I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  She spoke so loudly that the barman looked anxious and was hesitating at the side-door to the bar; and she had attracted the attention of the delegates across the lounge.

  Jean-Marie approved her and gazed with a smile in the folds of his weather-beaten long face. He looked at the delegates and winked. She laughed at them, at him, at herself. She got up.

  ‘Look, I’ll show you. I’ll do bingo-bango.’

  She walked to the little piano behind the gold rail and sat on the piano-stool. But the piano was locked. She went to the bar counter and asked the barman for the key. He, small and dark, with a neat wooden face, shook his head; but she persisted, her face becoming brighter and brighter, her features pinching into a faunish mask; and a candle lighted inside the mask, as she bewitchingly, irresistibly coaxed and flattered and teased. Everyone looked. The barman looked across at McRoy, suddenly smiled, bent down and handed out the key. She went back across the little dance-floor. ‘Olé,’ said the man in the cap, Tom Barrie. She sat down. Her strong legs showed their muscles through the slacks, her strong arms freckled and with fair down, her strong wrists and small squarish hands looked well, coming out of her striped sweater. She opened the piano, turned towards Jean-Marie, sideways, one foot on a pedal, one foot on the floor, and genial, a little drunk, said, ‘I used to barnstorm with a boy called Bim-Bam, stage name, and we brought Broadway to the hinterland, or said we did. Really we just made up our numbers out of nursery rhymes and work-songs or anything going around. This is one.’

  Then beating time with one foot and using the pedal freely, she began in a forceful, calm and sophisticated style and seeming more than life-size, to give a musical comedy rendering of ‘La Cucaracha’, with introduction, aria, a comic interlude, which she said was supplied by Bim-Bam originally, though she now supplied it. ‘La Cucaracha’ was played everywhere then. The men in the American group all sang it and when she had finished gave applause and ‘olé’. She bowed.

  She went back to Jean-Marie, and Stephen Howard came over and asked to join them.

  ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve seen you, but where?’ said she.

  ‘Writers’ Congress?’

  ‘Naw—tavern on University Place?’

  ‘Maybe; place with the white cat?’

  ‘I’ve been there. The cat’s always having kittens.’

  ‘Yes.’

  As the boat edged its way in awkwardly at Le Havre and she stood at the rail, excited by her first view of a French town, the man in the cap, Tom Barrie, came and stood beside her.

  ‘Gee,’ he said, ‘I’d like to get down there and kiss the dirt on the docks. In Europe and in America too, what France means! The light of the world.’ His dark face was wreathed in smiles. ‘The modern world began with the French Revolution.’

  ‘And the American,’ said she.

  She was to go ashore with Mrs Browne. She had not thought to get a hotel room, fancying Paris had plenty of rooms for tourists. She agreed to go to Mrs Browne’s hotel in the rue St Benoît, St Germain-des-Prés, a very small place where Mrs Browne had stayed with her husband in 1926, their first year in Europe.

  Mrs Browne said gloomily, ‘That is, if they have a room. There are residents in all these little hotels in Paris. They live there all their lives. Paris is full of people from the country and from foreign countries who left home and now live in a hotel room. They go to the zinc for their breakfast and eat rolls and paté for dinner and that’s their life.’

  ‘The zinc?’

  ‘The bar counter. My husband likes that. He’d like to live like that. But I don’t. I can’t live in London. It’s the climate and the clothes don’t fit; and they always say “Are you a Canadian?” So we may as well be divorced.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Marriage is a kind of divorce. You are just two people getting farther and farther apart. But that’s true of everyone. I’m getting farther away from my mother, too.’

  On the train she left Mrs Browne in the compartment. She suddenly felt a pang, realising that she had not said goodbye to Jean-Marie, who was going on to London. She stood outside in the corridor to see Normandy. A man coming along the corridor stopped beside her; it was Stephen Howard.

  ‘I was looking for you. Come and sit with us. Come to our hotel!’

  ‘Well, thanks, I’d like to but I promised Mrs Browne, that woman there. If I desert her, she’ll say life is like that, always abandoned. She’s an inspissated crêpehanger, but friendly. She thinks we’re all marooned on a million desert islands and no radio, no handkerchiefs to wave. So I can’t.’

  He remained silent. She looked up at him. On the ship he had listened to her tirades; and when at the end she wrung her hands, crying, ‘What prattle,’ he said:

  And gliding and springing, she went ever singing …

  The Earth seemed to love her, and Heaven smiled above her

  As she lingered towards the deep …’

  When she blushed, he said, ‘Shelley, Arethusa arose …’

  He had comforted her, picked the meaning from her words, made her feel young, wise, bright.

  He had fetching ways, a delicate, assumed selfishness and petulance, his life-long private joke which he shared with society, an affectation of naughtiness and self-indulgence which she, who had been brought up rough and ready, found delightful. Then, as if ashamed, he had let her know that he had been for many years an invalid.

  ‘And when at last I walked out into the world, a living man, a free man, grown up, as good as the next man, and left behind me the doctors and nurses who had done that for me, unselfishly, because they could have been stockbrokers and typists, and I saw all the little businesses, heartache, headache, sturdy tough little lives whisking down the drain, turning into the stuff we were made from and all those good lives, gone for nothing, I had to go to work, straighten myself out, no poor little rich boy for me.’

  An only son, he had already spoken of his mother, Anna, friendly.

  ‘Anna lives in a narrow, happy world. She’s not educated, though she’s been to college and made I don’t know how many trips to Europe. She’s thoroughly Chicago and never became New York, though we live there; and I think she keeps the Chicago out of pride. She’s shrewd, unaffected, rather awkward and a first-rate businessman. There’s no need to make any more money, but Anna does it out of pride and honour; one has a duty towards money. For us, the dollar-fever crisis has passed. We’re all gentle now, or ridiculous cranks. All but Anna and Uncle Howard Howard; someone has to mind the business.’

  Stephen had been married, was a widower and had a daughter, Olivia, aged two, an heiress, in the care of his sister, Florence, so as to leave him free. He wanted a political career; thought he had it in him. He said with a satirical grimace, ‘We’re not ascetics, we don’t mind money. My family are now lining up suitable girls for me, particularly one I was walking out with, a canned meat fortune, very suitable; and there’s my cousin, Charlotte, very nice girl, went to Bryn Mawr, went to art school for four years, no talent. No money now, but in due course she will be much better off than even I will be. Mother thinks I should have just a small allowance. I’m really paying it to myself, for it comes out of the estate I’ll eventually get from Mother. She’s right,’ he said petulantly, ‘fortunes have died young in the hands of dreamy misfits who want to see socialism in their time and do not realise that there is genuine socialism here and now for the rich. My mother thinks socialism would spoil the workers. I said to her, “Look at them! They’re spoiled now. No fish-knives, no boathouses on the lake with their little country cabins, no going to Groton and Princeton. How coarse and makeshift! The life of the workers’ friend is not decent either. You have to see the blackfaced, baldheaded facts of half a nation on the soup-lines; you have to compromise, get insulted, fight, blackguard.” No wonder Mother thinks it is no life for me. It isn’t. But I couldn’t live any other now. And she loves me. She puts up the money for this kind of frolic. F
or I’m not an elected delegate on this mission. I’m a private observer. She sees me making a mistake and she keeps me dependent to protect me. She’s not buying me. Dependants never have to compromise, they can speak out. No benefactor wants to lose his toady. Mothers even less.

  ‘You know she is very practical. Don’t think she’s asleep. The Howards have seen trouble before. If by chance, the wind is the wind of change, then maybe that wind will blow a Howard into the White House even as a friend of the workers, and that can’t be bad. No matter what Adams got to Washington, it was good for the Adamses.’

  ‘But why do you talk like that?’ Emily said. ‘You’re great and you’re working for the biggest new deal of all, change the world.’

  He said carelessly, ‘Oh, I’m a calculator. I’d rather depend on the poor than the rich, there are more of them. I have an affection for them. They’re used to bearing us on their backs, usually think nothing of it. There we go mowing them down and they shout or whisper, Hosannah! Till, of course, they get up, wipe the dust out of their eyes and have at us. A bad lot. Why can’t they be like us? The rich never revolt.’

  That’s what he had been saying to her. She had laughed quietly that day; and that night, when she lay in her bunk, she laughed aloud and had to tell the reason why to Mrs Browne, who did not think it funny. But such cracks and blisters in the skin of the rich she had never imagined. Was he ridiculing himself or her? Was she, to him, just a yokel from Lumberville? Wasn’t she worse than he pretended to be—for she hadn’t given a thought to these things, in spite of Grandma and her Wobbly.

  ‘But you sound so bitter!’

  He said, ‘Oh, I’m so pickled in contradictions, I’m soured. A vinegary skinflint. Can’t you see me in forty years? I’m going to be a mean old recluse like Grandpa Tanner, living in one room at the Ritz, knocking on the floor with my stick because the gruel they brought me is too hot. I wanted to do the world a good turn, but it turned out of my hands. Everyone knows the workers have no gratitude. So I’ll take it out on my manservant.’

  He said this in an airy, almost girlish way.

  ‘The air’s honey,’ she said to herself later, ‘there’s something odd about this. I’m floating.’

  Now in the train, looking up at him, she said ‘How tall are you? I must know.’

  ‘Just on six feet. I look taller because I’m thin.’

  Then he said, ‘What are you saying, your lips are moving?’

  ‘I was thinking about you. You do what I have never done. I’ve only fought for the family bread and then Emily.’

  Looking out at the countryside, he talked now in quite a different way. He told her how enthusiastic he had been at college. He had got in with a group who thought they ought to use their higher education for society. He studied socialism. He engaged a tutor, a poor scholar, a Marxist, who helped him because he, Stephen, was slow and behind in studies, on account of having spent years in hospital. Stephen had thought it wrong to spend his allowance. He tried to work his way through college as his tutor did. He made himself sick again. But the determination to help the world, which filled him then with an ardour, a fever, had never left him. It burned inside him. As soon as he graduated, he went off to join a labour battle between fruit-pickers and fruit-packers; and in the battle there he met his first wife, daughter of one of the packers.

  ‘I bounced right back into the boss class. We loved each other; but we thought a long time about it. Neither of us wanted to marry a boss.’

  He was eager now to see the writers and rebels they were to meet in Paris, face to face, to shake hands with, hear from, colleagues, those who had been in battle, in jail, been wounded, founded communist groups, edited papers, written appeals, spoken to crowds; people in exile, people burning with political ambition, and courage in the present doubtful pass, tough and keen with hope for the future, fighters, new people from the new lands. Think, men who had seen socialism in action!

  ‘What glory,’ said she: ‘it will be liking getting a whole sea-roller in your teeth.’

  ‘Did you ever?’

  ‘Yes, and swallowed too much, it ended up just a thin film on the beach.’

  ‘Come and sit with us. You can join your dismal Browne friend later.’

  She refused, ‘I’m a bit scared. You’re too good for me.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be looking for you at the meetings.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen,’ she said involuntarily, ‘I’m not a writer, I’m only a hack, a getter-up of pars. My highest hope is a byline. I’m a westerner as hairy and horned as a bison, Emily Hayseed from Skid Row; and you are a sort of ambassador of culture.’

  ‘I would not be there in glory without Mamma’s money,’ he said peevishly.

  She turned away and began to clap her hands, ‘Oh, look, France! Appleblossom time in Normandy! Oh, and I’m here. Do you care how you got there?’

  There was a pause. Then he said in a low voice, carelessly, ‘Why go with these schoolmasters to the council of the good? Let’s get off at the next station and tramp through Normandy, catch them up in Paris in a couple of days.’

  She was startled, could not speak, a little shocked too, for already she was visualising this great meeting of the new world, already reporting it. He waited, said no more and, someone coming for him from the other coach because they were in committee, he turned without a word and went off. Standing there in the corridor, a cool breeze coming through, she pictured scenes in inns, eating, walking, the night—fresh, innocent though in love, pleasant—a French inn among orchards, the broad white bed linen thrown back. Why had he said it and then gone off? A rich man’s joke?

  She went in and talked to Mrs Browne. There were new settlements, suburban houses, crowning and folded in hills. She was surprised, for some reason. There was in the distance a wide green field inside a square fence with trees along three sides, just inside the farm-gate an old car standing. It reminded her of lessons, ‘Find the area of—’

  The Atlantic was a long way behind now. At the station she saw him walking off with three other men. ‘That finished me with him.’

  Mrs Browne turned warmer on acquaintance. She knew the Paris Americans lived in; and offered to help. But Emily took her guidebook and Thomas Paine and set out to see the Bastille, the Place de la Concorde, Montmartre. She sat down in the Place de la Bastille in a café surveyed the monument and read her book. Everyone was reading Tom Paine in the USA then and some of his words were as well known as the Gettysburg Address. She was surprised to see that the book was dedicated to George Washington. She began to memorize.

  The American Constitutions were to Liberty what a grammar is to language.

  Freedom has been hunted around the globe; reason was considered rebellion. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks and all it wants is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world than despotism felt a shock.

  ‘Oh, great! I must change too. I must write that truth,’ she said aloud. She was glad now that she had discovered her ignorance. She wanted to be by herself until she could learn a few of the things that were ABC to the people she had just met and that were known to all artists in rebellion, all people who had been stirred up, in search of a better fate for mankind. It seemed strange to her now, looking back, that in the USA everyone was not on the march. Wasn’t it obvious that the system had failed? It was; and yet what had she been doing? She had lived from minute to minute, without an idea. She would go to the meetings—one day soon. She was shy about pushing herself into what she called the crème de la crème, she was not fit for it. She saw now that Stephen Howard’s remark about Normandy was just a joke. What was odd about it was the way it had struck to the heart.

  2 LOVE STORY

  PARIS, JUNE 1935

  FOR A WHILE EMILY’S home was the little hotel in the rue St Benoît and she trotted the streets around, the rue Jacob, rue de Fuerstenberg,
rue de l’Abbaye, rue Bonaparte. At eight o’clock in the evening they got there, after thick rain and the sun had shone, the streets, drying rapidly, were glassy. There was an old house at the end of the rue St-Benoit with four windows in the attic displaying pots of greenery, and the front of this house, anciently whitened, was patchy, part age, part wet, and next was Number 40 over which was the sign Ébénisterie, cabinet-work. Houses in various heights, various whites blotted out part of the washed blue sky, a terrasse with wooden tubs—the clouds lifting still, the air fresh, someone washing a floorcloth in the gutter, streaming with clear water released from the hydrant; and in all these old houses, people sitting in small places taking the air, but modestly, no elbowing, no outcries. Opposite the old Abbaye, before the police station, was an interior with the plaster bust of a young girl, a little Greuze, some bronzes. She was at the commissariat, frankly studying it, when a man, a painter in studio gear, stopped the three policemen going on duty, saying, ‘Have you seen—?’ and later in the distance she saw the same painter in the street, anxious, nervous, shaking his hands together: and then, passing a restaurant, there he was, walking along the counter towards the table at the end where six policemen were having supper with six half-bottles of wine. The painter said to the man behind the counter, ‘Can no one tell me where it is?’ He said to the policemen, ‘Can no one tell me where it is?’ How sad.