A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (16 page)

Then Linda had to do some more work and it was time for us to dine, so we returned to Roger’s. Alain, who was expecting a long-distance call from his father in Brussels, hastened on ahead. It was a cold twilight with a great fragrance, particularly that fermenty fragrance of sod which has lately been frozen or frosted. There was an afterglow folded in cloud. We strolled down a narrow old lover’s lane, under trees preserved in loving-kindness to a great age, then along a field of little vines all nursed and cut and healed and kept in harness, then along a soft orderly brook, and across a meadow on a well-worn path. Suddenly huge Roger turned toward me and talked to me.

“Listen, Alwyn,” he began. He said my peculiar name almost as if it were Hallowe’en without the H. He stood in the middle of the path and talked fast. “Listen, Alwyn, I must tell you this. I did not care to mention it in Linda’s presence; she would think it a good thing to put in an article for
Harper’s
or
The New Yorker.
And that would be worse than not telling it at all, because the men who are important never, on principle, believe a thing that they read in articles or in the newspapers. And there has been, my lord, enough of the shame of France. I am ashamed. I will not see any more of it in print. Not even abroad; not even when it is written by those like you and Linda who still feel that you are our allies. And, alas, if the Germans ever come to the conclusion about us that I’ve come to, God save us!

“I tell you this, Alwyn, because you must know some men who have power in New York and Washington. You can speak in our behalf, to impress upon them the necessity of helping us. Unless you stand by us we shall fail you. You cannot depend on us unless you help us.”

“Roger,” I interrupted sharply, “what are you talking about? What in the world is this?”

It was, as I might have guessed, the feebleness of the army of France, the inefficacy or ignorance of the government of France, the numerical if not personal inferiority of the French, the inadequacy of the heavy industry of France, the futility of the eastern and northeastern fortifications; in general, the hopeless imparity between the French and their enormous evil incomparable enemy. Roger had suspected all this for some time, and his two weeks’ service in the Marginot Line had settled it for him.

“We are lost, we have not a hope, it is finished. France is past. Oh, God, I am so tired of thinking about it! How can we go to war, in the perfect certainty of defeat? What do the English expect of us? They despise us and yet they depend on us. When it is all over you will all say that we were cowards, crooks, degenerates, a nation of eunuchs. But how can we fight well when we have seen with our own eyes, to start with, that we have only old guns, little tanks, a few planes, and that crazy line of fortresses which the Germans understand perfectly, and not one of us has learned anything up to date, no one knows what to do?”

I could not exactly see Roger’s face, in the double-focus light of the dusk, not night yet but nocturne. But I did not need to see it. I knew what expression of the idleness of grief it wore. Irritably, stubbornly, I began to assure him that his pessimism was not to be trusted and that, in him and others like him, it constituted a worse disadvantage to the Republic than the shortcomings which inspired it.

Unfortunately my heart was not altogether in what I said. For if, at any time during the past decade, I had been asked whether in my opinion France had a first rate army, I should have answered no. This was of course nothing but an impression, based on casual glances into various casernes and camps; on long waits at street corners for certain parades to pass; on conversations with some young men, soldier boys or ex-soldier boys who did not mean to tell me anything in particular, who suffered from none of Roger’s emotion.

As I remember, whenever you encountered the French army, there was a kind of gypsy atmosphere; it was agreeable, amiable. You saw as it were great untidy picnics of the military maneuvering along the roads, with the right idea and ideal surely, and businesslike in some ways, but with unbecoming uniforms and quaint-looking guns, with improvisation and patchwork. Inside aged masonry of a hundred traditional fortresses you could always discover something human, picaresque or idyllic or melancholy: little old temperamental mules, little old ardent officers, a mess table outdoors with fragrant soup in tin basins, a flutter of body linen drying on a clothesline. All over France you heard a bit of the music of the trumpet at dawn or at dusk,
divertimento,
as innocent, as rustic as a rooster crowing or a whippoorwill.

What Roger had to report, or rather to express, was a little worse than my impression; but probably that was because it meant more to him than to me. It was nothing very interesting, it was not news. He stood astride of the path waving his heavy arms, chattering rather than shouting. It was a mere outburst of simple conviction; refreshing in a sense, in France, where even in sadness there was usually too much moderateness and doubt. It was an outcry, an almost poetical generalization. His words themselves were flat and middle-class. A word here and there gave the idea, as in an opera, and the voice did the rest, that extraordinarily light voice, coming a little incongruously from the bulk of his shadowy figure in the empty meadow.

Really it amounted to nothing more than that the Maginot Line had been a bitter disappointment to him. He must have had false hopes of it after all, something like my dream of martial architecture which he had made fun of. In his actual report of his two weeks it was hard to tell exactly what was what; he had no reportorial talent. I wanted to inquire how long it had been before they had issued him a comfortable uniform, but he did not mention it and I was afraid of seeming to mock him. He did not really satisfy my curiosity in any respect. As I say, his mind was all lyricism and criticism. The Maginot Line has remained, to my mind, an enormity of mythical building with especially my Roger in it, my tragical, laughable giant talking so much and saying so little that was memorable or quotable.

He told me that officers were severe with the men, but ruefully, like doctors keeping some secret. The men were not insubordinate or even sullen. They were rather, as to the possibility of war before long, the limitations of their equipment, and their own shortcomings in the sense of aptitude for war and training for war, tactful with one another. None of them of course knew for a fact that their materiel was inferior to the enemy’s, but all of them somehow had been given some suspicion of it. They respected one another, and they had self-respect; but as to the guns and shells and instruments and supplies they were working with, they had only a sense of humor. As it had seemed to Roger their good behavior itself, given all these implications, was ominous.

As French as can be, Roger then tried to explain the state of mind in the Line by referring to a book. “Have you read
Les Caves du Vatican?”
he asked.

I had indeed; it is Andre Gide’s fantastic satire in which the Pope has been kidnapped and secretly imprisoned in the Vatican basement and an imposter has taken his place. Roger said that in the Line you kept thinking that there must be some supreme superior officer over all the other officers, and perhaps he was an imposter, perhaps he was deranged, perhaps he was a dead wraith. In any case the others did not understand the orders he gave, but as they re-gave them they pretended to.

The particular fortress to which Roger had been sent was an old building, built by the Germans in 1912 or 1913. When the victorious French recovered Alsace they found it in good condition and they economically incorporated it into their new battlements.

“The droll thing is,” Roger said, “that we never troubled to remove the German signs painted up on the walls inside it here and there, over the doors, in the corridors. Signs like
Damen
and
Herren,
not really
Damen
and
Herren;
there were no
Damen
except in our dreams. All the other things to do and not to do,
Vorsicht, Stufe,
and
Rauchen und spucken streng untersagt,
for example. We left all that just as it was, in the messy, funny Gothic letters, to save money.”

His accent in German was good and evidently it amused him to speak it. “All the
Achtungs,
and the
Tür unter keiner Bedingung zu öffnen,
and all the
Verbotens.
I tell you it had an effect of hallucination. It was a German fortress anyway, and sometimes when I was tired I fancied that we were Germans already and did not know it.”

This made Roger laugh, and in laughter—as it often happens, praise God, in all sorts of human emergency—he suddenly began to recover his composure. We went on our way home then along the path. We found Alain playing the phonograph and we listened for a quarter of an hour. Then we dined, very leisurely and well; and after dinner we gossiped of indifferent acquaintances, certain musicians and the children of certain friends, and went early to bed.

A few days later, when I said goodbye to Roger for who knows how long or perhaps forever, I suddenly realized that I had scarcely any affection for him left. The drama of France was too great, and his personal unhappiness and indignation about it too small, small and abstract. He had a broken heart, which is a sick, stupid thing, I said to myself. As a rule those whose hearts are really broken may as well be given up as a bad job. Unless they are quite young, one can do nothing with them or for them. Roger was truly patriotic and perhaps truly sensitive to the future, yet I had an impression of laziness all woven in with his feeling. Certainly, I thought, there must have been something more to the point for him to do than to unburden himself to a mere vacationing American strolling across a crepuscular pasture upon an April evening in the valley of Chevreuse.

No doubt it was and still is foolish to judge France by men like my Roger, either in condemnation or in excuse. The man who makes an outcry is never quite the same as the inarticulate fellow-humanity behind him. And perhaps even my impatience with Roger individually was unjust. All over the world better men than he have done no more good than he; and the majority of good men did not even have his foresight and emotion.

I still wonder at the simplicity and the courage of the chiefs of state allied to France in basing their policy and strategy upon the military might of the French and the obscure fame of those battlements in Alsace. I suppose they never happened to meet any Rogers. I find it hard to believe that our brilliant American foreign correspondents, brave honest indefatigable fact finders, never discovered that the French army would be good for nothing in a modern war. Probably they did discover everything, but, in their passionate devotion to the democratic cause, lest they discourage or demoralize their readers, kept imposing upon themselves a certain self-censorship. Now in New York I often discuss this with my friend Linda, but it is a mystery we cannot solve.

She was not in fact the last to leave France—far from it; no breeches-buoy! In May 1940 she came home, for a few weeks, as she thought, because her father was in danger of death; and meanwhile France surrendered and she could never get a passport to go back. The last we heard of Roger was that in June 1940 he was in some sector of the Maginot Line between Sedan and Metz, perhaps in that same fortress of the German inscriptions,
Vorsicht
and
Verboten.
That, as Linda reminded me the other day, was where the German army slipped through. So probably he is now behind barbed wire, or laboring as a slave upon a highway or an underground airport or some other wonderful project of enemy engineering. I like to think that, as his German is excellent and he loves Wagner and he is an amiable creature, he gets on well enough with his captors.

What is the place to live? I have lived in fact, as most people do, hither and thither almost indifferently, wherever I could be near the one I loved, or where there appeared to be some economic advantage in my living, or where I expected to be able to work well. But what if I had not had these motives? If nothing mattered to me; if I had given my talent up as a bad job, and therefore no longer felt obliged to live in any particular place for a specific purpose; if I had fallen out of love and it was final, and no one, none of my family, none of my customary dear friends, needed me or wanted me anywhere; and if, with nothing but my own inclination to consider, I had my choice of the entire earth—where should I choose to spend the rest of my life? The answer is New York.

New York, for its own sake, rather than Rome or London or Paris, although it is a disadvantageous place in many ways. Society in it is almost all alcoholic, and there are not nearly enough servants who take any pride or pleasure in their work. It boasts of its modernity, but it is a vain boast while millions have to go on dwelling in built-over brownstones, heating themselves up something unappetizingly on gas rings stuck in cupboards amid ineradicable cockroaches; and it has other shames and shortcomings. It is uncomfortable and it is expensive. The chances are that whatever you have to live on, whatever you do for a living, would entitle you to a higher standard of living somewhere else.

It is not even, in the strict sense of the aesthetic of cities, very beautiful. Think of Paris and Rome and London. New York is in a different category. As it grew, so little of it was ever planned ahead of time, and so little handed down to us about it as preconceived or traditional, that we think of it rather as landscape than as human construction and habitation. To be sure, it was humanity which aligned it in cliffs, and cut its faded canyons, and lifted it up and pieced it together nest by nest, rough-and-tumble around the horizon. But it might have been accident, the elements, the tides, and stubborn running water; or the instinctive work of generations of birds. Look at it, as you cross on a ferry from one of the islands out in the harbor; it consists of large dark sticks stacked this way and that, amid large withered reeds lapped by the waves; and hearing its congested traffic squawking, you half-expect some great thing to be startled up out of it, flapping panicky wings. Look up, as you walk or taxi south through the park: what you see is a part of a mountainside, with the atmosphere wound across it in wild vines, and when the night falls, the profusion of electricity ripening all over it.