by Bryher;
“So you have been in Greece?” The gloved woman turned to me, “Is it really true that an asphodel is an anemone?”
“Oh, no! It is a tall plant, bushy and grows on hills. You can recognize it easily from the columns.”
“But the Parthenon surely was a disappointment?”
“I have never seen anything so beautiful.”
“Curious! One hears such conflicting accounts. I was reading such an interesting article the other day, by that new Frenchman, you know, in that new magazine. He, too, seemed to think it was actually quite lovely.” She stared vaguely across the street towards the opposite houses and said to one of the boys who had just arrived, “Tell me, darling, is it a particularly warm night? Hang my wrap for me over this chair.”
That settles it, I thought, I do not like a woman who calls a stranger “darling.” I could not leave, the tables had spread to the very edge of the curb, there was a figure in black and white stripes crossing the dusty street between a design of elbows, wine glasses and discursive heads, she only needed a camera to duplicate a famous advertisement and somewhere a girl’s voice rose plaintively, “Not dinner surely? We never went to bed.”
“It’s eight o’clock.” The leader of the group stood up and stretched himself. He looked exactly like a woolly sheep on the Zoo’s scenic mountain. Taxis stopped more frequently, people began to drift away, the sky had turned the rose of a withered flower on some woman’s shoulder. “Come on! Let’s move!” Everybody but Tzara obediently got up. I was wriggling away when McAlmon caught my arm. “No, this evening you are going to come with us, it’s time you went the rounds.”
I think we started at the famous Jockey but where we went afterwards I do not know. Figures moved through the smoke in the corduroys that they were wearing that year, in fisherman’s jerseys or incongruous taffeta. The lights and the drinks were the same colors, the door opened continually to admit more people, there were shouted, excited greetings. “It plain gets on my nerves,” a girl grumbled in plump, white brocade as she passed our table, “everything’s happened and he still says I’m a little girl.”
“What the hell, if I send them a picture and they know I’m his friend, they’ll only slap it back at me,” the young painter next us drew angry, puzzled lines all over the tablecloth. “You can say what you like, the Dadaists know where they are going.”
“Which is more than you do.”
“Will anybody lend me fifty francs?” The Norwegian boy stared round hopefully but none of us answered him.
A girl looking like a stiff golden peony in her taffeta bent over the table and patted my arm. “Too bad you won’t drink,” she murmured.
“I don’t want my perceptions blurred,” I protested.
“That’s where you’re wrong, baby,” a stranger shouted, “it would clear them.”
“Will anybody lend me fifty francs?” The scarves, blond hair and elongated necks differed from the wallpaper only by being perpetually in motion.
“With your figure, I shouldn’t think there would be any difficulty about the economic situation.”
Men were strange, I reflected, neither the girl nor her body seemed particularly attractive.
“Will anybody lend me twenty francs?” Oslo was getting desperate.
The door opened slowly again, the newcomers were lingering on the pavement. “It’s Milly!” Almost everyone got up. A matron stepped majestically into the room in a rather shabby black dress. Only the lemon-colored hair distinguished her from any housewife shopping at the market. People began to talk again but respectfully, in lower tones. “It’s Milly!” As if they could not believe their luck, the young men in white pullovers persuaded Milly to take an empty seat at their table. She was a mother come to bring her blessing to some sinister, backyard game. “‘Allo, boys!” she had hardly any accent, “I can’t stay, really I can’t, I see the Île is in.” That meant checks had arrived.
The boys started to yell. They were going to make history, they were not going home as long as they could stand or till they had been locked up. Everything they uttered was a picturesque exaggeration because Milly was their license to break all bounds. She had nothing, she explained, but nothing, not even a franc. She turned her worn but expensive handbag upside down but she could get her children (as they muttered when she was not there) whatever it was they wanted. Her boys must not give her a sou, no, not even a drink, well, perhaps just one double brandy, but she couldn’t stop, a party was waiting for her, “their first night in Paris,” the words came out like a brutal caress. She looked slowly round the room and I felt her small, rather pig-like eyes staring at me for a moment, then she said something to one of my companions but he shook his head. No, really not another cognac, she meant it, her other boys were waiting outside and with three quarters of the males following behind her, she left as magnificently as she had arrived.
“She thought you might be lonely,” McAlmon said.
“Dear me,” the words slipped out of my mouth, “I had no idea these night places were so sentimental.”
“Ah,” the girl in the peony dress looked at me sharply again, “you do not give yourself easily.”
The mood had broken, more and more followed Milly, a girl’s head, dark and beautiful, rolled across the painter’s shoulder, the strap of her dress had slipped and another boy laughed. “She’s had more than she can carry,” he said.
“What the hell! We all like her, let her alone,”
At that moment, she was the embodiment of the Quarter’s code. Be drunk, be reckless, stick together with the bunch. Beyond the figures, almost a medallion, the green face of the proprietor watched the scene with dispassionate calm. The more his clients drank, the louder they shouted, the less they would count their change. It was a good evening as far as he was concerned.
“It’s the war,” an older man remarked, he was one of the few who were sober. “They have to forget.”
“They are exploiting tragedy,” I answered hotly, “and it’s horrible,” but he shrugged his shoulders and did not reply.
“Let’s go!” The few men were wondering what they were missing by not being at Milly’s party.
“No, not Montmartre, I won’t go there, they robbed me of fifty francs.”
“Time to move.” There was a general paying of bills and I heard as a couple passed me, “He stole a gingerbread lion at a fair.”
In twos and threes we moved toward the door. I glanced back at the overturned glasses, at the girl propped up against the wall as if she were a sack and at rapacious fingers slipping notes into apron pockets. We have not struggled all the years for this, I thought, and in a spasm of quite violent revulsion I was sick on the pavement.
The wretches that I had condemned so harshly rushed to me. I must come back and have some brandy on the house, I was not to worry, the doorman assured me, it happened to everyone and I realized that they thought that it was the first time that I had got drunk. I dared not confess that I had had only a glass of mineral water, at such a moment it was far less humiliating to be thought drunk than shocked.
I soon got tough but I rarely went out with McAlmon at night because I found the places that he visited intolerably dull. I remember only one other occasion. It was at some bar and as I looked round the faces seemed to change into masks, most of them staring at me with hatred. The owner of the place came up to me. He had noticed that I did not drink but I had come surely to amuse myself? He had a friend, that young man standing in the corner, should he introduce me? I shook my head. Ah, I preferred a girl? No! Then, he lowered his voice and whispered the words, perhaps I would prefer some hashish. I refused again and he turned and said something to McAlmon. “He thinks you must be very vicious,” Bob whispered, a few minutes later, with glee.
The offer of these things did not perturb me. I knew that they were commonplace in that particular boîte. Besides, the fellow was right, I had my vices. I longed for danger, to sail around the Horn and to explore the inmost recesses of the h
uman mind. Nobody needed to consider me virtuous. If I had been able to draw, this was the environment that I should have chosen, with the greed, the cruelty and the piteousness of people swaying underneath my eyes.
My Paris episode ended in London but it was the same Montparnasse group that was present. They still continued to rail at houses, to praise the freedom of the bars (yet they all wanted shelter) and to drink. “There’s nobody in this town, it gets on my nerves, hell, how can you stand it?” somebody said reproachfully, the whiskey went round again and the make-up ran in smudges down the women’s faces. Suddenly I realized to my horror that it was a vicarage garden party in reverse. These rebels were no more free from the conventions that they had fastened upon themselves than a group of old ladies gossiping over their knitting. I had to get clear of it at once. Just then I heard a sleepy murmur as one guest after the other collapsed full length upon the carpet. “Bryher means to be kind but don’t let her sit next me. She is a bore...a bore...a bore...” It was like the buzzing of many flies. I looked smugly at the scene, loosened some collars, placed aspirin and glasses of water at strategic points and then withdrew, leaving them to their headaches and nightmares.
Somebody should have smacked me.
SIXTEEN
He thought that I was Harré. The Harré from They Went who had grown up and wanted to get in touch with him again. In those days I was near enough that imp by temperament for the mistake to be a natural one. It was the autumn of 1923 and H. D., her mother, and. myself were visiting Florence. I had admired South Wind but They Went might have been written for me. I loved it, laughed at it, and immediately wrote to Norman Douglas.
What did I say? I know that there was some joke (but why?) about riding up to meet him on an elephant wreathed with marigolds. Yes, it must have been quite a Harré-like note. Douglas suggested that we meet at a café and I was tempted to keep the appointment but it did not seem quite fair. I wrote most sorrowfully to disillusion him, saying that I was condemned to petticoats instead of deerskin breeches but that if he could bear the disappointment, we expected him to lunch.
He came. Cautiously. Saying that he had an early appointment but he stayed quite late and enchanted us all. Was he not the last of the English milords whose coaches had spread a legend across Europe? He was then fifty and at the height still of his powers.
It was time that I was cuffed into shape and I think that only Douglas, of all the people that I have known, could have done it. He brought me up, like a puppy, by hand. His conversation was free, he was both erudite and adventurous, he encouraged me to have a will of my own but as far as external circumstances went, unlike “the bunch” he was stricter with me than my own strict family.
“Did I hear that you walked down the Via Tornabuoni alone at six o’clock yesterday?” he asked me at one of the first of our meetings.
“Why, yes, Miss James asked me out to tea.” She was an elderly lady who was staying at our hotel, “Did you think I might get lost? I know the way now perfectly.”
“Never do it again.” Douglas looked at me severely as if I had broken his favorite snuffbox. “No lady goes out alone in Florence after four o’clock. What were you doing in a tearoom anyhow? Poisonous places, full of envy and gossip. And very bad for the liver. If you ever go again, take a cab and remember it must be a closed one, otherwise I shall have to leave whatever I am doing and escort you back myself.”
If anybody else had suggested that I needed to be guarded I should have slapped them but, as with Gertrude Stein, there was no arguing with Douglas; you obeyed him reasonably or he did not see you again. He discussed the cost of girls on equal terms, “Prices have gone up,” he said, shaking his head, “in 1905 it was a hundred lire. Ah well, I’ve had eleven hundred virgins in my time but that’s all over. Very happy they were too. I gave the lire to the father, a turquoise bracelet to the girl and most of them made excellent marriages. Remember, the secret is, never deal with the girl directly but always with her family. But a virgin isn’t much use to you,” he glanced at my skirt, “never mind, you’ll get over it, have a pinch of snuff.” At that point I usually retired amid a gale of sneezes into my handkerchief. It was cool, impersonal and essentially Roman.
We met for lunch almost every day and then wandered about Florence. It must not be forgotten that I had spent the most impressionable moments of my childhood in the South. Our walks, I see now, were a form of primitive analysis because I was reliving scenes that had puzzled me. Douglas taught and explained, he never once said, “You are too young to understand.” Instead he gave me Isabelle Eberhardt to read and English translations of Athenaeus and Theophrastus. The pale blue sky brought out the red of the tiles more than the summer sun because it was easier to look at them, an olive grower or an old woman rushed out of an alley with shouts of welcome and begged the signore to sit down over a glass of wine to help them with some problem, I tasted my first wild boar and the cheese that was only sold in the markets during a special week in autumn, and among these throngs Douglas took my education sternly in hand. “Remember, if you are abroad you must know everybody or nobody.” It was an invaluable rule when I started to work.
There were always unexpected meetings, however. To my astonishment Douglas once shouted out a greeting in Welsh to an elderly priest. It appeared that the man had belonged to some missionary order and had spent his life in a mining town in Wales. We lunched sometimes next to a retired diplomat who sat in his corner looking lonely and bored until after a few jokes he was chatting to Douglas in French as if they were two young men en poste. And then there were the “crocodiles” as we called the dark-haired, mischievous urchins with Renaissance names who ran errands and ate, as reward, plates of pasta like miniature mountains.
Douglas was always strict with me but he was a born teacher. One day he asked me to read him a letter as he had left his glasses in an overcoat pocket. I got tied up with a word. “What’s that? No! It can’t be shirt in that context,” he snatched the paper away and looked at me reprovingly. “Don’t you know what the word means?” I shook my head woefully, feeling ashamed because I prided myself on knowing English. He then explained some Anglo-Saxon monosyllables accurately and precisely as if I were learning cuneiform and added, “Every lady must thoroughly understand what they mean but no lady ever uses them.”
There was more insistence upon being a lady than I liked but at least I had the sense to know that I was being properly trained.
He was immensely kind. He discovered that I liked marrow bones so once a week after his early morning cup of tea and before he settled to his own work, he went over to the market, prowled along the stalls until he found the bone that he wanted, bargained for it and then took it to the restaurant where we were to meet some four hours later. “Have nothing in front of it, my dear, eat it alone, that is the way to get the flavor,” he would say with a smile, watching me anxiously all the same, to see that I ate it seriously and with due appreciation. Afterwards he would tell me stories, mostly about his own youth. Wonderful as his books are, the prose is sober, it lacks the glorious exuberance of his conversations. I never ate many marrow bones afterwards; let them be a memory of the days that will never come again and of his tales.
We may have foreknowledge of the curves that govern each generation but we do not know what will affect our particular destiny. The day that Douglas invited us to watch the fascist parade to commemorate the march on Rome did not seem of particular importance to me. Actually it was to have far-reaching effects.
Douglas was living temporarily at the top of the Hotel Nardini at the time, waiting until an apartment should be empty. It was a warm, sunny November afternoon and we stood on the balcony, together with other of his friends, looking down at the crowded square. Florence is essentially medieval and the masses were cheering just as their ancestors had acclaimed first one duke and then another, whoever happened to be victorious, without a thought of the deeper issues involved. I was not interested in Italian politics, it was no
t long since we had emerged from five years of war and if I had a thought in my head at that moment it was gratitude that I had not been trapped unsuspectingly among the people on the pavement. The yells increased, a band marched into view, then rank upon rank of Blackshirts followed it across the Piazza, raising their hands at one point in a salute.
An Englishman was standing next to me. He was writing an economic report about Italy for the London Times but unhappily I cannot remember his name. He looked down gravely at the cheering populace and seemed to be counting each black shirt. Then he turned to me and said, almost with a pause between each word, “Watch what is happening. This is the beginning of the next war. If these fellows keep control, Europe will be struggling within fifteen years, not for victory but for her very existence.”
It was 1923. The war came in 1939. He was one year out. (It is often easy to forecast events, what is difficult is to predict the time.) The words shook my historical instinct out of its hibernation and I asked him why he was so pessimistic? He based his forecast upon the risks inherent in a nation’s consumption of productive capital. “After initiative has been destroyed and there is no scapegoat left to plunder, what can the fascists do if they want to keep power but go to war?”
I never met the man again but I think of him now as a messenger from Olympus, The first effect of his warning was to call me back to contemporary history and this was followed during the thirties by a growing awareness of danger so that I was able to take certain steps that may have helped to save a few lives. If this stranger, however, had not spoken to me clearly, I might have drifted with the main stream until it was too late for useful action.
Douglas did not like the fascists either, less because of the future, “Politics are no concern of scholars, my dear,” than because they had dismissed a friend of his, an elderly doctor who had spent twenty years fighting the malaria that, as Douglas said and he was most emphatic about the matter, had caused the decay of ancient Greece. This doctor had refused to join the Party, saying that he had more important things to do than to attend meetings. He was replaced by a newly qualified young man who had been a Blackshirt from the beginning and was immediately decorated for his predecessor’s work. The old doctor must have thought, we decided, that mosquitoes were gentler than man.
