I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  ‘They don’t know? One plug on the nose and they know: it’s a college education,’ said she.

  ‘But resentment isn’t enough. This could have been a revolutionary situation in the USA—like Russia in 1917, but there wasn’t enough preparation. In Russia the writers in the eighties expected revolution—they knew it couldn’t last. Thousands went out into the country, devoted their whole lives to teaching the people, lost their lives at it. It’s a terrible business to be in social reform. It gives me a pain, a real pain, in my head, in my stomach. I’ve got pains everywhere and I don’t know if it’s fear or despair or incompetence. I know I’m incompetent but I must go on.

  ‘And there you are, Emily, full of joy and interest and love and humanity and a need to know and you are strong, can’t be crushed. I know you’re strong and loyal. A faithful love, a true, great woman. You have the faith I’m afraid to lack.’

  ‘How do you know I’m faithful and strong?’ she objected, feeling cornered by this belief in her, without any foundation that she could see.

  He laughed.

  They were crossing the Luxembourg Gardens, on their way to a students’ restaurant in the place du Panthéon. First, as he knew, she would stand, read the incised letters across the pediment of the Pantheon—Aux grands hommes, to patrie reconnaissante—to (our) great men, (their) grateful country. She would sigh with enthusiasm, say, ‘Oh, grande nation, loving glory and greatness.’

  He had said, ‘You haven’t seen Lincoln in his temple in Washington. The archaeologists to come, ten thousand years hence will find it in the rubble of time and say, “This was the American God”, or they may think it is Manco Capac, First Inca—it won’t make any difference, and the Gettysburg Address will be tacked on to the legend of Paul Bunyan, for things will be as mixed as Mesopotamia by then.’

  ‘He is the American god,’ she said.

  ‘Not FDR?’

  She stopped half-way across the sandy walk by the fountain and burst out, ‘Stephen, I came over here to see Europe; and this is all I’ve seen. I don’t care if it will be gopher-mounds in ten thousand years. I came to see Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Florence, Rome, Amsterdam, Dublin—I wanted to go back with them all in arms.’

  He paused. ‘Well, I could take you to Baden-Baden and Karlsruhe where my family holidayed and lived a hundred years ago; but it will be on the up-and-up, no honeymooning; the Germans know from no jokes,’ (he said with an assumed German accent), ‘or Salzburg perhaps. We have a few days yet before they’re Nazified. But Berlin? Vienna? The pot’s boiling. Last July, Nazi conspirators shot Chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna. Last month, Chancellor Hitler, now known as Der Fuhrer, rejected the Versailles Treaty and ordered conscription in Germany. He’s fired the Reichstag, blamed the communists, arrested thousands, even members of the Reichstag, who should be immune; he’s assaulted the Jews and promised Germany revenge. You’ve seen refugee writers yourself. Why go there? You don’t even speak German.’

  ‘I can say, Ach, Himmel! and Gott sei Dank! and Sumpf and Pestfaul,’ she said, making explosive noises.

  ‘Very good! That sweet song should keep you out of the hoosegow. And they’ll tell you all.’

  ‘But I do get news, Stephen. Emily the Scoop. I want to see where things are happening. Don’t you? You’re a political journalist: you want to meet the President, tell him forceful things. I want to see where Dollfuss was shot to death and Weimer, and where the Weimar Republic was shot to death and I’d like to see I. G. Farben and Krupp’s and where the young no-good Adolf, the Spellbinder, got up the Beer Hall Putsch; yes and Bayreuth. I want to see the Reichstag that was fired by Goering, Ernst, Dimitrov, Torgler, Van der Lubbe and anyone not on your side. That’s how I do business.’

  ‘Do you think by looking at the ruins of the Reichstag, you’ll know who set it on fire? I know, without spending the train-fare, by the simple deductive route of cut bono.’

  ‘I know too. But I love to see the spot marked X. I used to have a friend in the firehouse at Keokuk, Iowa—’

  ‘Were you ever in Keokuk?’ he said.

  She pursed her face in her delicious roguish smile. ‘Maybe. He’d phone me and I’d get to the fire before they did. I even helped to save some children and furniture. Forgive the old fire-horse, Stephen. Think! You look up and those walls are soaked with incident, they drip with conspiracy, crack with fiasco and there are the blood-red bystanders, packed with queasy guilt or fear. I like to look at them and think about them. I get on with them, too: people talk their heads off to a journalist.’

  ‘Are you going to quiz the blood-red bystanders in Berlin? Then, “farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content”! No! I don’t want you to go there. I shouldn’t sleep one night, worrying. All decent people with any sense are flying or packing. The Nazis are crushing opposition: the multi-millions, though humming and ha-ing are preparing to move in behind Hitler; and everyone is gleichgeschaltet, co-ordinated, incorporated. It’s the fashion. Mussolini, Hitler, and even the USA is in the shadow of the corporate state: they’re chewing their nails and thinking it over, waiting to see what happens over here, letting the Nazi terror spread its foul wing, while big business recovers. Don’t you know it’s like that? Do you have to go and record the dying shrieks of a republic?’

  ‘You want to live in Washington and record things.’

  He had a strange look, mournful, big-eyed, ‘Doesn’t it mean anything to you that we’ve just become engaged? Don’t you want to be with me? If I ask you not to go, won’t you stay with me?’

  ‘Engaged?’ she said pondering, ‘Are we engaged?’

  He took her arm. ‘What are you waiting for? Do you want a ring? Let’s grab the first taxi and we’ll go to the place Vendôme, Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, or place de la République, the five and ten—anywhere. I’ll telegraph Anna for the money.’

  ‘No, don’t. But I must go somewhere, Stephen.’

  ‘Go to Amsterdam, that’s not far. Go to Brussels.’

  ‘I ought to go to Belfast and see where Lennie lives. But I haven’t the address. I don’t suppose by asking around—‘

  ‘Well, I’m glad. I know you. You’d kidnap him. You don’t want Lennie headlined in the world’s press like Baby Lindbergh and Bobby Franks, do you?’

  ‘Gee whittaker—you’re the yellow journalist, not me.’

  ‘I don’t believe Lennie exists. They’re milking you of his pittance.’

  ‘It crossed my mind,’ she said laughing; ‘but golly, I can’t say such things to them.’

  ‘If you can get his address, I’ll go to Belfast with you. There! It’s a deal.’

  They began laughing, he eased her on their way. They ate in the little restaurant where each student had his separate numbered napkin and they went to the Salle de la Mutualité to the congress; and in the evening they dropped in at the Opéra Comique and saw Louise by Gustave Charpentier, but she continued restless.

  ‘I guess I’m not happy living the perfect romance,’ she said to him; ‘it’s my training; it’s too good; I’m an unbeliever; how can it happen to Emily the Dope?’

  ‘But it can. You’ll get used to it. You’ll learn.’

  He began to talk about their future—we’ll do this, we’ll try that, we won’t have any children at first; I have a daughter and that’s enough. I’ll take you to the best hairdressers and couturières, we’ll get rid of your freckles, if you like. On the way back to the hotel, he bought her a large box of chocolates.

  He did everything with such gaiety, such inner and outward grace, she felt like a pleased child and yet she did not quite like it.

  ‘It’s because I’m used to the battle of life,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m a bugbear at the feast of life, a spotted clown, Emily Homespun, unlicked; I suppose I must learn the bong tong, the comme il faut. Pish! Pshaw! Can you bedizen a dancing bear? Besides, he says we’ll have no children—but he hasn’t said he loves me.’

  He hadn’t said so; and she thought to herself, astonished
: ‘I have agreed to marry a stranger—H’m! OK. Well, we’ll see!’

  But she continued thoughtful. She did not know him well enough to size up the reality of this shipboard acquaintance and this sudden projected marriage.

  ‘And your family, Stephen?’

  ‘I was an invalid once; I’ll get my way. Anna loves me.’ After a moment, he added, ‘And then, they’re not sure!’

  ‘Not sure of you?’

  ‘The way my mother and uncles, the Howards that is, look at it, is, You never know. They’re not taken in really by theories of sunspots and crop failures and business cycles. They know the USA started from nothing: it wasn’t a business cycle, but something new. They know that after the French Revolution the rich men came back, but not the kings. If the Commune had seized the banks, what would have happened? My people and their cousins are hoping for Russia, that some day they’ll have business cycles, but it looks bad at present. Europe and the USA are goggling after socialism—they’ve had too much of business cycles. Though, my respected family will do their best; and their best is good. But you never know. Paul Valéry wrote “The time of the world’s end begins”; only a pen-pusher, true. One of our congress people said, “Some few among the greatest have already said yes to the future—but all have felt it, that a time is passing that can never come back.”’

  ‘Hitler is trying to put the clock back.’

  ‘They’ll help him, for he’s our barricade against socialism; he even has to call his socialism, to fool all the people all the time.’

  ‘People have always believed in the apocalypse,’ she said slowly.

  ‘This vision shakes us all. But we have no right to romance. Someone said those who flatter the people with false revolutionary legends are like a cartographer who would give sailors lying maps. And the apocalypse is such a lying map.’

  She said, ‘My God, what can we do—in the apocalypse? What an extraordinary race to belong to! Ants and bees have organised societies—so they say. It’s all nicely fixed up, mother to son; they don’t turn the anthill upside-down every twenty years. But we say, it’s a tenet, the tree of liberty must be watered every twenty years by the blood of martyrs. Why is it? What is the answer?’

  ‘The answer is, revolution is a necessity if we are not to be ants and bees.’

  ‘Brr! but it’s murder, it’s terrible.’

  About that they talked for days. In the end Emily gave up her plans and returned on the boat with Stephen. They would come back to Europe some other year.

  3 MARRIAGE

  AT THE DOCK THEY met Stephen’s mother, Anna Howard, ‘dear Anna’ as Emily at once called her, a sallow, handsome, tall woman, with slender waist, long legs, broad shoulders. With her was a young woman, Adeline the heiress whom Stephen had thought about marrying. She was a dark, casually pretty girl, with large brown eyes and a hesitant manner, covering modest convictions. She was dressed in a dark material. Both greeted them friendly, but Mrs Howard kept Emily talking while Stephen spoke to Adeline and then Anna took Emily to her hotel, where she had a room for her, while Stephen, promising to see them later, went off in her car with Adeline to lunch.

  Emily lunched with Anna Howard in a small cellar restaurant off Washington Square.

  ‘I know you like places like this; Arthur and I come here,’ said she. She did not explain that Arthur Winegarden was to be her husband: but Emily knew.

  ‘You don’t drink wine,’ said Anna with a smile, after Emily, following her lead, had chosen osso buco with rice.

  Emily had meant to order veal cutlets with truffles; but she remembered what Stephen had said about ‘millionaire asceticism.’ Too bad, she thought; well, I must learn—let it be marrowbone and gravy. They had cheese and coffee and then went back to the hotel. Stephen returned, went to his mother and then called on Emily, who had a room across the hall from ‘dear Anna’.

  ‘It is all settled, Mother accepts my change of plans. What can she do? So there you are, you freak—engaged to me and we’ll be married right off. But do you mind going to Chicago? Anna has a summer shack the size of a department store, style cottage-baronial on the lake shore. We’ll be married there and then back to NY. I want to be near the New York party. I’ll work in New York. Mother wants us to live opposite her on East 75th Street; she’ll buy the house and rent it to us, or any arrangement. I don’t know how you feel about that? I’d say no.’

  They went uptown to look at the four-storey building which had a gable, tiles, an attic balcony; ‘a certain air of Montmartre,’ said Emily.

  ‘Yes, but good God, look at the place next door, gilded iron and heavy lace curtains, looks like a fine Paris brothel; and besides, Mother has only to look out of any front window from her house opposite to see our curtains, our car, our shared janitor and me at work in my study. One of her private ambitions is slowly to buy up four or five houses in this street and plant us all opposite, Florence, Olivia: “Howard Village”.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Yes, no-no.’

  They came back, went to the bar downstairs to frame their answer to Anna’s offer.

  ‘Golly, Stephen, I can’t get over the idea that because I went red, I married into the social register. I can’t take it in. I know it’s so, but it is just like a story by a dimwit, that any editor would reject.’

  ‘America the Golden,’ said Stephen, ‘and what about me? The effete scion finally inducing some honest red blood to mingle with the watery anil in his veins?’

  They were married at City Hall, with only brother Arnold and Anna to witness; and then spent a few days on the lake at Oak Park.

  The Chicago country house was entered by a paved courtyard behind stronghold walls; over them, tiled roofs, below dressed stone archways. There was plenty of room inside: guestrooms, halls, flights of stairs, unexpected turns looking through long windows on to parts of the grounds and a weed-grown private pond, on which was a rowboat and in it a man hauling out weed. These glimpses were disheartening. Perhaps the landscape and thick bit of woodland could not be fitted into these long but too narrow windows—something of the air of a citadel hung about the place.

  ‘A nice little shack situated in its thousand-acre backyard,’ said Emily.

  ‘Three hundred acres,’ said Stephen, ‘unless you’re counting the lake, not ours yet! Actually Anna is thinking of selling off twenty acres so that neighbours, the Littles, can get to their stables from the road.’

  ‘I’m simply not telling my folks anything about this. They wouldn’t believe it. Not for Flop-eared Emily, the family white elephant. Supposing I told them that this slum was occupied by a red, someone with his name at the masthead of the leading conspiratorial weekly, an agitator mumbling slogans to truck drivers, taking down in shorthand the beefs of striking seamen about pork chops—that’s what you do, isn’t it? Clasping the horny hands of the sons of Casey Jones, pulling the forelock to the Central Committee—they know I’m a liar, but they’d think I was mad. For journalism is one thing, but reality—no.’

  ‘Well, we will manage without troubling their dreams.’

  ‘Yes—but Stephen, listen, last night I had an idea! About Lennie.’

  ‘Who’s Lennie? Oh, yes, the Irish lad, possible nephew.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see if he exists. We’ll ask him over. They haven’t room. He can stay with us. It will cost less, too. He won’t take up room. He’s only four.’

  ‘H’m. Wait a bit.’

  They got an apartment on Twelfth Street, three rooms in a row, bath at the side, kitchen at the back. They divided the big front room with a large steel Venetian blind; they furnished the place and bought a Chinese carpet which Emily called ‘tray raffeenay,’ and went to work. Emily joined the Communist Party, went to classes for new members, stifled what she called her ‘ignoramus objections,’ read serious books, sold newspapers, and attended meetings; a very serious learner.

  Stephen even tried to restrain her. But she was in a fever. ‘I must learn all, everything—f
or the truth will make us free.’

  ‘We will see what the truth will do to us,’ grumbled Stephen.

  Stephen had first married Caroline, a young heiress. Her will left everything to her daughter, Olivia, now aged two. Part was to come to her on her sixteenth birthday, the rest at twenty-five. Meanwhile, the trustee, Anna, paid out of the estate all her expenses. Caroline, knowing her death to be near, had also asked Florence, Stephen’s sister, to take care of the baby girl; for Stephen, she said, did not understand children and had an indecisive nature.

  ‘Why did Caroline disinherit you?’ asked Emily, ‘disregarding the gracious words about understanding children, for the moment.’

  ‘I had my allowance. She was afraid I would become a drone, an idler, a rich louse and she had an ambitious conscience. She wanted to do me good; she wanted me to have a clean name. Even at noonday she saw the red muckraker in the shadows. You must understand that we, the Howards, are mentioned in The Jungle, under another name of course; but every social-minded citizen knows. And we all know. I think she married me to keep me straight. She didn’t want a servant, a class enemy in the house. She wouldn’t cook or clean for me, because I didn’t do the same for her. I pointed out that we would be in each other’s way dusting; but she thought I was unserious. She threw herself into social work to forget the misfit at home; she got her MA, studied law, to fight class injustice. We lived in a California bohemia, marched for causes with placards, threw parties for Negroes, Mexicans and others who had no reverence for our coronets and kind hearts; they simply drank up the hooch, went away and forgot our names.’