Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (36 page)

The undertaker paused to let the bliss sink in, and then gracefully concluded: “And so, ladies and gentlemen, I think we may go to our beds knowing we have done the human race a good evening’s service.”

They walked in silence to the elevators. Morgan stepped out at the undertaker’s floor and said: “I’m more grateful than I can say. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“Say nothing of it.” The undertaker looked at his watch. “If it weren’t that I have to make that early train, I’d ask you to my room for a nightcap.” He took a card from his billfold: “Any time you happen to be in Colorado.”

“I could have been there this very summer,” said Morgan. “So long, and thank you again.”

*

His own room was dark as a dungeon; he entered it thinking: So, my only friend is an undertaker. Divver’s room was dark and empty, too: Morgan closed the adjoining door, switched on his light and tried not to picture Divver, settled in an armchair listening to the engineer’s bubbling anecdotes and edicts, while
that
woman
contentedly worked on a pink bed jacket with the big wooden needles of the languid female. The clock struck twelve, and he thought: there was a time when I was always asleep at this hour.

A letter from his mother, the fourth in two weeks, lay on his bedside table. He had preferred not to open his mother’s second letter; but, ashamed to destroy it unread, he had carried it about carefully in his pocket until, like anything that is so scrupulously guarded, it had at last escaped by a
secret passage. He had opened the third letter, and discovered with surprise that it was affectionate and undemanding: it reminded him, in fact, of the cordial protestations of love that often precede the loved one’s annihilation. And so now the fourth one filled him with apprehension: he walked to the window, then to the toilet, began to undress, examined in the mirror the dark shadows under his eyes, and tried to find in his condition one substantial thing that would stand like a breastwork between him and the letter. But the only proof he could find of his independence, of having obtained his heart’s desire and made himself a new life with his own hands, was a feeling of intolerable
boredom
; and he could hardly believe that a word so commonplace represented a condition of such disgust, or that in destroying his drugs he had merely exposed his nerves to a most painful wear and tear.

For, the last two weeks had introduced him into a new world of the most disillusioning kind. Where he had once heedlessly dozed far into the morning, he now awoke, like any normal, grown-up man, with a violent palpitation of the heart and a sharp sense of horror at the prospect of another day. His eyes, no longer dim and bleary, were pinned down at the instant of waking by the sharp, standard lines of the hotel room, while a kind of fear that was new to him warned him that unless he single-handed made some further bold decision these dreary pieces of furniture would continue to surround him like coffins. Where his drugged ears had once easily rejected an unpleasant noise, such as a brisk call to him to come, they now nervously anticipated the monotonous sounds of a Mell morning—the tinny clank of the cathedral clock, the hawkings, slipper-shufflings and discordant whistlings that were Divver’s anthem to a new day. Where he had once reached, through a comfy haze, for his morning pill, he now snatched at the nearest book, and buried himself in it, until the same old waiter, with the same old grin, carried in the same old tray, whose silverware, so
gorgeous to a drugged taste, was now the dullest electroplate. When he fled from it all into the sunny fresh air his mind, clear at last of sentimental rubbish, recognized the parade of antiquity as tedious vanity, and there was not a relic or triptych in Mell with which he was not on terms of familiar boredom. When he walked by the cathedral and glimpsed the eleven apostles—their sandstone mantles embroidered with the ’phone numbers of countless pilgrims; their faces nicked to the bone by centuries of Baltic storm, Napoleonic cannon and little boys’ slingshots—he could close his eyes and summon up each one’s special posture and anatomical defects as precisely as a gloomy old roué can envisage the girls in the local brothel. In what already seemed like the good old days, he had only had to wander a few miles before he was too somnolent to think; now, it took long, brisk walks under the hottest sun to win even half an hour’s unconsciousness; and when night came he found that he could day-dream for hours before he was worn out enough to sleep. Recently, he had been spending many mornings sitting by the tennis courts, swinging his racket and inviting invitations; but they came only from people who were as bored as himself—and presumably as desperate and unattractive, he thought, as he fled from their clutches. He was interminably pestered by a new and urgent sexual energy, which kept him chained, as it were, to a homeless and rabid dachshund: he stared ferociously at all the attractive females, glowered down the front of their summer dresses and up their skirts, stripped to the flesh and carried off to his bed some ten or twenty waitresses a day. After dark, boredom and sexuality made him a prowler: he sat hopefully on the fringes of noisy, happy groups in bars, laughing at their jokes and hoping shamelessly that his enthusiasm would serve as an introduction. But the intolerable stink of loneliness was always detected by these sensitive people, who shut it out by hastily drawing into tighter phalanxes. He only came to know, and to dread, greying, drunken female
phantoms of the gay ’twenties who—dormant in alcohol through these hard years of social conscience, awaiting a glorious resurrection of Prohibition and Scott Fitzgerald—gladly threw their bitten arms around his neck and, screaming to their party, “Isn’t he a sweet boy? Darling, I love you for ever!” left a hot stew of Scotch in his nose, and fatty, crimson imprints on his lips and cheeks.

In haughtier hours he had managed to ignore the tourists and to dream, instead, of winning the love of those endearing figures that populate European novels: some marvellous old dame, who has suffered so harrowingly that wisdom glows through her furrowed patina; or a village priest, an old gentleman smelling of boiled cabbage and living with his housekeeper in amiable filth, sitting under an oil lamp over a shabby table cover, turning the pages of a worn Homer with black fingernails. But the living priest of Mell had turned out to be quite different: he existed to accommodate tourists as surely as telephone wires to accommodate birds of passage. He was young; his spotless robe bore the tag of the best dry cleaner in Tutin; he spoke fluent English and surprised the mothers of American children by talking knowingly about Superman and Dick Tracy. During the one conversation Morgan had with him the priest casually removed one of his eyes and polished it with a silk handkerchief. He had detached interest in this eye, which he explained was a real blessing, an artificial creation which synchronized perfectly with the movements of the other, all-seeing eye. Its life likeness, he explained, was due to a hunchbacked girl in Warsaw, who could copy the pupils, whites and irises of the sitter’s real eye with the skill of Filippo Lippi. Cyclopean clients applied to her from all over the world, the priest said; but she would consent to harmonize only the eyes of anti-Fascists: and the priest reeled off an extraordinary list of French, English, and American cabinet ministers who, thanks to this dedicated cripple, need never be suspected of looking two
ways: “she is an example to all of us who suffer from physical or mental handicaps,” said the priest. He lived in an electrified brick villa, and he invited Morgan to the next meeting of the camera club he had founded. Many American visitors were members, and they exchanged “photo-notes” with him during their winter absence. “I must confess that I am a dyed-in-the-wool shutterbug,” said the priest, and his eyes lit mischievously in a synchronical twinkle. Morgan watched him walk away, and felt shocked to the bone; he would have expected such an attitude in a Protestant clergyman, but not in a man who seriously believed in God.

As the days had passed—days of walking, prowling, stops to converse with passing cats, grins at people in whom he had no interest, recollections of pleasures and fading dreams of achievements as Caesar or Casanova—he had lost so many illusions that only one refuge remained. The backstairs of the hotel were as attractive as they had been on his first morning; he invariably left and returned by them, feeling some energy and happiness as he tripped down their four flights, curiously re-examining the stacks of mops and polishers, the big drums of oil and wax. The chambermaids either looked puzzled at seeing him or broke into friendly smiles: when they smiled he smiled back with all his heart and, feeling sure that a braver man would have his way with them on the spot, only sighed and continued down the stairs to the ground floor. Here he paused, leaning against a wall from which he could watch, through a stone archway, the shining engines of the huge kitchen, the chefs and their assistants shouting about in their white aprons and tall hats: and he would exchange a nervous smile with a couple of boys of his own age who sat at a heavy table peeling dumps of vegetables.

But, only yesterday, as he took up his stand at this place, he seemed to see a signal pass from one man to another, until it was carried out of sight, and he heard an invisible man call
out to somebody. Next minute, one of the manager’s assistants, dapper in his black suit and stiff collar, came picking his way through the kitchen, and stood in front of Morgan. “I am sorry,” he said, with a little bow and a rather disdainful smile, “but these stairs and kitchen are not open to our guests. Is it that you became faint in elevators? No? Then you will forgive me if I request you, on behalf of the manager, to make use of them in future.” He was polite but his voice was firm, and Morgan, looking away from his strict eyes, saw that his expulsion had made a dramatic occasion. The chefs and the peelers had stopped work and were staring at him in cold, dead silence, as if they had long been waiting for the moment when the parasite would be removed from their bodies. He felt not only ashamed but afraid; he turned quickly toward the stairs; at which the manager’s assistant laughed tolerantly and said: “I do not mean you should trouble yourself to climb all the way up again”: at which Morgan had obediently turned back, passed by the icy servants, and walked out into the backyard, smaller and more desolate than he had ever felt before.

Tonight, the activity and excitement of the evacuation practice had at least distracted him; but now, while the gangs held together in the bar and the undertaker dreamed of what was coming to Senator Fitch, Morgan could only open his mother’s letter:

“… it is not that I am hysterical, Jimmy, but simply that in not so much as
replying
to my letters
you
are being rude, thankless and, as I see it, most foolish. I admit that my first letter was possibly dictatorial—and certainly tactless, since it called you back when you had barely arrived. But I have written twice since then in quite another tone, as if there were no differences of age and experience between us: in other words, I have written not as a mother but as one who is eager to help. In return you have written me precisely
one
letter, telling me of your arrival, and describing scenes in which I
could, to say the most, share your natural excitement at finding yourself in a totally new environment. This was some pleasure to me, but as the weeks pass with no further word, I begin to feel that perhaps
I
am the one who is being foolish—because I am allowing
you
to decide what and how I shall write to you, letting you be a dictator through your silence. I think this is both bad for
you
and more than
I
should put up with, and so now I am going to speak to you frankly, as most mothers would have done long ago.

“I want to know if you are well.

“I want to know what plans you have made for yourself about coming back—presuming that the plans
I
have suggested have not made the slightest impression. I credit you with enough sense to believe that it is not your intention to sit dreaming happily in the Polish Corridor until you are woken up by Hitler.

“Now I am going to go on and say something that I find more painful than you will care to believe. I think that for reasons unknown to me, some strain of blind stubbornness has come up in you, so that anything constructive automatically seems something to which you should pay no attention—it would not be the first time. And so, if I do not receive a cable with a statement of your plans, sailing-date, etc., in a few days, I shall have to appeal to someone who will be more concerned than you are with your welfare. So far, I have taken special care
not
to communicate my anxiety to Max, but it is to him that you may force me to turn—a course that will be as distasteful for him and for me as it will be humiliating for you. It is, incidentally, only thanks to him that I know you are still in existence. He, too, I believe, might, as your guardian, have written a word or two more than a few lines attached to a manuscript. But at least he
did
write those, despite the burden of his work.

“You will think this a hard, dictatorial letter. Perhaps you
will not forgive it. I must take that chance, my patience is exhausted.

“One question, in closing: Don’t you think it might
occur
to you that in following a personal whim that threatens to take up the time of two very busy adults, you are rating your individual happiness and ‘freedom’ somewhat higher than you should?”

If he had been at home instead of in Mell, smug instead of bored, this letter’s last paragraph would have been impressive, placed like a thong on the end of a whip to cut through adolescence’s noisy assertions of mature rightness and lay open the silent, rooted conviction that it is, and forever will be, inevitably and childishly wrong. But Morgan, clutching the letter, gave this paragraph no more than a nominal blush; boredom fled, and he recoiled from Divver’s door as if his mother had in one step covered four thousand miles and was at this instant pinning her eye on him through Divver’s keyhole. He thought abruptly: Well, this is final: I may as well pack up and go: what’s there to stay for, anyway? But this admission of failure and obedience to authority worked him into such a rage that the room turned simultaneously blood red and brilliant yellow and he had a terrifying feeling of being whisked into eternal space. Wholly against his will, his mind’s eye was invaded by the most humiliating spectacles: visions of the brooks and fields of his own country, homey vistas littered with inhabitants far more hoary and benign than the dames and priests of his European fantasies: they stirred him into such spasms of homesickness that he suffered a sensuous wrench in kicking them out and replacing them with visions of himself, blood streaming from his nose, resisting illusion and dependence to the last. The thought of Divver as his mother’s instrument made him cackle maliciously; an enjoyment which soothed him into a more normal state. But he was too harassed to sleep: perhaps, he thought, I should
have kept just a
handful
of pills for times like this: after all, there is nothing ignominious about waking up refreshed. But there were no pills; the clock struck one; he knew that only activity would put him in the right stupor; he left the room.