope for, but she was afraid the pull of the old life would prove too strong for me. Plus, she had no wish to learn another language. In the end, we agreed on London, with my mother's adopted nationality to build on.

  “Your brother helped me, as I understand he had helped Mother when I was born. And, as I later found that she had, I asked him not to inform you until I could do so myself.”

  He laid the cigarette case down and looked straight at Holmes, for the first time in several minutes. “Once we decided to leave Shanghai, I married Yolanda. Neither of us believes in the concept, but I doubt the government would have permitted her to come otherwise.” He waited for a reaction from Holmes, disapproval perhaps, but when no response came, he continued; there were clearly more revelations to come.

  “As it happened, we arrived in London less than a week after you'd left for India—we probably passed you somewhere off the coast of France. It didn't take long before we were wishing we'd stayed in Shanghai—winter is a terrible time to come here from the tropics, everything is bitter cold and grey and lifeless. Yolanda had never had chilblains before, and the cost of coal to heat the rooms was more than the rent itself. I hired a studio and rediscovered the challenge of painting with shivering hands. Every day we thought of leaving, but we didn't, quite.

  “Then April came, and the sun appeared. Everything was brilliant, seductive, cheering—the poets are right, to make much of this country in the spring. Yolanda began to look for more permanent housing, and I sent my first London paintings to a gallery she'd located off Regent Street.

  “As spring wore on, that was our life: We scraped together enough to buy a little house with a garden in Chelsea, two streets away from my studio. Yolanda began to explore the nearby parks and religious centres, and made some friends. And one day I was in town and I heard my name called—a fellow I'd met in Shanghai. An artist. He was surprised to see me, of course, but took me for a drink and introduced me to his friends, and life began to settle into a pleasant pace. …”

  “Until?” Holmes prompted.

  “Until the latter half of June.” Damian ran fingers through his long hair, revealing a glimpse of the scars, and went through the business of lighting another cigarette. He pinched out the match. “You have to understand: I promised Yolanda before we married that I would support her in all ways. That I would never f
orce myself or my opinions on her. That I would always recognise her complete right to make her own choices. Yolanda and I have a marriage of freedom. We love each other, and are honest with each other, but we have our own lives and our own interests. I may do things for her churches from time to time, and she may come to dinner with my artist friends, but neither of us expects the other to pretend to interests that aren't compatible.” He looked from Holmes' face to mine, searching for sympathy, I expect. “Ours is a modern marriage,” he insisted.

  “Very well,” Holmes said. “What happened in the latter half of June? And, the date?”

  “The date? I don't know, it was a weekend—a Sunday. I'd been to the park and came home to find Yolanda … troubled. She was in the sitting room with the curtains drawn and the windows shut, although it was stifling. When I turned up the lights, she cried out as if she'd seen a snake in the room. She wouldn't tell me what was wrong, but the maid said she'd started the morning completely normally, then after breakfast suddenly retreated into the room, and stayed there all day.

  “I coaxed her to eat and put her to bed. The next morning she seemed better. She laughed when I asked her what had happened, and said something odd about being unaccustomed to happiness.

  “She wouldn't let me stay home, insisted she was fine, tried to pretend she was herself again. But she wasn't. I could see that something was eating at her, but I thought perhaps it was simply as she had said, that when one has spent one's life tensed against life's next blow, security and comfort can themselves seem untrustworthy. I vowed to myself that I would sustain her comfort, until she became convinced that it was real, and permanent.

  “Since then, I've done my best to convince her of her worth. I took her to Brighton for a few days, to amuse her, bought her books, even went to her favourite church with her. And I thought I was succeeding. Her friends started to drop by again, she's been out a few times—generally with a mundane purpose, to shop or visit the lending library, but the haunted look seemed to leave her, and she spent less time behind closed curtains.