by MARY HOCKING
Frangcon came across to the bed and took the cup from her.
‘Where did Raoul go, do you know?’
‘Go?’ Rose looked at her vaguely. ‘I don’t know where he went.’
There seemed to be no point in asking her anything else at the moment, she was obviously in no state to give a clear account of what had happened to her. Frangcon said:
‘Lie down quietly. I’ll stay with you.’
She wondered what she ought to do. She did not know where James was and she did not like to leave Rose to go in search of him. She felt angry with herself for her inability to think clearly. Rose lay quiet for a time; then suddenly she sat up on the bed and said with decision:
‘I want to wash.’
‘Rose, why not just take things quietly?’
‘I have to wash.’
She was in the kitchen showering for a long time and she would not let Frangcon go to her. When she returned she was naked; but instead of looking, as she so often did at such times, like a small girl about to slip into bed, she had an unpleasantly bizarre appearance, her hair sprayed with a glittering gold dust, the eyes, staring in the pale face, rimmed with black mascara. She went across to the wardrobe and pulled out a pale gold dress; she stepped into it and searched for sandals which would be kind to her bruised feet.
‘What are you doing, Rose?’ Frangcon asked uneasily.
‘I’m going out.’
‘At this hour?’
‘Night life starts late in Barcelona.’
‘But you can’t go out. Rose. You’re not well. Another night . . .’
‘But my date is for tonight. I had quite forgotten about it.’
She went across to the mirror and stood looking at herself, twitching at her hair which looked hard and metallic now. Frangcon watched unhappily, feeling that there was something she should do, not sure what it was. She could only say, with a rather childish possessiveness:
‘I don’t want you to go. Not like that. Rose; not looking like that.’
Rose flicked her tongue across her lips. She ran her hands exploringly down her slim thighs, turned her shoulders so that the sparkling dress tightened across her small breasts; her eyes were anxious. Frangcon felt the kind of pity she had experienced sometimes for the more puny and inadequate of the harlots standing around in the cold, smoky evenings in Piccadilly. She reached out her hand.
‘Rose!’ she entreated softly. ‘Let him wait, whoever he is. He doesn’t matter.’
Rose turned her head away; when she moved some of the gold dust scattered on to the dressing table. Frangcon looked at it, thinking irrelevantly that it would make a mess on the pillow. Behind her, the door shut. Rose had gone.
Frangcon went to the window and watched Rose walk across the dim courtyard, her bruised feet hampering her movements so that the old, swinging grace was gone and she went forward reluctantly, like a weary, middle-aged woman. Tears came to Frangcon’s eyes; Rose’s figure blurred and receded. Frangcon felt that she should run after her, that it was desperately urgent to stop her. But what could she say? They had never interfered with each other about this kind of thing. She turned away and began to unpack Rose’s case.
Chapter Fourteen
James did not manage to pick up any useful information in his wanderings. He decided to rejoin Rose and Frangcon. He went back to his hotel first, however, because he wanted to fetch the clippings that Milo had given him. It would not do to leave them lying about if one wanted to plead innocence. When he went into his room he found Raoul lying on the bed, a torn white sandal dangling from one hand.
‘The girl who showed me up here seemed half-witted. So I suppose I can rely on her not to give the alarm?’
‘The question, surely, is whether you can rely on me?’
Raoul was not dismayed.
‘We’ll talk about that. You don’t mind if I talk lying down? I feel rather faint. Also, I am quite hidden from the window. Perhaps you would sit down, too? Then your shadow won’t jerk about as though you were talking to someone.’
‘I shan’t be doing much talking. But I’ll sit down and take a rest while you talk.’
‘Don’t sound so angry in that controlled, Scots way. I shouldn’t have come to you if I could have avoided it. I knew I should have to argue things out with you before you would give me what I needed. And that’s going to be difficult because I’m so tired.’
‘Then save yourself the trouble.’ James was relieved that things had worked out this way; he had been afraid of something much more difficult in which Frangcon would be involved. He said: ‘You can have the bed while I take a shower; so long as you’re gone when I come back I won’t make trouble for you.’
Raoul turned on his side and looked at James, his mouth dragged down in a bitter smile.
‘It’s not really as simple as that, is it?’
His face was very drawn. James could see the ribs straining beneath the thin shirt, could imagine the agonizing pain at each gasp for breath. Yet Raoul insisted on talking.
‘You won’t give me what I need simply because your emotions are stirred, and I should despise you if you did. You will only give help if it can be proved to you that it would be right to do so. Are you surprised that I know these things about you?’
‘ “Surprised” isn’t quite the word I would use.’
‘No matter. Our choice of words may differ, but at least we speak the same language. It will be good to talk to someone with a fairly adequate mental equipment. When you first came—do you remember?—we walked about in the square down there and I thought then that one day this would happen.’
He sounded eager, rather gauche, more like a student than a hardened adventurer. James turned his head away. Somewhere in the room a mosquito buzzed; he half-rose to let it out, remembered that it would be better not to go to the window and sat down again. Raoul had stopped talking and was lying with his eyes closed, his hands clenched at his sides; the whole line of his body was rigid. James realized that, as in the mountains when he had clashed with Milo, he was drawing on a store of energy that he could ill afford to squander. James was moved by an unwilling pity for him.
‘Don’t waste your time arguing,’ he said gently.
But pity was not what Raoul wanted.
‘I must talk,’ he insisted. ‘I want you to get things straight in your mind.’
He turned his head again and his eyes held James’s; the eyes were those of a sick man demanding not so much a reprieve from the doctor as absolution from a priest. Instinctive wariness damped down the little flicker of James’s sympathy.
‘I already have things straight in my mind.’
‘How much do you know about me?’
‘I know why you are wanted in France.’
‘Oh, that! I didn’t do it, you know. I wasn’t even in Oran at the time.’
There was a pause while the mosquito buzzed and Raoul waited, moistening his lips, his breathing quick and shallow. Eventually, James said:
‘I don’t know the details of your campaign; but I gather that it was pretty ruthless. Among other things, you sacked a village . . .’
‘Oh yes . . . that place. I never can recall its name. We won’t talk about it, if you don’t mind. It’s not important and it tends to confuse the issue. People become so emotional and it has a quite destructive effect on their reasoning powers . . .’
He seemed momentarily to have lost his concentration; his voice babbled on meaninglessly and his eyes had become unfocused.
‘All right,’ James said. ‘We won’t talk about that.’
Raoul lay back on the pillow, closing his eyes. Below the street door slammed and steps thudded on the stairs outside James’s room. James, who did not wish to be engulfed in Raoul’s problems, concentrated on the discomforts of the room; it was so noisy that he wondered whether he might not have been better off in his original room, even without a proper window; and then there was the plumbing . . . Raoul was saying:
‘People talk suc
h nonsense. Frangcon—she made a quite inappropriate comparison with the Nazis.’
‘You don’t approve of the Nazis?’
‘Approve of them! They brought back barbarism.’
‘And you?’
‘I want to hold it at bay. Don’t you?’
‘Most certainly.’
‘We are agreed on that, at any rate.’ Raoul was silent for a few moments drawing strength for the next phase of the struggle. ‘This is going to be difficult for you,’ he said eventually. He sounded like a teacher about to expound one of the more complicated equations. ‘You haven’t had to fight, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you a pacifist?’
‘No.’
Raoul levered himself up on one elbow and looked eagerly at James.
‘Why not?’
‘It doesn’t seem a practicable proposition to me. I know I would have fought the Nazis. The pacifist attitude is fashionable now; but faced with the same kind of thing again, I doubt whether I would see any alternative to resistance.’
Raoul, who had been nodding his head as though delighted at the progress of a pupil in whom he had high hopes, interrupted:
‘But there is an alternative. One much in favour at present. You can retreat; slowly, imperceptibly, you can allow the tide of ignorance and barbarism to force you back until it is too late to make a stand. You can renounce all that your country stands for. Does that smack of “patriotism”? That word so very suspect nowadays, particularly in your country where it is considered so important to be anti-everything. But we do stand for something, countries like England and Italy and France; we are the aristocrats of civilization. France particularly. It has been said that she has been “the mint of ideas”. Rather a nice phrase.’ The words were coming much quicker, the mature man was transformed into an eager youth gushing out his favourite themes to the one chosen companion. As he listened, James felt himself growing older. ‘Ideas matter; people matter,—and by people I mean their individual quality, their potential, their ability to lead the world forward, not the dreary mass of uneducated creatures unwillingly routed out of their hovels to become the new rulers of the world. We are supposed to bow down to them—humility is very much in fashion; humility and equality. And in order to be equal we have to relinquish what is noble and fine, all the beauties and splendours won over long, hard centuries, and climb down into the slime with them. We have had our turn; now we must make way for the rabble. They call it progress!’
He paused for breath and looked at James, rather shyly, as though he had made a confession of love; there was a faint flush on his cheeks and the hard, bitter mouth quivered indecisively. James said crisply:
‘And you really believe all this?’
‘Can you pretend to doubt it?’ Raoul’s voice was reproachful. ‘Don’t you think that the cult of giving way to the brute force of the thugs who can stir up the mob has gone a little too far?’
‘I think that with every significant change in history the pendulum tends to swing too far in one direction,’ James allowed grudgingly. ‘But it is usually adjusted.’
‘And isn’t the adjustment made by man?’
‘He is involved in the process, certainly.’
‘This time he has left it rather late.’
The man who had gone up the stairs was in his room above now; in the pause which followed Raoul’s statement James listened to the shuddering of the pipes in the corner of the room as the water ran away, then the wash basin gave an unpleasant retching noise. The plumbing fascinated him; he wondered whether all the water in the house was channelled through the pipes in his room.
‘Some of us had to act,’ Raoul said a trifle impatiently.
‘You talked of climbing down into the slime with them.’ James turned reluctantly from his study of the pipes. ‘You don’t think that you have already done that?’
‘You mean that our methods of fighting were not dissimilar? One has to learn from the enemy. Don’t imagine I found it easy. But you can’t do things by half-measures. To coin a phrase—having put one’s hand to the plough, one cannot turn back.’
He was watching James, still with that anxious, demanding look as though waiting for something which he was sure would eventually be given him. James said nothing and Raoul began to elaborate.
‘You must not believe that I enjoyed it. No civilized man enjoys that kind of thing; I am rather squeamish and not at all adept in practical matters. I’m still not very good with a gun.’
Although he spoke lightly, it was easy to believe him. He must have been through some strange adventures, and yet he had an unreal, academic way of talking about them which made one wonder whether he had ever really come to the heart of his experiences. James suspected that he had remained a text-book adventurer. He said:
‘Was it so important to do this to yourself? Why couldn’t you have stayed at the university? You say yourself that ideas are important.’
‘But can’t you understand? That was why it was necessary. In order to maintain the flow of ideas one must maintain a climate for thought and research. What do they know about that? What do they care? You don’t know what they are like; you have never walked in their “colourful” bazaars, visited the areas in the big towns where they spawn, waded through the muck and stench of their villages. You would never be prepared to hand over to them if you had had this kind of experience. It would be utterly wrong. We are inheritors of tremendous riches, and inheritance brings responsibilities. We can’t simply stand aside, abdicate.’
‘And just what are the riches of which you are talking?’
James’s voice was becoming more Scots; he bit on the words with an angry vigour which Raoul welcomed almost gaily.
‘You can ask that? You, who come from a country which has given Keats and Shakespeare to the world, which has a respect for all that is beautiful, which believes in the preservation of the great arts! I find that quite shocking.’
‘Let me quote you some lines of a poem of Pound’s which I find shocking:
‘There died a myriad,.
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization, . . .
For two gross of broken statues
For a few thousand battered books.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Raoul nodded, a little puzzled but anxious not to seem to miss the point. ‘Yes, I see how it must have shocked you. To dismiss these things as unimportant, to . . .’
‘No!’ Raoul drew back a little in the face of this vehement denial. ‘What shocked me was that he could talk of civilization as though it was contained in dusty books and pieces of statuary.’
‘I don’t think I follow you.’
‘Civilization isn’t the hallowed memory of Greece and Rome, the worship of works of art, the preservation of antiquities. It is laws and codes of behaviour which man has evolved so that he can live with other men, respecting their human dignity.’
‘Dear me! I should have remembered that I was talking to a lawyer. I do apologize. The law, of course, is the cornerstone.’
‘It is the thing which stands between man and the lord of the flies.’
Raoul said sharply:
‘All right! Don’t thunder at me in that absurd way as though I were a barbarian. Do you think that I am a blood-drinker, like Milo? Milo fought because he enjoyed it, killed because he had a zest for it. I killed as a necessity. That is the great difference between us, that is what makes . . .’
‘Milo was not so wholesale in his killing, I believe.’
‘What?’
Raoul’s eyes had become unfocused again, his attention wandered. He said, almost casually:
‘You mean that he spared the children, I suppose? A sentimentality.’
‘I would call it a respect for life.’
‘Call it what you like. But you must understand that things were simple for Milo. He killed for himself, for pleasure; he could draw a line, say; this I
will do, this I will not do. It was all for himself. Don’t you understand yet? Milo could choose: I sacrificed my right to choose.’
‘To me, that is the equivalent of putting one’s mind in chains.’ But Raoul had ceased to listen. The energy and the hope were dwindling from him. He said, and it was the only time that James ever heard him speak gently, almost with compassion, ‘How could you understand? You have never seen the foundations crack.’
James went across to the window. Raoul no longer bothered to protest. James raised the blind and looked out. He wanted to escape from this room with the zooming mosquito, its extraordinary plumbing and still more extraordinary visitor. He was confused. What was he to do about Raoul? After a time, Raoul himself supplied an answer to this question.
‘I need money,’ he said with dry bitterness. ‘You will help me, won’t you? Otherwise the police will get me. And whatever our differences, you know whom you would choose as between myself and Milo.’
James was watching a woman calling to a child in the square; the woman moved heavily because she was pregnant and the child danced away from her, playing-up as children will.
‘Well?’ Raoul said impatiently.
James turned to him. While he was debating whether he ought to give Raoul the money, he heard himself saying:
‘I should choose Milo.’
The words had a flat, judicial finality he had not really intended. Something happened in the face that stared up at him from the bed. James had never seen it happen to a human being before. He was no longer looking at Raoul; the eyes were an open door through which darkness and whatever it is that crouches at the heart of darkness looked out. He was under no illusion that at that moment he was seeing the real Raoul, that he had got to the essence of the man; this was something so alien as to be beyond recognition. James was frightened; although he could speak to Raoul, he could not speak to the thing that possessed him. He remained quite still. Time had no relevance: it might have been a matter of seconds or hours before Raoul swayed forward and put a hand to his eyes.
