Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘Twenty police?’

  ‘I was told there were twenty police defending the quai Woodrow Wilson.’

  ‘Not while we were there. Who said that?’

  ‘No?’ He wrote in his book.

  ‘They must have arrived after it was all over. After Sir Eric called them. When we were stoned we had no police. Just ourselves. And a St Bernard dog.’

  ‘You know they wrecked Maxim’s?’

  ‘Maxim’s! But why?’

  ‘Because of the sign saying American Bar. They burned that too. They struck wherever they saw the word American. Even American Express.’

  ‘Ye gods. Still, the League doesn’t have anything to do with America and they attacked us.’

  ‘I think the crowd probably thought of it as President Wilson’s summer place. Quai Woodrow Wilson and so on. They looted the bar at Maxim’s.’

  ‘Drank it dry?’

  ‘In my story, I said “looted”. But yes, they drank it dry. Regardless of the nationality of the liquor. A few of your people were there and had to be rescued by the police.’

  ‘Anyone I might know?’

  He looked up his notebooks. ‘James Gibson?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Caroline Bailey and Howard Liverright — you know them — and a couple from the ILO.’

  ‘Caroline Bailey and Liverright were at Maxim’s last night?’

  ‘Yes. Liverright in his usual state.’

  ‘Were they rioting or roistering?’

  ‘They were among those rescued.’

  ‘How delicious.’ She laughed this time.

  ‘Let me in on your joke.’

  She shook her head. ‘Tell me, did people try to stop them looting Maxim’s or any of the places? Did anyone appeal to the crowd?’

  ‘People were injured at Maxim’s. Bernard the maître d’ came out and tried to stop them. He was hit with something. Anyhow, we’ll all sleep more soundly tonight — the Federal Government has called in three battalions of Swiss Infantry.’

  ‘Is it that serious?’

  ‘There’s rioting in every capital of Europe, maybe every capital of the world.’

  She was stunned. She had not realised that it was such an issue.

  ‘Did you see Vanzetti’s final statement?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  He took a cable from his briefcase and read from it: ‘“Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words …”’

  She stopped him. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ She felt sick again.

  He folded up the cable and put it away. He wanted to talk more about Sacco and Vanzetti. ‘Did you people sign the petition which went around?’

  ‘How do you mean, “you people”?’

  ‘League people. Officers like you.’

  She pondered whether she could answer that. ‘I can’t really answer for everyone.’

  ‘Did you sign it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Isn’t that a matter of personal conscience?’

  ‘Yes. But may I ask — as a matter of personal curiosity?’

  She told him her reasons.

  ‘I agree with you.’

  ‘That’s a comfort.’ It came out more drily than she meant. Was she learning from Caroline? He took it that way and blushed, which interested her. ‘Why is it such a big issue?’ she asked him.

  ‘Sometimes cases like this seem to get through all the glitter and frivolity of the times. Express all our political frustrations, I suppose. Cases like the Dreyfus affair. They come to stand for things. It’s difficult to guess what case will excite the political imagination. Sacco and Vanzetti, though, like Giordano Bruno and Francisco Ferrer, will never be forgotten.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean that what people choose to take up is correct?’

  ‘I think not.’

  He offered to buy her lunch. She declined. Although they had both made each other laugh, he was still a man with whom she couldn’t yet feel at ease. Although while talking with him now she’d realised for the first time that he was only a few years older than she. She’d always thought of him as much older. As he was leaving, she asked him if Ambrose had been at Maxim’s. He shook his head.

  ‘What about Florence Travers?’

  He looked into his book. ‘No.’

  She didn’t know why, but she was relieved that Florence wasn’t with Caroline and Howard. She didn’t want to feel ganged-up on. ‘There were a couple of diplomatic chaps. A Mr Huneeus claiming to be from the Azerbaijan Embassy.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Professionally. Was he hurt?’

  ‘He was. He was hit by something.’

  Poor Mr Huneeus. Maybe he was destined to be hit. She couldn’t be everywhere at once.

  As he made ready to go, she said, ‘You’d better read out their statement to me. I should hear it all, I suppose.

  ‘If you wish.’ He got it out again. ‘“Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words, our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler — all. This last moment belongs to us — this agony is our triumph.”’

  They sat in silence.

  ‘Vanzetti said that,’ he added.

  Edith was moved but did not let go of her sense that she was still fundamentally correct in her behaviour.

  ‘It’s a cruel world,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. For good shoemakers and poor fish peddlers especially.’

  ‘Do you think they’re innocent?’

  He smiled darkly. ‘That we will never know.’

  After he left, Edith sat in sadness for a while. Then she did some work and her mood lifted.

  Just before lunch she strolled around to Caroline’s office in Précis-writing to razz her about Maxim’s. She looked into her office. ‘Well, Caroline, how was Maxim’s last night? The dance orchestra in good form?’

  Caroline grinned wryly. She said she’d heard that Edith had had an adventure as well. ‘How’s your thumb? I was going to call you.’

  ‘All right. Miss Figgis took care of it.’

  ‘It will probably fall off. Seeing that you’re the heroine of the hour, let me buy you lunch.’

  ‘Why, thank you. I’m meeting Ambrose down there, is that all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Caroline got her handbag. ‘You must tell me your story. I don’t agree with rioting. Bad form.’ She was a more subdued Caroline. The experience at Maxim’s must have been ugly for her. There was some sort of apology in Caroline’s manner and offer.

  In response, Edith relinquished her slightly gloating tone, and said soberly, ‘You must tell me your story. I hear Maxim’s was wrecked.’

  ‘When they start smashing bars and dance halls, I’m against it,’ Caroline said, trying for her more usual sardonic tone, linking her arm with Edith’s. ‘And when they hurt my friend’s thumb.’

  Edith found she was pleased to be claimed by Caroline as a friend.

  They looked at the damage on the way to the restaurant and Edith pointed things out. As they entered the basement restaurant, Edith heard Joshi call for three cheers and she was given a small cheer from the tables of eaters. Even the usually very reserved Swiss waitresses clapped.

  Florence got up from her place and came over and they hugged. ‘I’m sorry about your thumb and everything. Eat with us.’

  ‘Sorry, Florence, I’m Caroline and Ambrose’s guest. It seems for once in my life I’m besieged with invitations. Sorry.’

  ‘So you should be. You’re a heroine. We’ll have a dinner later this week.’

  Edith and Caroline went to where Ambrose had kept a place. Her thoughts were about Florence. Florence could care about a cut thumb but not about her risks and tumbles of other kinds, the more complicated risks and tumbles of her psyche. She saw now
that Florence would not ever return to being a proper friend.

  The Tenets of Civilisation and Various Wonders Not to Be Talked Of

  Following the Sacco and Vanzetti riot and the realisation that her deep rift with Florence was to remain, even though they were talking again, Edith felt she must go to some place quiet to think. Her thumb wasn’t healing quickly either. She asked for a week of her leave but Nancy Williams suggested she take all her annual leave which was anyhow overdue, and she agreed.

  She’d been shaken by the stone throwing at the Palais Wilson more than she thought she should be. It was as if all the transgressions and the foolish daring of her life since coming to Geneva had goaded the angry crowd. The stone-throwing crowd had become oddly fused with the molestation at the Molly Club, as if she herself were somehow to blame for it. And it was true that by going out of bounds she was partly to blame. She’d gone out of bounds in other ways and places too. All these things had come together with a wobbly underlying logic which she couldn’t interpret but which had made the stone-throwing riot into a storm against her as a person. As mad as it sounded, it was as if on that night she’d been stoned as a witch or as a scarlet woman.

  For a time, perhaps since the time of the Molly Club incident, she’d had a numb indifference to her psyche and to her body. She’d fostered an optimism in herself that it all didn’t matter, that it was ‘the Continent’, that everything would feel familiar and normal in the morning, or by next month. There’d been too much drinking going on in her life too, which, perhaps, she’d needed to sustain her numb indifference, or her waiting for the return to ‘normal’. She was frightened now that she could not return to normal or that, for her, there was now no normal.

  She’d also noticed that her drinking sometimes allowed her to enjoy a despair about the world and herself. The relief of desperation. She was frightened of this enjoyment.

  Florence had made overtures, but Edith felt that a decision was required on her part as to whether there was value in her returning to friendship with Florence, and she’d decided there was not. She remained amiable towards Florence but politely evaded her invitations and did not return invitations, allowing the friendship to wither away. And this winter, she’d been disgusted to see Florence wipe her nose on her glove.

  It was time to attend to herself. To mull on her life. To perhaps find her standards again.

  It was time to think out how she felt on consequential matters, to take time away from the daily procedures and office panics of the League, to turn away from her overfull days. Maybe to consider going home. And what to do with Ambrose. Was he getting in the way of something more serious with a man? Or did she want to use it that way? Was a man like Ambrose best for her? Even Caroline had said to her recently that she must stop concerning herself only with the tactics of life and design for herself a life plan.

  Recently she’d felt on the brink of being over-challenged by all things. Most days she felt no justifiable method for doing whatever it was she was doing from one moment to another. Mary McGeachy had reminded her that she did have inherent capacities and that her judgements in League affairs were based on her dining-table education in mercantile life from her father, and in public life from her mother and father, and from her uncle. Yet so many situations at the League seemed to lack practices. They spent so much time making the rules. It was more what McGeachy called ‘the hunch’, which determined what Edith did. Unless someone told her, she rarely had a confident idea of whether she had done well or badly. Oh yes, she was good then at vindication. She never faltered in finding the reasons for what she’d done — although you only needed reasons for having done something when what you had done turned out to be a failure. If it worked, everyone could see the reasons for it. Sometimes it was as if she were inventing the theory after the event, tidying up her behaviour behind her with methodical explanation and with words of good order.

  Maybe it was time to go back to Australia. To visit her mother’s grave. And what about being, herself, a mother? And other Questions.

  She went to Chamonix for a week, in the footsteps of Shelley and Ruskin, to the supposedly healthy ‘gentian zone’, where the gentian flowers grew. Where Ruskin wanted to go when, ‘Lost in various wonder and sorrow not to be talked of’. Although he seemed to be mainly worried about his liver and his teeth: ‘If those would keep right, I could fight the rest of it all’, she’d read on the way down in the train. She thought she knew what he meant. She had a problem with a recurring hand rash. Some days she thought if that could be cured, then she could cope with the rest. Or maybe when she could cope with the rest, it would then be cured? Perhaps she should apply the gentian lotion of her childhood.

  It was her first vacation without Ambrose, but on the following week-end, Ambrose, Jeanne and some of the others were coming down. Per Jacobbson from the Scandinavian Club was going to teach them all to ski. If her thumb had healed. She imagined that she might be more a cross-country skier although she suspected that if a sport had not entered her life by now, it was not likely to enter it.

  She resolutely brought only one book, Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. She had reserved a deluxe room at the Hôtel Mont Blanc. After settling in, she moved the writing table to under the window and opened her day book, her personal journal. She’d filled three such books in her time in Geneva. She poured herself a Scotch from Jerome’s flask. She always held the flask for a second against her face in recollection of that aberrant night. She drank from the silver travelling cup which she also carried in her luggage, carefully packed in a specially made leather pouch, and she said to herself, glancing at the mirror, ‘Now Edith, mull.’

  She went to the mirror to look more closely at her face but stopped that and returned to her desk.

  She dated the page with her fountain pen.

  Firstly, she copied her last poem into the book from the sheet of office paper on which it had been composed.

  The Pirouette of Knowing

  Look into the eye of the eye

  to the egg of the eye

  look until you reach the pirouetting ego

  of the egg

  and its staggering dance

  leaden-footed dance

  made so by a politic not yet known

  engaged in a cause for those

  who know not their cause

  the unknowns and the know-nots

  pirouetting inside a Palais

  proposed to be

  within reach

  of the wretched

  but which, itself, has no reach

  no-ledge for the grasping.

  Knowledge without reach

  is a no-ing, not a knowing

  is a retching not a reaching.

  (unsubmitted)

  It was a little stern and needed more work but was not so bad. Maybe she would try to have it published in something like The Nation, which Caroline had shown her.

  She decided to begin the mulling with a list of civilised tenets because of what she’d heard herself say in the Club de la Presse. She worried about mixing with journalists. They were so often damaged by their way of life, maybe from living so close to world anxiety and then having to make the anxiety into sense, into words, knowing always that they had got something wrong, yet never knowing until the next day what it was they’d got wrong. But as Ambrose said, it was diplomacy inter pocula.

  Recently, she’d said in front of some of them that surely at the bedrock of everything — what the League stood for and what it pursued — were ‘the civilised tenets’. No one had disagreed. But no one had taken it up either. The journalists hated talking like that because whatever good they believed in on that night would be proved false by morning.

  After she’d said whatever it was she’d said in the Club de la Presse about ‘civilised tenets’, she’d looked across at Robert Dole. He had the look of a man who liked her, maybe more than that even, was an admirer. But he had the look also of a man who had thought his way through to another wiser plac
e. To a wiser but not a happier place.

  Exactly. That was how Robert Dole always looked. And his look said he was waiting for her to join him there, at this wiser but not happier place. Since the unsettling encounters they’d had back during the preparatory commission, his behaviour towards her had changed. After the Sacco and Vanzetti night, he’d been considerate with her during his interview and had agreed with her about the petition, and had moved her when he read Vanzetti’s statement. Now when he disagreed with her, he did not do so in front of people as he had in the past. In fact, he now shielded her. As he’d left the club that night, Robert Dole came across to her and said with a smile, ‘Trietschke said, “Civilisation is soap”. Good night,’ causing her to smile.

  She was being coy with herself. Robert Dole was, in truth, preoccupied with her. She’d been surprised at times to hear him come to her defence. Sometimes he came to her help and gave her position more lustre than she ever could. Maybe he agreed with her?

  And, she knew, without her permitting anything to happen about it, that he desired her carnally. She feared that if she allowed herself to desire him, it would mean that she would be induced by him to go through a black curtain to the wiser but not happier place where he seemed to dwell. He came from a different ilk of men to those she knew.

  What further restrained her, one way or another, was that she’d found herself in enough strange, intimate places with men, and needed a pause, perhaps, in that part of her life. Before it got totally out of hand. She again counted up the men with whom she’d had some carnal association, fearing that somehow, unobserved by her, the total had crept up. She’d now had three carnal experiences in life — or maybe two and a half— including one lover — Ambrose — and not counting her ballgowned skirmishes back at university, the outcome of which seemed at times in recollection difficult to appraise, experiences which were lost somehow in the layers of the fabric and studs and buttons of those nights. There had been one serious and fairly correct young man in Melbourne but they had parted ways as it became clear to her that she would go to Europe and to the League and not to live in a house in South Yarra. And she did not know whether to count Jerome or to simply to see it as a ‘Paris escapade’.