Mrs Grainger's Gift 30

By Ritchie Moore

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This work is intended for ADULTS ONLY. It may contain depictions of sexual activity involving minors. If you are not of a legal age in your locality to view such material or if such material does not appeal to you, do not read further, and do not save this story.
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Mrs Grainger’s Gift
PART XXX

Monday 17th August
Talks with teacher & priest. Catherine’s bath

Lebouc shook his head.

“No, Mathieu, do not apologise for differing in your belief, or considering others’ beliefs are mistaken. ‘Le droit d’opposition, tout ensensé qui est, est sacré’ – that is, ‘the right to opposition, however insane it might be, is sacred’. It’s perhaps an inflammatory remark, but said in all honesty by Denis Diderot, do you know him?”

“M. Bertin was talking about him—” Oh dear! What had he said? The teacher frowned, and his friend looked disconcerted.

“Ha, well, you may return my quotation to me! Bertin is, after all, entitled to his opinions. But the trouble with him is that he frowns on anyone else having a contrary opinion, do you see? He had a terrible difference with Père Michel here.”

He looked at his friend, who pursed his lips.

“It is true, Matthew, we quarrelled, I must call it that. You are a civil disputant, and you are polite in disagreeing with me,” said the priest. “Both of you are kind in treating my beliefs with respect, even though you have strong reservations about them. It is perhaps an English attitude? Though I must say your mistress….”

“No, Father,” said Catherine, “I must admit Mrs Grainger is quite open about her ideas on all sorts of things, and doesn’t care what others think. She’s like M. Bertin in that. She’s not rude about it though. She may think you’re a bit simple, foolish, to believe in God or Jesus and saints and things, but I don’t think she’ll say so.”

“Hm,” muttered Lebouc, “so she dissembles, does she? She pretends? That, if I may say so, is also almost a sin, like hypocrisy. I’m afraid I expect that of many English. But allow me to say that I have that opinion without knowing many English. And you children,” he said expansively, holding out his hands to them and smiling, “you are the sort who give the answer to such a prejudice.”

Matthew flushed and said only “Thank you.”

Catherine smiled her thanks, and suggested they stop talking about persons who weren’t present. “But maybe we can talk about writers, who aren’t here either, to defend themselves?”

“Hé, yes, Catherine. For instance, you were asking about Alphonse Daudet, his Lettres de mon moulin, weren’t you? The mill he had is not too far from here. Mind you, he didn’t write all of that by himself, he had a collaborator.”

“Yes,” chimed in the priest, “a fellow called Paul Arene. I’m not sure how far the collaboration went. I like to think the pieces that stir my heart are all Daudet, though.”

“Do you have any real favourites?” asked Catherine curiously.

He looked pensive. “La Chèvre de monsieur Seguin, perhaps…. Yes, a rather moving story about an old man who loses his goats to a wolf, and the seventh, his prized little one, called Blanquette, which means ‘Whitey’, I suppose, is out on the mountain and doesn’t want to come in.”

“Pardon, mon père. We should say first that the story is a cautionary tale told as a warning to a friend, who refuses to take a journalist position in Paris, because he’ll have no freedom, not be himself; he wants no constraints on his creativity.”

“Yes, Amiel, thank you. So Daudet tells this story about monsieur Seguin’s goat. He had had six goats, all of whom were eaten by a wolf when they went to the mountain. Anyway the goat meets a black chamois and they wander about on the mountain, and when dusk comes Blanquette is in no hurry to go home. She hears M. Seguin blow his horn but she doesn’t want to go back to be shut up again, she decides to stay on the mountain. M. Seguin is very sad, as you can imagine, while Blanquette is having a fine time enjoying her liberty. But of course along comes the wolf, and she struggles against him all night, but at daybreak she’s exhausted, and she is devoured.”

“Oh dear!” exclaimed the sympathetic Catherine. “And she was so happy to be free….”

“Yes, Catherine, but the moral is there, or rather the moral question. The friend is warned that being unfettered may have consequences. It is sometimes better to accept constraints, to submit to rules, and in so doing live in security, than to want to be free at any price, and risk being eaten like M. Seguin’s goat. It’s a clear choice: be shut up in safety, or free and in danger?”

“That is one of the stories that pretends to be a popular tale of Provence. Daudet says, how does it go? – If you’re ever down there, all our people will tell you they know all about – he says it in Occitan – la cabro de moussu Seguin, que se battégue touto la neui emé lou loup, e piei lou matin lou loup la mangé.”

“Oh!” said Catherine, “that’s lovely! I understood it all! And that’s your wonderful Occitan, the langue d’oc as they call it.”

“Yes, Catherine!” said Lebouc in pleasure. “And Daudet thereby is making a statement about the story, and about the language itself. It reminds me of a later story, one of my own favourites, because it features a schoolmaster.”

“Oh,” said Matthew, “tell us, please!”

“It’s in his later collection, Monday Stories, published about 1873 or so, and it’s one I always recommend, called La dernière classe, ‘The Last Class’, all about a boy who gets to school late, but he isn’t punished for it, as he expects to be. The master is dressed in his finery as for a special occasion, and the boy is surprised to find a lot of adults there, old men too, and the reason is soon apparent: the schoolmaster gives them their last French lesson. For from now on they will be educated in German.”

Matthew sucked in his breath. “This was after that war, in, when was it—”

“The war of 1870, which was lost by France, and so Bismarck was able to acquire Alsace and Lorraine, and so on. So the story, like the others in that collection, is a poignant reminder of that awful time. The language of the area was French, but Alsatian, which is the local Germanic patois, and German itself, were tolerated. But in 1871 it came under direct control of Berlin, under the Kaiser, and German was the only language for nearly fifty years. It was ceded to France again with the Treaty of Versailles.”

“That must have been heart-wrenching for them all. Did you say the old men were there too?”

“Yes, Catherine, and I find it very … moving, to be told how they all join in the lesson, regretting, like the young boy, how they’ve neglected their language in the business of living or just enjoying themselves. The teacher talks to them solemnly about this, praising the French language, and he quotes Mistral on that point.”

“Mistral?” said Matthew. Père Michel smiled to instruct the boy in his local culture.

“Ah Mathieu, you don’t know him. A great poet, who got the Nobel Prize for Literature twenty years ago, who had the same name, ‘Masterly Wind’, as the fierce cold wind that blows down on us in the spring and winter from the north-west. It’s powerful, it can reach fifty kilometres an hour. I think you would call it … thirty miles an hour, a rather noticeable speed. Anyway he lived up to that coincidence by being a fresh wind that blew to liven up and indeed revive the culture of Southern France. He founded a society for promoting the local language, and published a grand epic poem in … 1859 it would be. It’s a tragic love story about a girl named Mireio.”

“Oh! But that’s the same—”

“Yes, Matthew, Pascau’s daughter is named after her. It translates as ‘Marvel’, I would say.”

“Anyhow,” continued Lebouc, “in the story about the little Alsatian boy, the teacher quotes Mistral, without naming him however, to the effect that an enslaved people have the key to their prison as long as they hold on to their language. How does it go, Michel?”

The priest looked into the distance and rolled the exotic syllables off his tongue.

“Car, de mourre-bourdoun qu'un pople toumbe esclau,

Se tèn sa lengo, tèn la clau

Que di cadeno lou deliéuro.

“Which means in standard French, ‘Car, face contre terre, qu’un peuple tombe esclave, S’il tient sa langue, il tient la clé Qui des chaînes le délivre.’ Now in English, ‘Even if the face is bowed down to the earth, when a people falls into slavery, if it holds on to its language, it holds the key that will deliver it from its chains.’”

“Yes,” said Matthew, “especially if it’s Provençal!”

Leboud smiled. “You know perhaps that it preceded what we call French now – the language of Paris and the court took over. But the langue d’oc was the first literary language of Europe, after Latin of course. Mistral deserved all the praise he got. Lamartine, his contemporary, called him a genius, and said his epic would live for centuries.”

Matthew shrugged. “I’m sorry I’ve never heard of him. Or La—what? Lamartine?”

“Do not castigate yourself, my son,” said the priest. “You’ve not been lucky enough, that’s all. And we don’t know all the British poets! Hé, Amiel, why don’t you recite some? ‘Le Lac’ for instance?”

The teacher obliged, and the children were pleased to find that they understood practically everything, and relished the end.

“Yes,” said Matthew, “it’s a great ending – have I got it right? He’s disappointed the lake hasn’t preserved that night of love, and he says he hopes the groaning wind….”

Catherine took it up. ”Let the wind in its moaning, the reeds which are sighing, let the light perfumes of your balmy air, let everything one hears, and sees and breathes, let everything say: ‘They have loved!’

“Oh yes, let everything say they have loved.” She looked at her lover, and he flushed as he caught her eye. The two men looked at each other and smiled in understanding.

“Oh, what’s the time?” Catherine asked anxiously. “I have to see the doctor. No, I’m not ill, it’s a standard sort of thing.”

“I’ll go with her if you don’t mind, my friends. It’s been good talking to you. See you soon.”

They were waved off and Lebouc sighed. “Ah, Michel, Michel, old friend! They are in love, and I fear for their future in that woman’s clutches! What can anyone do?”

“Just remember the words with which Monte Cristo ends, Amiel: Wait and Hope.”

While Catherine was being attended to by the willing boys at the surgery, a process that for some reason was mercifully short that day, Matthew browsed in the library and read a newspaper in the little café. They had thought about skipping the appointment, but somehow knew Mrs G would be told, and be furious. So there Catherine was, enduring yet another shameful exploration, and when they met he could tell by her eyes and her cheeks that it had been just as awful as before. She smiled wryly at him and merely said it would be her turn to fret the next day, and think of his mortification. They journeyed home in a resigned sort of gloom that a good game of chess tried its best to dispel.

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Tuesday 18th August

A short bath and a merry one; later, visitors, and a pleasant musical evening

Matthew learned to his relief that Fauré couldn’t manage him that day, not entirely anyhow. Genevieve told him that he’d get just a quick going-over, like his companion the day before, and peremptorily ordered him to strip.

“Here?” he asked in surprise, looking round at the waiting room.

“Yes,” she said, “why not?”

“But, it’s, it’s public,” he stammered. “What if someone comes in?”

“It’s the only space there is,” she said. “The bathroom through there is being used for something else, so it’ll have to be here. Strip.”

With a sigh he started to undress, and looked at her in curiosity as she brought out a very small bath, practically only a basin, and disappeared. By the time she came back with a kettle of hot water he was naked and sitting on a couch, concealing his genitals with a magazine. She laughed and told him to get up and get ready. “You will stand in the bath,” she said, “while you are washed all over, then you will sit down, yes, you will have room, and I will add some salts to the water. Then after twenty minutes you will come out to be dried, and sent home. That is all we can manage to do today. Do you understand?”

He pursed his lips and nodded. “Yes,” he said wearily, “I understand.”

“Fine! Well, come and stand in the bath. It is hot but not too much.” As it turned out, and he stood there looking at her rebelliously while she fetched a cloth. Then the door opened.

He quailed as half a dozen girls came in, talking among themselves, then giving little shrieks of amusement when they saw him standing in that ridiculous little bath. They had come, it seemed, just to visit their friend (by chance? he doubted it), and were content to sit down and chat while she busied herself at the pleasurable task (as she assured them it was) of washing him all over. Of course they were all eying him lecherously, and didn’t bother to hide it. He couldn’t hide from them too well, and could only hope this ‘short’ treatment would really be that. They pointed out parts of him they hadn’t seen washed, and the saucy girl satisfied them by going over those again (and again). His penis had extended itself, as he knew it would, till it seemed a tingling twenty centimetres long (as one pert miss declared), so of course it should be measured, just to settle the argument. Matthew had the absurd idea that that must be equal to ten inches or something, and tried to work out the equivalence. Genevieve went off to fetch a measuring tape, leaving him to the bawdy mercies of her friends, who stood up to surround him and try the washcloth themselves. This activity, conducted with broad grins and cheeky asides, made his erection throb a little more, and when Genevieve returned he was almost disappointed to be stopped from ejaculating. But the prick had to be measured, and by God they all wanted to do it. The solution was naturally for each of them to do it, and one after the other they took hold of his quivering tool and measured its length, though the number in centimetres meant nothing to him. The last hand at his member was the last straw however, and he came, yelling in shame (and oh God yes in pleasure), while they watched and applauded.

“Good!” said the student nurse, “Now you sit down. But first I think we remove the dirty water. So step out on to the mat here, for a moment.” He did so, and one of the girls picked up the bath to throw out the water, a friend opening the door to the street. Matthew protested at the chance of exposure, but they hushed him, laughing at his modesty.

The water was ejected, and the pack surged to the door, Matthew shrinking behind his hands, and the girls made a great game of nearly putting him out on the street. Just then two mothers with toddlers approached and made to enter. The girls led Matthew back and settled down as the women took seats and stared incredulously at the naked boy, who was hiding behind some of the teenagers. Genevieve explained to them what was going on as she poured more hot water into the bath and strewed some salts and herbs in, and they looked at each other and laughed, starting a conversation among themselves and looking from time to time at the bath proceedings with careless amusement.

Matthew was brought forward and told to sit down in the herbal bath, which he managed to do, much to his disbelief, but he did indeed fit his hips snugly into the basin, as he thought of it. His position however was less than modest, for Genevieve made sure his genitals landed up between his thighs to be immersed in the liquid, and they were only too patently obvious to anyone looking.

So there he was for twenty minutes, the girls looking at his exposure and grinning, the mothers treating him as a droll piece of furniture, and he in constant terror of more interruptions from casual visitors. Which of course did materialise. The nurse came in to collect one of the women and her child, and the other stood and stretched, explaining to her daughter in the local patois that the boy wasn’t taking a shit, he was being given a little bath, and she laughed, which did not improve Matthew’s self-confidence. Then another couple of girls came in, to laugh and make more comments, and in fact the blushing boy was astounded at the sang-froid with which they all joined in a conversation about him. The second mother was called, and she left, casting a gleaming eye on the ridiculous scene, and then the girls were free to make scurrilous remarks (only half understood) about the nude plaything and his adorable attributes.

Then Mlle Lefevre appeared with a piece of paper which she shook at him as she addressed Genevieve. “I am much too busy,” she said, “to deal with this. You are performing your duties very competently, Geneviève, so I will leave it up to you. Your friends may want to assist. Here’s the instruction.” She looked at him and he asked “What?”

“It is the collection of a specimen of your sperm,” she said matter-of-factly, ignoring the sudden crimson that bloomed on his face, “as Dr Fauré already explained, did he not? Right.” She left, and he looked up at the girls around him and shivered. He couldn’t avoid it, after he left the bath he would be deliberately aroused to orgasm to deliver a specimen of his … sperm, his sperm, for God’s sake! At the hands of these girls, all around his own age, all eager to see his nakedness, his balls, his prick, to see him come, oh Christ! It had happened before so many times, but this was another audience, and for fuck’s sake why did they get away with it? Why did Fauré let him be manhandled like this? Surely not just to keep in the good graces of the lady of the local estate?

But his thoughts were interrupted by being hauled out of the tiny bath to be dried. They all joined in, naturally, and they all had a chance to feel him up, though Genevieve warned them not to make him too excited yet. She watched very carefully and stopped them when it seemed he was about to explode. Then she let them start again, and then again stop just short of orgasm. This awful technique he had suffered before, and it was just as excruciating, although he admitted to himself that somehow the knowledge that he would ultimately come quite copiously and very gratifyingly made it unbearably bearable.

At length Genevieve produced a graduated beaker and held it up to their eyes. “This is what we’ll use,” she said, “to collect his ejaculate. The doctor will examine it under his microscope to see how healthy it is, how active the sperm are, and so forth. So now we can bring him to his climax. Oh dear!”

Her exclamation was due to her seeing that his erection had decreased to a noticeable extent, and they all looked at his penis, now at half-mast, as he thought of it. It was still excited, however, and when they laid their hands on him it perked up satisfyingly, though they insisted on making sure by taking him to the door and exhibiting him to the world out there, Nicole pushing two of her fingers into his rectum to ensure total erection. He moaned as he saw the folk passing by, and the imminent discovery of his nudity created a full and heroic hard-on. He was pulled back to give Genevieve room to hold the beaker to his penis, and the others applied themselves to various parts of his quivering bareness, till he came with a yell that caused someone outside to pause and look in the door. Oh God, he thought, what will they think? He shut his eyes, and opened them suddenly when he heard a girl (of course) yelling “O my God! What are you doing?”

This caused him to spasm again and spurt forth, as if in salute, another gout of sperm, at which the girl laughed and repeated “My God, what a sight! What a spectacle!”

Genevieve looked up at her and brandished her beaker. “Yes,” she said laughing, “see what he’s produced!”

The girl, evidently known to most of the bawdy crew, was invited in, and introduced (how ridiculous!) to the bashful boy as Colette, a fourteen-year-old who had heard about the naked English boy but hadn’t been lucky enough to see him. Now she did, and she came up to him and stared quite openly at his genitals, now drooping and spent. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “it really is. Not like some.”

“Oho,” joked Genevieve, “do you mean that brother of yours, or who else, eh? Have you been spying on the boys in the urinal, or at the school baths?”

Colette blushed, still looking at Matthew’s penis, and replied “N-no, of course not! I mean, I have seen Robert’s zizi, and it’s too small, you know, it’s a measly little thing, and besides, it’s so hairy! This one is nice and … attractive, that’s all!”

The others laughed and agreed, some evidently filing away the information about her brother. Then they seized Matthew and rapidly got him into his clothes, kissed him (with a stealthy hand to his ballocks) and pushed him out that open door into the sunshine, where he saw there were a few more girls gathered, who had evidently been peeking in the door. One of them called to Genevieve, asking when the boy would be back. “In a couple of days, I expect,” she replied, with a grinning glance at her victim. He walked off with his eyes on the ground and tried to ignore the comments of the crowd. Yes, he thought with a shudder, I’m sure Mrs G wants me to come back, and Catherine as well, for more humiliation. But am I getting used to it? Is it becoming just an ordinary expected part of my life? Of our life? God, don’t let me just get inured to it. That’d be admitting defeat. As long as we resist, as long as we still shiver in shame, for goodness sake! she hasn’t won, we’re still our own selves. Is that silly? Oh Christ! Just let me get back to the estate and Catherine, and we’ll comfort ourselves. For that, it might be worth the price. Or is that even sillier? All right. “Modestine, take me home.” The donkey nodded, and off they went.

.

A large car drew up at the front gate and Mireio went out to see the visitors. She returned with two young men, talking in speedy French, explaining that Madame was not at home, but they were welcome to come in. Matthew looked at the pair in astonishment. “Hello!” he said, “welcome to Provence! It’s Mr Bator, and Damian – I’m sorry, I forget your name.”

The boy smiled and put out his hand. “Collins,” he said. “But call me Damian, please, and I’ll call you Matthew, if I may. Tadeusz told me how you heard us making love at the party. So the ice is broken!”

“Oh, certainly,” said Matthew, blinking “How do you do, Mr Bator?”

“You’d better call me familiarly too, Matthew,” said the other with a companionable smile. “We’re practically intimates! It’s Tadeusz. No, really, call me Tadeusz. My pet name is—”

“Tadzio!” cried Damian, “But that’s our own name between ourselves.”

Matthew smiled as he shook hands. “Tadeusz, Damian. Mrs Grainger isn’t here, so I welcome you to the estate. Are you on a tour, or what? No, come along, we’ll have tea, unless you want something stronger. Wine, maybe?”

“Wine, certainly,” said the boy, smiling in his turn. “Then you can show us around.”

“Of course. But come through. Mireio!”

The girl appeared, and he tried his French. “Du vin, s’il vous plaît, pour ces messieurs, Merci.”

She grinned and said “At once, Matthew!”

They settled down in wicker chairs and as they got out cigarettes Matthew explained his presence, and that of the girls. When he mentioned Catherine, the guests smiled in recollection, and Matthew realised that that would be the reaction of all who met her for the second time, and felt rather troubled. Still, it couldn’t be avoided. He reminded himself that the pair had probably become lovers, and he couldn’t be jealous. Mireio appeared with the wine, and all helped themselves. Bator told him they were travelling to Spain after being in the liberated Poland and the new state of Czechoslovakia.

“Can you speak those languages?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Tadeusz. “I’m Polish with a Hungarian father, which helps in Eastern Europe, and I learned French and German at home and at school, besides your normal Latin and Greek.”

“Oh,” said Matthew, “I wish I understood all those languages, it must be nice to be able to travel about and speak to the natives. Here I try and speak French to Mireio, she’s the nice girl you met, and she’s very patient with me, but she appreciates I think that I’m trying my best to speak her language. Catherine is better than I by a long chalk. But I envy you your … linguistic virtuosity.”

“I’m lucky, that’s all, mostly anyway,” said the other. “Damian here is better at the classics and Romance languages, Italian, Spanish, but I must say he’s absolutely at sea in Hungarian.”

“Well,” said the boy with a pout, “it’s an utterly impossible language, with no connection whatever to civilised tongues like French or even Russian.”

“Ah yes,” said his friend, “Damian is pretty good at Russian, he sings those songs you hear in the cafés in Paris, from the émigrés, like ‘Dark Eyes’. Have you heard it? You have been to Paris, I hope, hmm?”

Matthew flushed a little as he recalled the proceedings at the Vermeil. “Yes,” he said, “but those songs, I’ve heard them sung in the streets. There was a chap with a balalaika on the Rue Moscou, coincidentally, singing away. I don’t know if it was this ‘Dark Eyes’, though.” Damian broke into song, and after a minute Matthew said “Yes, that’s the very one! You sound just like he did.”

“I hope so,” said the other, “I’ve been told I pronounce the damn thing like a real denizen of St Petersburg. Or whatever they call it now.”

“Leningrad, of course,” said his friend, “‘the city of Lenin’. They renamed it last year. They keep renaming things. Like everyone else, it’s a common habit. Of the victors, I mean. Still, it’s a bit sad really to think of all the Russian refugees, losing everything and fleeing here, to sing in the streets for a few francs. It reminds me of the dispersal of the scholars of Constantinople when the Turks came in. War and revolution are not kind to culture, whether it be scholarship or the arts….”

“Hey, listen,” said Matthew, “d’you think you could sing us some things, later, I mean? I hope you’ll stay for a bit. Are you in a hurry to be on your way?”

Before they could reply Catherine and the girls came in from a shopping expedition, to be greeted and introduced. Catherine at once said “You will stay, will you? We’ve plenty room. I’m sure Mireio won’t mind another two plates and sheets. Please say you will.” They broke into smiles and accepted, and Matthew was pleased at Catherine’s typical generosity. They explained things to Mireio, who said of course, they were welcome. There was a spare room, and a spare bed, and all was well. Matthew looked at Bator and smiled at the realisation that the two would be happy to sleep together. The older man raised his eyes to meet his and smiled with a faint blush, and nodded as he appreciated the boy’s understanding.

They spent that evening in pleasant conversation, and Mireio produced a guitar, which she played with some artistry, singing some local folk songs which charmed the others. Damian sang his Russian songs, to Tadeusz’s accompaniment, and taught them the chorus of a song of the barge haulers of the Volga, which amused Jennie and Amelia no end, though Damian chided them, it being quite a serious song. Matthew sang “The Lass of Richmond Hill”, and Catherine, though claiming to have neither voice nor repertoire, gave a good and moving rendition of “The Last Rose of Summer”, which had been a favourite of her uncle, whose mother had been Irish.

“D’you know the story about that?” asked Bator. “It’s a thoroughly Irish song, the words by Thomas Moore, the tune an old Irish air, adapted by Moore. The composer von Flotow heard it and assumed it was an old anonymous – traditional – folk song, and so he appropriated it and gave it to his heroine Martha to sing in his opera. That was in 1847 I think. The audience went wild, we’re told, and encored it, and called for the author. Von Flotow naturally accepted the acclaim. Moore was still alive, though – he died about four or five years later – and complained bitterly. I don’t know what the dénouement was – he should have been able to claim a lot of royalties.

“But come, Catherine, you have a lovely voice. Don’t deny it. Please sing something else.”

She looked at him and asked “Do you know that one by Balfe, from The Bohemian Girl?”

“Yes!” he said with a smile, “you mean this?” He played a few notes, and she nodded, then started, to his florid arpeggio accompaniment, looking over at Matthew and smiling.

“I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,
With vassals and serfs at my side,
And of all who assembled within those walls,
That I was the hope and the pride.

I had riches too great to count, could boast
Of a high ancestral name;
But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you lov'd me still the same,

That you lov'd me, you lov'd me still the same,
That you lov'd me, you lov'd me still the same.”

They listened with smiles, Mireio looking at her and her boy and saying to herself How dear he is to her! And he is drinking in her love song with pride and … love, yes! They are a beautiful pair. God bless them. And you, Holy Virgin, bless them too, let all be well for them! The company applauded, with sentimental sighs all round.

Matthew had an idea. “Hey, Catherine, love, d’you think you could sing that old German song?”

She smiled and said “Oh yes, it’s quite sweet. But Tadeusz doesn’t know it.”

He asked what it was, and on hearing about her uncle said “I’m sure if you sing it over I’ll catch on. I’ve seen the Middle High German words, of course, so I’ll be able to follow your translation. Walther did have a tune for it, but I’ve no idea what it would be. This,” he said to Mireio in French, “is a grand old poem from the greatest of the Minnesingers, a wonderful song put in the mouth of a girl who’s remembering, and rejoicing over, her first love experience. Just start, Catherine, and I’ll follow you.”

She smiled and started the old song, and after a moment Tadeusz started to accompany her with delicate arpeggios, smiling greatly and no doubt thinking of the original words as he played. They all sat entranced, Matthew feeling a great outpouring of emotion, for he took it quite personally. Catherine was glancing at him with possessive pride, and he knew she also had a private sense of entitlement to the story. The last verse summed it up.

“If any knew how he did lie
with me (now God forbid!), I'd die.
What was it that he did with me
May none e’er know but he and I,
And a little singing bird;
Tandaradei!
I’ll trust him not to say a word.”

The others applauded, and Damian commented that her uncle’s tune fitted the words very nicely. “It’s difficult,” he said, “I realise, to get a translation that fits a tune that fits the original words! He made a good job of that.”

Catherine thanked him on her uncle’s behalf, and Tadeusz seconded the praise, turning aside the others’ pleased comments on his improvised accompaniment. Then the old pendulum clock on the wall chimed, and Catherine said “Oh, we really should get to bed. D’you mind?”

“Oh no, of course not,” said Damian. “We mustn’t keep you up. And Mireio will be up earlier than the rest of us, I think.”

She looked over at him and smiled. “All right, then,” said Matthew. “Off to bed, Thank you for the entertainment, and merci, Mireio, pour … pour votre … playing le guitar.”

She laughed and nodded, and put her instrument aside. Off they went to their beds, and Matthew smiled to see Tadeusz and Damian making their way with an arm round the other’s waist, the younger boy looking up in affectionate trust to his friend. He kissed Catherine goodnight, and lay down in his own cool bed still smiling. That had been so enjoyable, so … normal! He ruefully wondered about a resumption of Lydia Grainger’s despotic humiliations when she returned from Paris. And Catherine would have one of those baths tomorrow. With a sigh he composed himself to sleep, and dream perhaps of another pleasant time with Catherine and other … nice … people….

=====================================================================

Wednesday 19th August

Converse after breakfast

“You ask about my name,” said Tadeusz. “Well, it’s the Polish form of Thaddeus, who’s in the Bible as a disciple. That itself is probably Greek, and ultimately will be Hebrew I suppose. It’s quite a favourite name in Poland. A number of famous (more or less) people have it. There’s Kościuszko, for instance, who was a patriot, opposing the Russians, who were busy dismembering Poland, and he helped the American colonists – he was a General in their Revolution. He’s a real hero to Poland, and Reymont has a novel about him.”

“Who? A Polish author?”

“Sorry, Catherine, yes, Władysław Stanisław Reymont, who got the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, mostly perhaps for his prose epic, you might say, of 1905 or so. Called Chlopi, ‘Peasants’, all about village life, in four volumes, told with realism, in a language modelled on the peasant speech. I believe it’s being translated into English this year. The Swedish poet Anders Österling proposed him for Nobel laureate, last year, and he was telling me that he was pleased to be successful, against a field of other contenders, namely Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy. Formidable rivals!”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Matthew. “He has to be a great writer, then!”

“Ah,” said Catherine, “and I notice that they’re all men!”

Bator smiled ruefully. “It’s true, Catherine, it’s just a historical fact. Mind you, the few women who are noticed in history books have to be utterly extraordinary, and that doesn’t always happen. I mean,” he said, unscrambling his syntax, “women have got to be twice as good to be noticed in this male-oriented world, and all too often they’re viewed as uppity ambitious types who dare, laughingly, to broach the masculine citadel. I can be somewhat objective about this since in a manner of speaking I stand outside both camps. Or maybe have a foot in each of the camps. However that is, the record is clear: there have only been a handful of female Laureates since Marie Curie twenty years ago. And our heroes are usually male too.”

“What about your namesake, Tadzio?”

“Oh, I suppose I must boast of another famous Tadeusz, namely the one called Pan Tadeusz, which literally means Sir Thaddeus. He’s the hero of a great poem – epic actually – by our national poet, Adam Mickiewicz.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Tadeusz! Again, I don’t know about him. He’s Polish, is he?”

“Yes, Matthew, a very great poet, let me say. He’s not well known in the west, rather like the poet of the Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko.”

“Ouch!” said Matthew. “All these terribly foreign names! But what did he write?”

“His collection is called Kobzar,” said Damian, “which means a musical instrument, it’s like calling your poems ‘Harp’ or ‘Lute’, I’d say. And he’s a fighter for his people against those imperialistic Russians, again. He and Mickiewicz are equals, in many ways, of Pushkin, who’s the national poet of Russia. And who betrays in his writing (and his behaviour I suppose) a spirit of freedom from autocracy, like the others.”

“That makes me wonder,” said Matthew, “about … questions of national identity – is there a national poet for France? I suppose Shakespeare is the sole contender for an English figure, and Burns is the only name for Scotland?”

“Walter Scott?”

“Well, Damian, hmm, for a novel or two, but…. I’m afraid he’s only got a couple of lyrics maybe, but I don’t know enough about him I’m afraid. In America, now, I’d suggest two prose writers – if we’re accepting the novel, that is: Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn) and Melville (Moby Dick).”

“Two very different kinds of book,” said Bator, “and interesting choices! The one is a sort of apotheosis of America, don’t you think (antebellum, naturally), and the other is a transnational story, surely, about personalities and human endeavour, and an obsession – not necessarily an American story at all – which disqualifies it!”

“What about that other one that came out last year? It’s called Billy Budd, Foretopman.”

“Sorry, I haven’t seen that. What is it?”

Collins smiled. “It’s a story about a sailor who’s executed for killing an officer, during the Napoleonic wars. Don’t look like that, Tadzio! Melville didn’t really finish it, so it’s a bit … incomplete, but it’s actually an engaging tale of duty and bravery and discipline and hatred. Yes, the officer hates Billy and provokes him to strike him. But under it all I sense something else. Claggart hates Billy because … he desires him.”

“Ah! But then….”

“Melville never published it because he was sure someone would guess its real point. And I bet folks will be reluctant to talk about this aspect – which makes the plot so much more plausible – because being a homo is illegal, it’s not only a sin, it’s a crime. And God knows when that will change.”

“But there are places that accept it, it’s not punished in France, the Code—“

“No, Matthew, I’m sorry,” said Tadeusz. “It is true that the mere fact of being homosexual is tolerated by the lawgivers, that what we do in our bedrooms (and even in the noon-day) are ignored, but a great many of the population are still bound in the chains of past ages, and so a family is split apart, your job is made uncomfortable, promotion never comes your way, your fellow-students laugh at you, your pupils distrust you, even fear you – oh, there’s lots can happen to you without even physically harming you – which happens too. I’m afraid it’s still safer in this enlightened country to be discreet. Of course if one is rich or powerful or a respected artist, say, one is left alone. André Gide is homosexual, and people still buy his books and invite him to parties. Jean Cocteau, likewise. While he was alive, they respected Raymond Radiguet, his lover.”

“Weren’t you telling me he was probably bisexual, Tadzio? After all, The Devil in the Flesh is about a fourteen-year old having an affair with a married woman, and you said it was really autobiographical!”

“True, Damian, but my point still applies. Anyway, enough of that. We were speaking of novels. But for poetry, now, I’d say America is not well off. Edgar Allan Poe? A genius, perhaps, as some say? Some good stories I suppose, a lyric or two. I admit ‘The Raven’ is quite memorable. And you probably have a tender feeling for it, Matthew! But the United States is young yet. What, only 150 years old next July! She hasn’t had a chance yet to show her powers. In fact I’d say that only now are we going to see any real flowering of her intellectual ability. There are new writers this century, I mean, some very exciting stuff. Prose and poetry, that is. What about that young man called … Ezra Pound, for instance? Do you know of him? No matter. I’m just forecasting a fulfilment of the American promise. Indeed, I tell you, this will be the century of America.”

“Because the centuries of Britain are past?”

“Maybe, maybe. Last century was the end of British dominance. Mighty names of course, right the way through the ten decades of the millennium since Beowulf.”

“Dickens, or who?”

“Hah! We could argue, I suppose, about relative worth, relative importance. But as the man said, when he was introducing a debate about the superiority of Dickens or Thackeray, he said ‘Gentlemen, we all swear by Dickens; but who the Dickens ever swore by Thackeray?”

They laughed and poured more coffee.

Catherine left in mid-morning to see the doctor about a bath, which was the same as before, except that some more boys turned up, the same lot that attended to her infection. They lost no time in telling the others about it, and so they all wanted to try it. They asked Fauré, who pondered for a bit and finally said “Why not? We merely substitute the herbal unguent for the last bath I had planned.” So in essence it was a repeat of that awful session where they all put their fingers to her perineum and her arse, her bumhole and her tits, and concentrated on her vulva and her clit. Again and again….

After a restorative sleep and a bite of lunch she was herself again, wondering however if she could somehow cultivate an amnesia, to forget all this? Matthew smiled at her and gave her a kiss, which made up, as she thought it would, for a lot of her torment.

In the afternoon they had a pleasant ramble with Tadeusz and Damian, leaving the others to help Mireio, which they preferred to walking miles with company they actually despised – though they had the opportunity to dilly-dally with the gardening boys, who arrived just then. The girls were amused to learn a few words of French like chatte and foutre and con, and even the same in the local dialect, which when they began yelling them out made the boys laugh outrageously.

Later that evening the guests left to a flurry of kisses and waving of hands. Catherine looked sadly at Matthew and sighed. “I don’t know if we’ll – I’ll – ever see them again. Oh Matthew, somehow I feel things are going to … I’m going to be … oh hell, I don’t know. But it’s something like a feeling of impending doom. Do you have any idea what I mean?”

“Actually yes, Catherine, for I’m anticipating the day we are parted and I go back to Crossley’s – to my family, alright – but away from you, and you’re going back, I’m pretty sure, to that hellhole in Cumberland. Won’t you?”

“Yes,” she said sombrely. “That black day is getting nearer and nearer, as if we’re looking at a storm approaching, and have no shelter handy. Oh, I don’t know … we’ll just have to ride it out somehow. If we can. If we can….”

=====================================================================

Thursday 20 August

Matthew’s bath.

He was taken to the main bathroom this time, with about twenty girls around him enthusiastic about his arse and his prick. It was the same as Catherine had endured the day before: using the herbal unguent in place of the last bath, and all were very pleased about that, for all could take a part, each lovingly smearing those handsome loins with the ointment, till he was induced to spout forth that glorious fountain of his manly juice, as Genevieve poetically expressed it. His mind was in something of a fog, wondering in a fragmentary sort of way when he’d be coming back for more of the same. In two days? What had Mrs G said? Oh fuck, does it really matter? The bitch is dreaming up new torments I bet, in Paris, egged on by that bastard Raoul. Fuck her! he screamed silently, fuck …. Oh God, just let me get through this day.

“Well, ma chère, have you done all that business with the lawyers?”

“Yes, Raoul, all’s settled. Now I’ve nothing in mind except enjoying what’s left of my … stay. Tonight for instance, there’s that new dancer at the Moulin, and a film, perhaps? And later, mon amour, we take a refreshing bath together and try that hash you told me about. There’s much to see. What did Chesterton say?

‘For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.’

“Yes,” she muttered, “by way of Kensal Green.” She laughed behind closed lips and looked at him fondly. “I know you don’t know what that means, lover mine, but it doesn’t matter. Not yet. All right! Let’s put on the glad rags and go out on the town. Paint it red, white and blue. Like the Union Jack and the tricolour. Bien! Allons-y!”

====================================================================

Friday 21st August

Matthew gets a sponge; a troubling message

The telephone rang, and Matthew answered. It was the cheerful Italian film producer, full of bonhomie and ideas. “Matthew! Yes, it is I, Signor Morelli. Is your charming lady at home?”

“No, Mr Morelli, I’m afraid she’s gone to Paris. I think it’s to do with her health, actually….”

“Ah, that is unfortunate. I trust all will be well. But it is you with whom I wish to talk.”

Matthew looked accusingly at the receiver. “Me?” A horrid suspicion came into his mind.

“Yes, my boy. It concerns those other pictures I spoke of, with golden showers and other scenes to attract the custom of those special interests, you remember.”

“But – Did Mrs Grainger say it would be all right?”

“Not in so many words, no. But she did promise full cooperation, you know. She was genuinely interested in all my productions, and keen on my using you and Gloriana as subjects.”

He sighed deeply. “All right, sir. I suppose you want us to come over there soon?”

“It doesn’t have to be today; but the sooner the better. Tomorrow will do, however, and if I am assured you are coming I will be able to prepare my materials, and the other actors. So may I expect you tomorrow?”

“Er, but sir, I’ll have to ask Glori—Catherine, please. Do you — wait, please hang on, and I’ll be back.”

He laid the receiver down and went off to peek in on his lover, who was lying on her bed with a pained expression, her hand on her belly, and she nodded to him as if to say “It’s here.”

He nodded in understanding and went back to the ’phone.

“Sir, she’s in bed, she isn’t well, she can’t be photographed–”

“What? Ah, I think I understand, she is having her period, sta in periodo mestruale, no? Well, that is all right, she can come tomorrow or the day after, you can come today. Or at least tomorrow, no?”

“Em, yes, I suppose I can maybe come later today. Maybe I can telephone this afternoon, to tell you?”

“Si, si. I await your message. Ciao!”

He went through again, wondering if they could get out of this, to be consoled by Catherine, who needed sympathy herself, for her period had indeed come and she was troubled by a belly-ache. She looked up as he came into her room and with a flush of her own she showed him a little sponge.

His eyes widened as he said “Oh! That’s to put in your … vagina, to soak up your menses!”

“Yes,” she said, her flush deepening, “and I want you to put it in.”

He gasped. “Thank you, Catherine,” he said. “I’ll be very glad to. To help you, and to see your beautiful cunt again!”

She smiled. “Exactly. I thought you would.” She raised her dress and nodded to him, and he with eager loving hands drew down her knickers to bare her dear delta. He knelt before her and put a caressing hand to her slit, then gently parted her labia to expose her vagina. He carefully inserted the sponge in her and playfully flicked a finger at her clitoris.

She gave a delighted shiver, and said “Ah, my love, we’ll get back to that in a day or so. It bothers me today but it should be all right by tomorrow. For now, though—”

“For now,” he said, “we just think about it. Think about it long and hard.”

“How long?”

“Six inches!” he said, laughing.

“How hard?”

“Just you wait and see!”

They kissed and smiled, and he went to the main room to find a paper, putting off any discussion of Morelli’s planned humiliations. His French was improving, he thought, and maybe it wouldn’t be so long before he could read those naughty stories by Balzac. His pronunciation at least was a great improvement, though he’d only been in France six weeks, and Catherine had said he was maybe good enough to be taken for a Frenchman, albeit a slow-witted one, from a very distant part of the country. “French of Paris was to him unknow,” she’d said, laughing fondly. She herself had found that she could make out what was said if she listened hard enough, and could translate for him quite adequately, but she still spoke haltingly with some shyness, which the Parisians she spoke to had found charmant. Since coming to Vaulx, however, her conversations with the inhabitants in the village had improved her grasp no end, and Matthew likewise found himself getting quite at home. At the same time, reading a newspaper was still a bit of a struggle, and it took a while to get through one page. He’d found a French-English dictionary on a bookshelf in his room, which he treated as a boon companion, though it was quite old-fashioned, and it helped a lot.

He was halfway through an article about the banning in England of an American play called Desire Under the Elms, and intrigued to find it was a tragedy taken from the ancient Greek story of Theseus, when someone came to the door, and Mireio answered.

“Matthew!” Mireio called out as she entered the room. “There is a telegramme, from madame. See.”

He took the paper and read it with some astonishment. Mrs Grainger was telling them to pack up and return to Paris, in readiness to go back to England. They were to leave the very next day for Marseille, for a quick train ride to Paris, and meet up with Mrs G there. It was all very rushed, and he couldn’t understand why. School would be starting, of course. But why wasn’t Mrs G joining them here? All right. They didn’t have much luggage, at least. He heaved a sigh and set about packing things up. Catherine was feeling a lot easier, and the news of their departure probably hastened her recovery. A grieving Pascau was primed to convey them to the city very early on Saturday, and a telephone call to Morelli gave him the bad news, which quite devastated him. The children took a last trip to Vaulx to make their farewells to their friends; Père Michel and Amiel Lebouc shook their hands and kissed them, Matthew accepting their embrace with some sad humour.

Catherine looked at them and said “I can’t tell you how much we’ve enjoyed meeting you. I’m so sorry we’re going back. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to come back. But thank you for your friendship. We’ll miss you.” She kissed them again and sniffed back a tear. “Goodbye.”

Matthew waved farewell and smiled. The men nodded and smiled in return, and watched the cart take the young people away. Then they looked at each other and nodded seriously, and the priest sighed as he reached for the bottle. “A toast, Amiel! To them, to the two of them, our English children. Health! Good luck! The blessing of the good God!” The glasses clinked, the friends smiled, and breathed quiet prayers.

====================================================================

Saturday 22nd August

Paris again, and café talk

Their train was met by Bauvais, who didn’t bother to apologise for Mrs G’s absence, saying she’d see them the next day, and in the meantime he’d take them to a hotel.

“Oh! We’re not going to the apartment?” said Catherine in surprise.

“No,” he said shortly, “it’s occupied. This hotel is quite comfortable. You settle in and take another sightsee perhaps. There is an English bookshop you should visit, it is a favourite of madame. Oh, you’ll find things to do, I’m sure. Here, you might as well have this now.” He produced a wad of banknotes and doled them out. “That should buy you a meal or two till tomorrow morning. Madame will come to find you at ten o’clock.”

With that he convoyed them to a modest hostelry in the Rue Moscou, which made Matthew smile, for it was here that he’d heard that Russian song he’d told the boy lovers about. Then the poet left them to their own devices. Jennie and Amelia opted for staying in and lazing until tea-time, but Matthew and Catherine looked at each other, nodded, and went off themselves, saying they would find that bookshop and have a coffee and come back in time for a meal.

Matthew and Catherine came out of the English language bookshop with their purchases, in good humour, pleased to have discovered an Anglophone oasis in this cosmopolitan city.

“That chap talking to Miss Beach was Irish. Did you hear the accent?”

“Yes, Matthew, and I wondered if he was using it for a joke. He seemed rather … humorous, what can I call it, whimsical, yes. You couldn’t tell, though, from his expression, which was … sort of fierce. Frowning. And wasn’t he saying something about his book, that troubled him?”

“I wasn’t really paying attention, I was so busy looking at all the books and papers in English. We’ll have to come back. Maybe we can ask the lady – didn’t she have a nice welcoming manner? – what the book was. Oh God no, we can’t. But you’re right, he did look a bit forbidding, in spite of his humour. Sort of austere, proud. But maybe that’s because of his eyes. His glasses, and an eye-patch that made him look like a pirate.”

After a pleasant walk for a half-hour or so, enjoying the sights again, they came to a café-bar and decided to rest a bit and look at their purchases. They settled in to a table in a corner and ordered coffee. Once it arrived they took stock of the others.

In one corner of the room a young man of sixteen perhaps was sitting reading a book. In another a thin middle-aged woman who seemed to emulate a cubist portrait sat looking uncomfortable, smoking a perfumed cigarette in a fancy holder, while her companion, a stout lady in her forties, had a careless sort of smile on her face as she ate her snack.

At the next table a very old man (it seemed) was peering at a newspaper in an odd sort of alphabet, which Matthew finally realised was Hebrew. Over by the window where they had come in there sat in a very loose sort of posture a dirty-looking fellow in his thirties or so who was probably a manual labourer, and who gazed out of the window at the passing parade with an expression of melancholy.

At the table in the middle of the room lounged an athletic-looking man in his mid-twenties, maybe, with a little moustache. His female companion was about ten years older with red hair and a complacent look about her. From his speech he seemed to be an American, as did his girl. To her right sat a chubby fair-haired man who wore a constant expression of sardonic amusement as he turned his head to follow the others’ conversation.

At the other end of the table sat an older man with a greying beard, smoking a cigar, and to his right a plump gentleman with a clerical collar and rather artfully arranged hair, who spoke in a somehow fey and feminine voice. At the bar a pale-faced nondescript stood, toying with a glass of milky liquid, making quiet mutterings to himself and sometimes to his neighbour, who was distinguished by a mop of auburn hair and a rather big nose.

They were a motley sort of group, but half of them seemed to know each other, and there was a sort of bonhomie about them that broke barriers of diffidence, and they entered into conversation very easily. Catherine and Matthew drank their coffee and relaxed, listening to an exchange that this time was in English, mostly, and not drowned out by a crowd or the traffic.

The fair-haired man, whose name was evidently René, nursed his drink and continued the conversation they had evidently been having, addressing the older man with the beard.

“Speaking of Valentino, Max, I must say he strikes me as being too proud of his looks. I know people tell him he’s wonderful – as do all those film fanatics, it can’t be helped, but surely he doesn’t believe them?”

The red-haired woman laughed. “I don’t see why not,” she said. “We all like to think we’re irresistible, don’t we, honey?”

Matthew somehow got the idea she was baiting her man for some reason. A domestic or sibling tiff?

Her companion sipped his drink. “I guess that’s a human weakness,” he said with a trace of humour. “In order to rise above the herd, we must exaggerate our condition. But in films, now, which after all are projections of fantasy—”

“Yes, Ernest,” said René, “although they are taken too seriously half the time. That film was quite misleading. Like the book, I suppose, which seems to have been ridiculously popular. And unlikely, too! How the girl behaves, I mean. And the subject, now!”

The clergyman looked at him doubtfully. “What—”

“In the book, did you read it? She’s raped, several times, over a period of weeks! And in the film, for obvious reasons, it’s only suggested . But it’s there. She’s an independent woman, after all, a sort of Kate, you know, Shakespeare’s shrew!”

The man called Max drew on his cigar. “Yes,” he said, “and you know why that book is popular! And you know why that film is popular! It only suggests, but it’s suggestive! The men lick their lips, and the women squeeze their legs together and say Ooh, what if that were me!”

The plump woman dabbed a napkin to her lips and said “But doesn’t she actually come to love her seducer? After a while, I mean. She behaves just as Katherine does, which I’ve never really understood.”

“I don’t know, Agatha,” said the angular lady in the corner, “she puts up some resistance, at first anyway. She knows what he’s after, but refuses to undress. Then he comes back to her and says Well, am I to be your valet as well? In other words (and that’s the end of the scene) he is going to have to strip her himself. A rather hot moment, if I may say so. But the readers, and the cinema patrons, surely the women don’t want to be ravished, no matter the virile handsomeness of the man!”

“Who knows what women want?” said the American. “But I’ll tell you, they’re safe in the movie theatre, and a dream is only a dream. It fulfils a common fantasy – to be subdued, forced to take part in making whoopee, all sans guilt!”

“Who knows? I’ll tell you, Ernest, the bosses in New York and Hollywood – Mayer, Zukor, De Mille et cetera, they know, or think they know, what women want.”

“– But surely, that De Mille person – we all know what he wants! He knows what every man wants! Very scantily-clad females, no matter what the subject of the story, be it Egypt or the Ten Commandments!”

“Listen, I’ll make a prediction. Sooner or later the authorities will descend on the industry with a heavy hammer, like those axe-wielding prohibitionists, and force it to behave. There’ll be less of the bare legs and bosoms, less Theda Bara and ravishings by sheikhs in sheets!”

“Oh, I fervently hope not, Max. I quite like Theda Bara. She was quite good as Cleopatra. And all the others. Did you see Betty Blythe in The Queen of Sheba? Oh, those diaphanous costumes! Still, DeMille is rather good at what he does, and I’m sure he hasn’t hit his peak yet. I look forward to his next large project. He does have a wide sort of vision, doesn’t he?”

“Not really,” said the American. “In fact he only has one topic – lush scenery and women in various states of dishabille. He tries to be significant, but ends up being pretentious. He tries to be artistic, but ends up being merely shocking, managing to épater les bourgeois. But the public, mostly my crass American public, eats all that up. Huh!”

“But Americans don’t have a monopoly on crassness, for goodness sake. Nor the British, I hasten to add, though they can be awfully so…”.

“But what Max is saying is quite apt, quite possible, I mean that there’ll be some scouring of the Augean stables! Look at what’s been happening. You’ve had the Fatty Arbuckle affair, a farce combined with tragedy, you’ve had the sudden death of that actress, Olive Thomas, who died, let me remind you, of drinking a toxic medicine prepared for her husband’s syphilis. And he a matinee idol! The brother of Mary Pickford!…. You’ve had a real murder, for God’s sake, three years ago, that producer , William Desmond Taylor – and while all of that has nothing much to do with cinema as such, and Arbuckle was innocent, as the third jury said, and the murder was probably an attempt at robbery gone wrong, it just has to be too much for the crass American public. They may eat it up, Ernest, but the whited sepulchre says we don’t tolerate the shenanigans these people get up to – on enormous salaries, yet! Oh yes, Hollywood has quite a lot on its conscience.”

“Yet Valentino,” said the bony woman, “still has a personal reputation, hasn’t he? As has Douglas Fairbanks, and ... lots more. And there are degrees of sinfulness, as the Reverend Summers here can corroborate. Stan Laurel, now, is, I’m informed, living with a woman in sin, or call it common law. And there are others who never make any headlines.”

“Perhaps,” said the lugubrious one, “it’s because they are discreet!”

“What do you make of that Russian actor, that the press here keep on calling France’s answer to Valentino? I mean Ivan Mozzhukhin.”

“Who?” asked the red-haired woman, frowning.

“Ivan Mozzhukhin,” repeated the pale-faced man, looking in surprise, which faded when he realised she was probably American and not up to date on French enthusiasms.

“He’s Russian, yes, but he’s come to France, just a few years ago, and he quickly made his reputation, which he had, I mean his following, in Russia. He and his troupe fled the Bolsheviks. He made a rather curious film a couple of years ago now, called The Blazing Inferno, about a detective called Z….”

“I didn’t see that,” said the greybeard, “but I hear it was almost surreal in its plot and staging.”

“He was excellent in that film, The Queen of Spades, about ten years ago,” said the boy in the corner.

The old man nodded judiciously. “That was a better version than the one of ten years before, in 1906, which you probably haven’t seen,” he said. “It’s a good story, and deserves to be well told. The cinema is better than live theatre for producing ghosts and so forth.”

The stout lady squirmed shyly and asked what it was about. A ghost story?

“Yes,” said the clergyman, “an excellent tale by the Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin.”

“It’ll be poetically told, then,” said she.

“Yes and no,” he replied with a smile, “because Pushkin is one of those annoying people who write very simple – deceptively simple – verse and very spare prose. He’s very difficult to translate because of that. I mean, it turns out quite prosaically in English, and you say this fellow can’t be a poet! It’s not poetic, it’s not real poetry!”

The sad-looking man by the window nodded and contributed, “Turgenev tells that anecdote. He translated some of Pushkin into French for an acquaintance, who said exactly that, he said ‘Mais il est plat, votre poète!’ That is, flat, insipid, dull.”

“You can say the same for a lot that’s being written these days,” said the bony lady, “and Pushkin would seem to be before his time!”

“Hm!” exclaimed the red-haired girl, “that’s a fine comment, I must say! Ernest, what do you say?”

The man chuckled and nodded at the bony lady. “I hope you didn’t have me in mind,” he said. “But I’ll defend plain writing to the end. Some are plainer than others, of course. Let’s see, you can count Sherwood—“

“Oh, I think not, surely,” said the plump lady. “If you’re thinking of his Winesburg stories, I mean, aren’t they a bit mannered?”

“But they’re all mannered,” said the pale man at the bar. “Every one, mannered! We’re all mannered after some fashion. Particularly in this so-called Modernist age. In poetry too, so-called. In fact Mannerism (have I invented, or discovered, a new school?) – Mannerism has come into its own this century. You see it all round, so it’s reflected, mirrored, in the glass of verse, it can’t be otherwise. In fact Mr Hemingway’s prose goes for shortish declarative sentences, and that’s his manner. His verse is very similar. I suspect it’s because of his journalist training. Miss Stein goes in for repetition and a sort of circularity, and again that’s her manner. I’m not saying, mind you, that there’s anything wrong about it, about either of them, or even Mr Eliot’s curious patchwork of quotations in The Waste Land, like a literary collage from Hans Arp. It’s all Modernist, it’s all Mannerist.”

“But surely not dull,” said the boy, keeping his place in the book with a finger, and gesturing with it. “As Pushkin surely is not dull.”

“Ha!” exclaimed the American, “Thanks for bringing us back.” He looked at the plump woman. “You were asking about it.”

“As to what it’s about,” said the clergyman to the enquirer, “it tells of a German officer called Hermann—”

“Hermann the German!” cackled the man with the nose, “that’s rich!”

The clergyman frowned. “It’s a serious story,” he said reprovingly. “This fellow is very thrifty and scorns the gamblers he knows. But he hears this tale of the grandmother of a fellow officer who has a secret method of winning she was told long since by the Comte de Saint Germain, the reputed occultist, when she was in Versailles. So he courts her young companion, who agrees to an assignation and tells him how to get to her room. But he hides and comes out to threaten the old countess. She is frightened to death, literally, and his scheme comes to naught.”

“There’s a moral in there somewhere,” said the American.

“Anyway,” resumed the clergyman, “he is visited by her ghost, who reveals the secret to him, charging him not to play again, and she forgives him her death if he marries the companion.”

“I get the idea,” said the American somewhat playfully, “that there’s a catch here.”

“Just wait. He has to play three cards in three games of faro – namely the three, the seven, and the ace. So he realises all his money, and bets on a three turning up. It does, and everyone is astonished. Next night, the seven, and his winnings increase. The third night there’s a huge crowd that gathers around as he wagers everything on an ace. But his card, when it turns up, isn’t the ace of spades. It’s the queen.”

The plump lady smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “A ghost story, right enough, with a moral, as Ernest said. It sounds quite romantic.”

“Aha,” said the clergyman, “but you see our realist Pushkin is very careful to be ambiguous in the way he sets it out, so that we can’t be sure of anything. The ghost is seen through Hermann’s eyes, so is it real? The numbers are actually used by him in envisioning his riches, the wins are easy lucky coincidences. He looks at the queen of spades and sees the face of the old woman, and goes mad. But he was probably over the edge long before this.”

“Yes,” said the boy, “and didn’t Mozzhukhin capture that mad look very well? His staring eyes! It was very good.”

The plump lady said “That would only work in the film, Maurice, with a close-up. You couldn’t do it in a theatre!”

“That’s one of advantages of film,” said René. “But I’m reminded of the German actor, Conrad Veidt. His eyes, I mean. Did you see The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari? A very interesting film by Robert Wiene, five years ago. Lil Dagover co-starred. It’s about an insane hypnotist, played with sinister panache by Werner Krauss, who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. It’s a dark and twisted plot, and the décor is dark and twisted too – there are sharp angles, odd perspectives, oblique lines, unexpected relationships, the surroundings are skewed, and the happenings are bizarre, things are not what they seem, and indeed the denouement turns everything topsy-turvy and you begin to question everything that’s happened. It’s a very Expressionist film, almost surreal. I do believe it’s something of a milestone in the photographic art. Just as in their own way the films of Griffiths have advanced new techniques and so on.

“I do think Veidt is very talented, and I hope for more films from him. Oh, and another film of 1919 I think is The Man Who Laughs, all about a circus performer who’s hideously scarred, his mouth is in a perpetual grin; and so it’s covered up most of the time, and Veidt expresses everything with those wonderful eyes. It’s very good. That reminds me, did anyone see Anders als der Andern a year or so ago? He was excellent in that.”

“And what was that about?” asked the American girl.

“Well,” said Max, “it means ‘Different from the Others’, and it’s about a young violin virtuoso, Paul Körner, who falls in love with a pupil, and he’s blackmailed by a hustler called Franz Bollek. As Körner refuses to pay more money to the extortionist, Bollek denounces him for offending against that notorious Paragraph 175 in their penal code. In the ensuing trial Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (who plays himself) gives an impassioned speech in favour of acceptance and tolerance towards homosexuals. Bollek is convicted of extortion, but Körner is also condemned, for violation of Paragraph 175. His reputation is ruined. He breaks under the social stigma, and seeing no way out, commits suicide. It’s quite an emotional piece, though I must say I personally found it a bit … sentencieux. Preachy.”

“Yes, Max,” said René, “as was inevitable. It was propaganda, after all. And it hasn’t made any difference. Has it?”

“No, René, and I’m not surprised. What does surprise me is that it was made at all. But the decision being made, it was a happy choice, to use Veidt.”

“Yes, the eyes have it,” said René, with a half-smile. “Speaking of that, what about that Swedish one that came out last year, called Gösta Berlings saga. The Saga of Gosta Berling, that is, directed by Mauritz Stiller … it’s about a defrocked priest – sorry, Father,” he added, with an apologetic look at the priest, who waved his hand. “He’s sacked for drunkenness, and objectionable sermons – and it leads up to his redemption. Anyway the cast is very good. The protagonist is played by Lars Hanson. He carries the film, I can say, with his fiery eyes and spirited interaction with others in the cast, that is, Gerda Lundquist, do you know her? They call her the Swedish Bernhardt, And a certain Greta Garbo, a new actress, who is beautiful and talented. I’m sure she has a future in films.”

“It’s an adaptation, then, of the novel by Selma Lagerlöf, about forty years ago? That should be good. Didn’t she get the Nobel prize for literature in 1909? I’m glad they do these works of literature. Let’s see ….”

Max screwed up his eyes in concentration and puffed on the cigar.

“Yes,” he said, “there’s The Three Musketeers, for instance. About 1921, with Douglas Fairbanks. That was rather good. Oh, what about Edgar Allan Poe? I’d imagine the Americans would go after him in a big way, for they seem rather starved for real literature.”

The man called Ernest roused himself to say’ “Oh, come, now! I grant names like Shakespeare don’t crop up too often, but that’s true of England as well. Mark Twain! Henry James! Melville! Harriet Beecher Stowe!”

“Sorry, Ernest, I should have been more specific. I’m trying to recall films made from those classics, and it’s hard. Yes, all right. Huckleberry Finn, five years ago, yes, with young Lewis Sargent. I did see that, it was fairly close to the book I think. Tom Sawyer? 1907, but redone in 1917 with Jack Pickford and Robert Gordon as Huck. And a sequel in 1918, Tom and Huck, with the same actors. Poor Jack doesn’t seem to have got many good parts though.”

“Yes,” said Agatha the plump lady, “it’s a pity. I saw that eight years ago, that’s right, and I thought he was very good. A nice strong young handsomeness. But somehow he hasn’t been as lucky as his sister Mary.”

“I imagine,” said Robert the Nose, “that she’ll be supporting the entire family. And her salary will well be able to manage. But as for him, his wife’s death hasn’t done him any good, obviously.”

“Hmm, now what else? I’m trying to disprove you, Max. What about Edgar Allan Poe, you say? I seem to remember a short about the Raven. Yes, it’s an old one by Griffith, about him writing his poem and getting it published to get money for his dying wife. And there’s something based on The Tell-Tale Heart.”

“Ah yes,” said Max. “That was about ten years ago I’m sure. It was called … yes, The Avenging Conscience, or Thou Shalt Not Kill. It’s ironic it appeared at the outset of the war. It featured Annabel Lee also. Actually I like the title, melodramatic as it is, for it reminded me of the agenbite of inwit that Stephen Dedalus is bothered about in the Portrait.”

“And what about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? I’m sure that’s been done,” said Agatha.

“Yes,” said René, nodding, “about four years ago, with John Barrymore and that vamp Nita Naldi. It was one of Barrymore’s finest performances. And Naldi, well ….”

“But we were speaking of American classics. If you’re going to broaden the argument to include films made from foreign classics, there’s a whole library to consider,” said Mr Summers.

“For instance,, let me see, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1921. That paired Valentino and Naldi, an excellent cast. Do you remember its last words? ‘Peace has come—but the Four Horsemen will still ravage humanity—stirring unrest in the world—until all hatred is dead and only love reigns in the heart of mankind.’”

“And that will be long time fixing,” said the American.

“Another, by Ibanez, is Blood and Sand, a rather good drama about a matador, filmed starring our Valentino again.”

“Hah!” Maurice laughed. “But did you see the parody of that? It was very funny, especially obviously if you know the original. It was called Mud and Sand, and starred another American actor, Stan Laurel, who is named Rhubarb Vaselino.”

“He’s English, actually,” said Agatha.

“But in a film, which is silent, you can’t tell. If they ever get a sound system, you’ll know, but of course a foreign accent, let alone a foreign language, will create problems, I foresee.”

“Quite so,” said the man with the nose. “I’ve heard your Russian, Maurice, Mozzhukhin, I heard him in conversation a while ago and his Russian accent is quite thick. I thought it was charming at the time, but obviously he’d only be able to play Russian parts. Or sinister foreigners, at any rate.”

“As for me,” said the angular lady, “I’m pleased that such stories as Ibanez and Hugo are made available throughout the civilised world by the means of the cinema. It’s really an excellent teacher. A book can only do so much, even an illustrated one. But a moving picture has so much potential.”

“Yes, Mildred. And remember that the message put over by the film can be of many sorts. I mean, for propaganda. Both good and bad – I mean by that, from a subjective point of view. Good is in the eye of the beholder, and bad obviously as well.”

“My doxy is orthodoxy,” chuckled the clergyman, “and yours has to be heterodoxy. Yes, the Bishop of Gloucester put it rather well.”

“And there’s the news films,” said the boy, “that bring us up to date with all sorts of things, even the war, for goodness’ sake.”

“Yes,” said the clergyman gravely, “we can see speeches by generals, our troops marching, the enemy being mowed down.”

They all seemed to sigh, and ordered more drinks.

------

“This generation,” said the American, “is lost. In many ways. It doesn’t know where it’s at. And apart from that, it’s lost its own sense of direction. Where to go? What to do? But you have to have the innate sense of self first. And that is gone. Along with all those other good things like hope and purpose and well-being, pride and confidence—”

“But wait a bit, Ernest,” said the bony lady. “You yourself are part of the lost generation. I don’t see you being miserable about your status, your position. You’re observing, an outsider.”

“And is it that we are all outsiders, strangers?” asked the young man in the corner. “Do we look at all the others and say ‘That is not me’, ‘I am not with them’, ‘Who are they anyway?’”

“Hmm,” muttered the plump lady, “somehow that chills me. I know we’ve survived the greatest war ever, but we seem to have been beaten all the same. Is that it?”

“Because our eyes are opened,” said the lugubrious one at the bar. “We no longer delude ourselves with the progressive hopes of a soon utopia. We have seen a change, and it’s not for the better. For one thing, mankind has been revealed as a selfish arrogant power-hungry collection of wilfully heedless fools, headed for the precipice with all the other lemmings, dashing to destruction without a care. So those who can still think should just embrace their own foolishness and drink – as Rabelais’ oracle commanded – drink and push aside such inanities as compassion, love, belief in a better world—” He drank his milky liquid and gave a shudder.

“That’s for you, Reverend,” said the American, perhaps with a sarcastic tone in his voice. “A better world up there. Your kingdom is not of this world!”

“Ha, sir, you’ve got me there. And yes we all know about the pie in the sky that the Wobblies joked about. But you’re right in signalling a loss of faith – in God, in oneself, in life. Yes, lost…. It’s a good phrase, you have there.”

“Oh, it’s not mine,” said the American, lighting a cigarette. “It came from Gertrude.”

“Ah,” exclaimed the bony lady, “I’m not surprised. She’s a good observer. A good critic, too.”

The clergyman looked puzzled. “What of?” he asked plaintively, being evidently beyond his depth. Mildred stretched her limbs akimbo and seemed to be unfolding from a chrysalis, then relaxed and appeared to shrink into herself. An odd look, but evidently only an exercise to prepare for an anecdote.

“Ernest is speaking of Gertrude Stein,” she said with an eager smile. “I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of her things. …”

“Well, no, actually,” said the clergyman. Priest? Matthew wondered what denomination he was, his clothes seeming deliberately old-fashioned. “I’ve not come across her, though I know the name of course. No, I’ve been studying other things, like the saints, and Restoration plays, and vampires.”

Matthew gulped on his drink and looked at Catherine, who was very amused at the way the conversation was shaping up and changing course.

“In that case,” said the fellow with the big nose, “maybe you have an opinion about that vampire film Nosferatu. Murnau’s film, three years ago. Hmm?”

“Well,” said Summers, “of course one has an opinion, which in my case comes from some study of the subject. You know I suppose that it’s a version of Dracula, the Stoker book, with some name changes for copyright’s sake. I understand that the family were outraged, and brought a suit, and in order to escape a punitive fine the producers have declared bankruptcy. And they wanted all copies to be destroyed.”

“Yes,” said the Nose with a wide grin, “but some had already been distributed, so they couldn’t. Which is how I saw it in England. Anyhow, what’s your appraisal?”

The priest looked pensive, and chose his words carefully. “The production was very good, in the design and presentation,” he said. “I happen to know that that was the result of employing a gentleman who is well versed in the occult, named Albin Grau, and for that reason alone the film stands out. It is also very close to the novel. I know we shouldn’t really expect a film to copy a story exactly, for it’s a process of translation, isn’t it, from one medium to another. But this one is pretty faithful. The portrayal of the vampire, the so-called nosferatu, now—“

“What does that mean?” broke in Matthew, who immediately flushed at calling attention to himself.

The priest looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, licked his lips and continued. “Well, my boy, it’s supposed to mean ‘vampire’ in the Roumanian language, spoken in Transylvania. The name ‘Dracula’ really means ‘Devil’ in that language, and means the historical ruler called Vlad the Impaler.” He looked at the children and made a face. “He earned that epithet many times over. But anyhow there seem to be several words applied to the vampire, and this one would seem to be just another appellation, meaning something like “awful creature, damned soul’, and so forth. Now as I was saying, his portrayal by the actor was first-class. His very appearance was striking. That was probably from the advice of Herr Grau, who had a great deal to do with the design of the film. He brought his occult learning to the film. You maybe don’t know about him. He was one of the participants in the Hohenlaube Conference which just took place, a meeting of all the main occultists of Europe, to discuss the status of an English would-be magus, namely an unspeakable man called Aleister Crowley. When I say unspeakable I err actually, he’s eminently speakable. However, as to the film, it’s a pity the producers went bankrupt, for we missed a whole series of extraordinary films, I’m sure.”

“And what about the novel, then?” asked Robert with the nose.

“Well, it’s told quite brilliantly in some ways, especially the first part. After that, it’s a little uneven. The characters are stock, their behaviour tedious, and many parts of his vampire lore could well be done without. But it’s still fascinating, so it’s still popular, and I hope another film can be made of it, I’m sure it would be popular.”

Another two patrons arrived, to seat themselves at the one remaining empty table, against the wall by the toilet, and call for drinks. Greybeard gestured with his cigar and addressed the new arrivals, who gave him to understand that they had little French and less English, so they wouldn’t be taking part in the conversation much. Their names, though, were Hans and Axel, evidently, from Denmark, and they could have been twins – fair-haired, tall and slim and blue-eyed, and for some reason Matthew got the idea that they were homos, perhaps because of the way they looked at each other. Or was he only hoping that others could have the same happiness in love that he had?

After a while the American Ernest Something asked the clergyman about his other interests.

“Ah,” he said, in that feminine voice, “I’ve written a study, twenty years ago now, of Catherine of Siena, who among other things pleaded and prayed for Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome.”

“He was in Avignon!” exclaimed Matthew.

Mr Summers looked pleased, and nodded pleasantly at the boy.

“Yes!” he said. “She sent him a letter – she wrote many inspiring and persuasive letters – and finally he brought his court back to its real home, in Rome, in January, 1377.”

Robert, who seemed to be the resident cynic, said slyly “I hope you enlarged upon her several patronages, her defence against fires for instance, and miscarriages, and sexual temptation!”

The priest looked at him and said “Oh yes, of course these have to be dealt with.”

Robert continued “But what I have always been intrigued by is her mystical marriage to Christ, you see.” He looked keenly at the priest, who seemed to be a little embarrassed at the reference, but gave a resigned sort of smile as he answered.

“Yes, sir, she records that at the age of twenty-one she was mystically married to Christ. Now—”

“Yes, but how was it solemnised? With a ring, which she wore on her finger but which was invisible. But what kind of ring, eh?”

Summers shrugged. “I know that you want me to quote her letter to Sister Bartolomea della Seta. Where she says ‘Ben vedi tu che tu sei sposa, e che egli t'ha sposata, e te e ogni creatura; e non con anello d' argento, ma con anello della carne sua.’” He looked around and translated. “Well seest thou that thou art a bride, and that He has wedded thee and every creature, not with a ring of silver, but with the ring of His flesh.”

“And what more apt, more fitting, than that ring of flesh he lost on his eighth day?”

The greybeard laughed. “Of course! Very apt, very fitting.” He explained to the others: “The prepuce. The foreskin.”

Summers attempted to regain his authority. “As everyone knows, there have been several claims to the possession of the sacred foreskin. The Dominican scholar AV Müller, writing twenty years ago, could list no fewer than thirteen separate locations, all of which claimed to possess it. And there have been critical questions as to the preservation of the scrap for thirty years, of course. But there’s an answer for that. Catherine was not the only one concerned with the prepuce. A generation earlier, the Austrian nun Agnes Blannbekin – she died in 1315 – she devoted much of her life to the foreskin of Jesus. She seems to have been obsessed, that’s the best word, by the loss of blood and the pain which our Lord had suffered during His circumcision. Then one day, she was thinking of this suffering, and she suddenly felt the foreskin on her tongue."

This caused a few jaws to drop, and Summers continued with seeming relish.

“Yes, a little piece of skin, that was exquisitely sweet. She swallowed it many times, and was visited many times, and the spirit possessed her and filled her with ecstasy, a burning throughout her body that didn’t hurt but caused infinite pleasure. She had visions too, naturally, even of a naked Christ.”

“Oh!” said Catherine, “like Michelangelo’s Risen Christ, who is naked!”

The priest looked amazed and nodded. “I know that there are those,” he looked searchingly at the sceptic, “who consider such stories as mere case-studies in sexual excitation, and it is impossible to discuss them rationally. But I was saying that Agnes – never canonised, never even beatified – had an answer for the preservation of one foreskin at least: it was revealed to her that the foreskin was resurrected with the Lord on the third day. After all, an omnipotent God can do anything.”

“But why haven’t we heard about this?”

“Because the Jesuits destroyed the first publication in the seventeen hundreds. I think there’s only one copy of the book left.”

The company drank its drinks and seemed to ponder for a while.

“We’ve talked about the loss of faith, the cynicism, of the post-war years. And we see it in art and poetry and music, illustrating the breakup of values; prose disintegrating, life disintegrating in fact. When we’re urged to pursue a fast life, seek pleasure – and carpe diem…. Isn’t that so?”

“There’s a poem attributed to Virgil,” said Max, “that puts the whole philosophy in a nutshell. It’s about a Syrian dancing girl, and ends up ‘Pone merum et talos. Pereat qui crastina curat!’”

“Ha,” said the clergyman, “yes, I like that. How would we render it?”

The boy in the corner grinned, and declaimed “Set down the wine and the dice, and to hell with the cares of tomorrow!”

“Ah,” said the cleric, “very good! And you managed to make it a perfect hexameter!”

The boy blushed at the compliment, and Mr Summers gazed at him with a smile that had in it something of an invitation.

“But still,” said Agatha, “there are others who look at their position with honest eyes and accept the status quo, the way things are, crying Morituri te salutamus! to the Caesar of our world –”

“But who would that be, pray? Do you have any specific Augustus in mind? – More like Nero, or Caligula! The rulers of our present world are all of a piece, surely. And I include Great Britain and the United States in that gallery of rogues. How is that experiment shaping up, sir, the Prohibition?”

“Well,” said the American, “it’s transformed society, but in a somewhat different way to that envisioned by the Prohibitionists, I must say.”

“They tried it in Canada,” said the man with the nose. “But they stopped it after the war. I believe there the provinces are left to legislate themselves, they’re freer than American states in many ways. So some of them have started to regulate liquor, to take charge of the whole thing. For one thing, liquor creates wealth. The duty must amount to millions. And they’re missing that, in the States.”

“And in the meantime the general populace is awash with hypocrisy,” said the melancholic, “and the criminal gangs are rife. For them all, God’s in his Heaven, and all’s right with the world!”

The clergyman cleared his throat.

“I’ve never liked that poem,” he said, “Pippa Passes. The child seems to be saying that Heaven is where God should be, nowhere else! Not on earth, at least! Which is of course surely, an idea against the Christian idea of God on Earth, where he is all round us, manifest in our lives. Or He should be,” he added hastily.

“Oh,” said the other, “I don’t like it either, which is why I laugh when I think of the concluding lines.”

“What?” asked the bony lady.

“Why,” said he, “begging your pardon, Browning uses a naughty word. He talks about ‘owls and bats, cowls and twats, adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.’ He evidently thought the word meant part of a nun’s attire, a head-dress like a cowl or wimple, and so must have been a little embarrassed when he found it was a rather low word for a lady’s what-do-you-call-it.”

Matthew stared, then looked askance at Catherine, who was wide-eyed herself, then at the company, who didn’t know whether to laugh or be shocked. Curiously enough it was the clergyman who answered with scholarly objectivity, though he nearly betrayed a salacious humour.

“Ahem! It is an unusual word, I suppose, and so the poet can hardly be blamed for his ignorance. But I remember that being discussed back in the 1880s, it would be, in The Academy. I came across it in the British Museum a while ago. Actually it began I believe as a dialect word in the north of England. It’s really ‘thwait’, from Scandinavian of some sort, such as Norse thveit, which occurs in place-names and so on, and would seem to mean ‘a cut, or a slit, or forest clearing’….”

The man with the nose snorted a laugh, saying “Well, you can see how it came to mean the other! Hah!”

The cleric seemed to suppress a chortle of his own and continued manfully, “And there’s a euphemism for it, a rather artful substitute, that you get in old verse, namely ‘tu quoque’, which is Latin for ‘you too’. Invented by the university bloods I suppose.”

“But what exactly does it mean here? Is it something like ‘You’re another’, or what?”

“Obviously,” said the chubby man, “it’s a riposte to an insult. One blood says ‘You’re a twat!’ And the insulted one says ‘You’re another,’ or tu quoque.”

“Very logical,” said the clergyman with a tolerant smile. “Oh, and I’m sure there’s a town called Twatt in Orkney, and maybe in Shetland too.”

“At the same time,” said the chubby man, “I do deprecate the use of the term for the pudendum (of either sex) for a pejorative epithet. To mean, I suppose, ‘fool’, or ‘objectionable fellow’, and so forth.”

Big nose guffawed and contributed “In French too, where you hear j’avais l’air d’un con to render ‘I looked like an idiot’. Isn’t that so?”

The boy, seeming to be testing the waters in this adult environment, said “But sometimes it’s used in the proper way, as an extra insult, as when you say to someone who’s totally inept, ‘A cunt’s a useful thing, and you’re not!”

There was a gasp from the ladies, but the chubby man rescued the conversation slightly by saying to the priest “And what about the derivation of that fine Anglo-Saxonism, Mr Summers? It’s probably Scandinavian again I’ll wager.”

“Well, sir,” he replied, “it is of course found in Latin, mostly in the satirists, namely cunnus, of masculine gender, curiously enough, which directly fathered con of course. Where the unvoiced labio-dental stop came from I know not, probably from the Germanic side as you say. Which reminds me about an anecdote of Keats.”

The plump lady looked a question.

“Well,” said Mr Summers with a diffident sort of smile, “it’s about a dinner party where a young fellow gives the toast to ‘Mater Omnium’, the Mother of All, which you must know means the pudendum muliebre, and is then persuaded to give it again in plain speech. So then two parsons and a grammarian are disputing its etymology but another guest interrupts to say ‘Excuse me gentlemen but I’ve always thought it was not a derivative but a root!’ – It’s in Keats’s letters. Which are remarkable for shedding light on Keats of course as well as that entire time.”

The company smiled and turned to other things.

“Maybe every age is the same in the way it asks its society to conform, but still prides itself on being correctly tolerant. And by ‘the age’ I mean, naturally, the strata of the population that wield power and can ask, or drop strong hints at least, about the behaviour of that society. After all, is not the position of the ruling classes and their supporters, the middle class, by definition almost , the pinnacle of the achievement of the race? So they have every right to ask their minions to dance for them. What—? Ernest, you’re smiling!”

The American laughed. “It’s just that there’s a little poem in the February issue of Der Querschnitt that puts it pretty well, in my humble opinion.”

“Well? Can you quote it?”

“Oh yes,” said his companion. “He wrote it.”

“Ha! Then favour us, please!” said the plump lady. He smiled and recited.

“The age demanded that we sing

And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow

And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.”

They laughed and slapped the tables, and Ernest looked suitably pleased at the reaction. The bony lady however did purse her lips and say “I really think, though, that your rhyme there is just a little bit – or too – unorthodox.”

“Yes,” he grinned, “but that’s my doxy, eh, Mr Summers?”

The cleric smiled and said that the rhythm of the fourteeners was almost mediaeval, and the sentiments expressed summed up in a degree the nihilism of the age.

“But I’d disagree,” said Charles. “It’s more cynical than anything else….

“One just has to joke about it,” said Robert. “Or publish things like Prufrock, ten years ago, now! At the start of the war, but it showed the … disillusionment of the time. Even before the wreckage got really going. The lost generation wasn’t the result of the war; in fact you might say the reverse was the case. So why not joke, eh?”

“Are you suggesting that Eliot and Pound and Joyce and company are jesting? That’s a bit harsh.”

“I must say,” said Charles with something of a frown, “that there is some humour in Ulysses, but like a lot of his jokes, it falls flat for me.”

“A lot of his jokes?”

“Yes, I mean his facetious behaviour, like his poking ‘fun’ if you can call it that, at poor Gertrude’s embonpoint. ‘Overdoing the sugary things, eh?’ I mean to say! And he looks round the room to see them taking in his wit. He’s half right, anyway.”

“He’s a half-wit, you mean? That’s too far. He’s … juvenile, maybe.”

“Exactly, Max – look at his very first book of poems.”

“All right. Chamber Music. A nice little collection. And I see what you mean.”

“Ooh yes,” said the angular lady, “it is, some of them are really delicious.”

“I suppose,” said the clergyman, “for Georgian poetry they’re all right. But—”

“No,” said the boy, straightening up, “‘All right’ doesn’t do it. Take – oh, for instance –”

He began to quote, looking at them all earnestly.

“My love is in a light attire

Among the apple-trees,

Where the gay winds do most desire

To run in companies.

There, where the gay winds stay to woo

The young leaves as they pass,

My love goes slowly, bending to

Her shadow on the grass;

And where the sky's a pale blue cup

Over the laughing land,

My love goes lightly, holding up

Her dress with dainty hand.”

“Er, yes, that is rather … nice,” said the clergyman weakly.

The boy subsided looking satisfied, and the plump lady and her bony companion smiled at him, the latter saying “Thank you, Maurice! Georgian isn’t the adjective. Edwardian, surely! But I’d say he’s more Elizabethan! And actually, as I remember them, they really deserve to be set to music, every one, by a latter-day Dowland, for instance.”

“Anyway,” said the clergyman, looking restless, “what of it, this collection?”

Max took up the anecdote.

“Don’t you know where he got the title? It was in 1904, the year of Ulysses. He was reading some of his poems to a young lady of amiable disposition and his crony Gogarty.”

“Who?”

“Oliver St John Gogarty,” said Max, looking as the question was ridiculous, “the Free State Senator.”

“Really! And so—”

Max turned to the children, who were hanging on every word of this literate conversation.

“In Ulysses,” he informed them, “Gogarty is depicted as ‘stately, plump Buck Mulligan’, in the first chapter, named for Telemachus.”

Matthew smiled and nodded thanks for the information.

“Gogarty’s a poet himself,” said Max. “He brought out a little collection a couple of years ago called An Offering of Swans, quite good really. But then, a lot of writers start off with a slim volume of verse. You, Ernest, and even Valentino—”

The boy interrupted. “But one has to be published somehow, and a book of verse is easily enough done. I did it myself.”

“Oho! Can you give us an example?”

The boy looked embarrassed but spoke up. “This one, it’s in French, I wrote a year ago.

                        O je n’oserais dire ce que c’est dans mon coeur,

                        Et je n’oserais parler de ma grande douleur.

                        J’essayerai donc vous le dire, mais sans mots,

                        Dans les sons de mes soupirs et de mes sanglots.”

They gave some applause and approving sentimental sighs. This encouraged the boy to give another short example of his muse, looking down shyly at the ground.

                        “The warmth of the sun

                        The cool of the air,

                        The stroke of the hand

                        On the skin that is bare.”

“Aah,” breathed Mr Summers, “a perfect vignette!” His eyes lit up, and he seemed to stare at the young man with a look that was almost speculative, but anything else had to wait for the conclusion of the anecdote.

Max nodded in appreciation and said “Anyway, to continue, if I may?”

The ladies nodded acquiescence, and Max went on. “They were all drinking porter, and after a while the young lady excused herself to go off to make herself comfortable, and went behind a screen, whence they shortly heard the uninhibited sound of pee tinkling into the chamber pot.”

“Ah,” said the boy, “I see what’s coming!”

“Yes, boy, Joyce and Gogarty listen to this and Gogarty says ‘That’s criticism for you!’ meaning I suppose something to the effect of ‘I urinate upon your verse!’ – then she comes back all nonchalant and they resume the reading. So on the way home James says ‘You know what I’m going to call my book of poems when it comes out?’ And the answer was –”

“Chamber Music!” they all chorused, amid laughter. Matthew glanced at Catherine with a smile that said he was pleased to be an audience for this intellectual debate.

“But he was young,” said the clergyman, affecting a reproving look.

“Yes, I suppose. About twenty-two or so, I should think. And now he’s forty-three, isn’t he? A grown-up schoolboy….”

“You’re too hard, Max. You think he should have outgrown his adolescent lavatory humour? There’s other sorts in Ulysses. Anyway, I get the impression that Miss Stein thinks she’s missing the accolade, or notoriety, that he’s earned.”

“Why so?” queried the man with the big nose, suddenly perking up his attention.

“Because I think she sees herself as forward-looking, a true Modernist, whereas he looks back, he’s fundamentally a traditionalist.”

“Well, she’s certainly tried to reform the language of poetry and prose. But so has he, by God!”

“I know, and I’m scared to contemplate what he means to do with it. His latest stuff is a little … startling.”

“Why don’t we wait till it’s finished, and see? Don’t dismiss him out of hand.”

“Ah,” said the plump lady, “if only he’d gone on with his poetry. I’m sure he’d reach the stature of Yeats.”

“But I fear for him,” said the bony lady. “His health, I mean his eyes! He’s been troubled for years, poor man! I don’t know how he can manage to read the proofs.”

“But he doesn’t!” exclaimed Max. “My copy of Ulysses has several egregious misprints, and it isn’t just because it’s printed in France. And the trouble is, with his style, it’s potentially confusing. You don’t know whether some felicitous expression is from art or accident!”

The angular lady took a deep breath, and said “But that’s why he gets a help or two from some admirers. And I suppose he’ll keep on that way. Though how he’ll manage dictating his involved prose is beyond my imagination.”

The boy with the book shifted uncomfortably and said “Oh, I do hope his eyes get better. No worse, anyway. But I do think that losing one’s eyesight is not the end for a writer. As, that is, I agree, as long as he can still dictate his works. Like Milton, and so forth. And I do see that in Mr Joyce’s case that might be troublesome, for that very reason, that his prose is going to be rather convoluted, highly stylised, unusual in its concatenations and collocations and even spelling. Isn’t that right?”

The red-haired girl smiled and said “Yes, you’ve hit it. So this may mean that he has to stop what he’s doing, backtrack, from where he is I mean, in his development, to a more expected, more accessible sort of writing.”

“Like Ernest’s, I suppose,” the plump woman contributed, and flushed to be making a critical comment.

Matthew was muttering to Catherine that the fellow in the shop had to have been this same one—.

The American woman said that her companion had a high opinion of Joyce, and he nodded, adding “Mind you, every genius has flaws of some sort. And Ulysses is a work of genius, believe me. Yet I do regret the fact that it’s very autobiographical. Oh, I know the events of June 16, 1904 are imagined, that Bloom doesn’t exist, and I don’t really believe that it’s a roman à clef, as some have said. But still, young Stephen Daedalus is too much like the author, in both the Portrait and Ulysses. In my opinion, of course. Before you tell me that every author puts himself into his work, I agree, I’ll admit some of that myself, but Joyce puts too much in. Daedalus is Joyce!”

“I think, Ernest, that you see Joyce as a wonderful amalgam of romantic and intellectual, but you don’t think his hero should be? On the other hand—”

“On the other hand,” said the American. “that book is so … multi-layered, with so much in it! It’s a great book, and we should probably leave it there.”

“But by the bye,” said the chubby man, “why does he name his hero Dedalus? Spelling it without the ae, you know. Misdirection?”

“No, René,” said Max. “I think it’s a bilingual pun. Daedalus, with the ae digraph, is the Greek Daidalos, supposedly meaning ‘craftsman’, or ‘ingenious workman’ perhaps. Which fits the original, as inventor, sculptor, and so on. But without the digraph, Dedalus becomes quite Roman, as opposed to Greek.”

“Ah!” exclaimed the Reverend Summers, “I follow . Now the root becomes ded, as in do, dare, dedi, datum, ‘give’, no?”

“That’s it,” said Max. “So it has the connotation of giving, as well as creating. As to what that actually means, though—”

“I don’t suppose,” said the bony lady, “that he’s got anything else tucked, or packed away in there, in a bigger portmanteau, an Irishism maybe?”

“Oh, no, I doubt that very much,” said Max. “I don’t believe he’s ever had much sympathy with the teaching of Irish. The ‘race of clodhoppers’ could do fine with English. Or what they call English. The pronunciation, for one thing—”

The man with the big nose, addressed as Robert, laughed as he remembered an anecdote which he had to pass on to the others, about a boy who shocked the teacher by answering a history question with “James the Shit”. Another boy stepped in to explain that he’d made a mistake; “‘Please miss,’ he said, ‘he was thinking of William the Turd!’”

René laughed to remember the confusion of t and th in the common speech. “Yes,” he said, “you get that in novels trying to imitate rural Irish speech. I suppose that the Irish language, the Gaelic, doesn’t have the ‘th’ sound. Like French.”

“Or German,” added Charles.

“Most other languages, if you ask me,” said the pale face. “English is different from an awful lot of them. Unique? Well, of course. The language of Shakespeare, et cetera. Which becomes the language of Dryden and Dr Johnson and Joyce, God help us!”

“What is expressed in that language, also. It’s wonderful how tastes change, and what is so great at one time is old hat, even distasteful, a couple of decades later. After all, look at the difference between Shakespeare (and even Marlowe) and those other later dramatists. Mr Summers, did you say you’d been studying them?”

The effeminate-looking clergyman simpered and said “Oh yes. Very interesting they are, too. Of course one has to be broad-minded in reading them, and producing them, also. I have had a modest part—” he gave a sort of knowing shrug – “in the formation of a company to perform these neglected children of the Restoration muse. Which only continued a previous trend, naturally. But Dryden wrote his Essay of Dramatick Poesie to defend Restoration plays from the charge of lewdness. It’s there he claims that there is more ‘bawdry’ in The Custom of the Country than in all later plays combined. That was by John Fletcher around 1620. Also note the obvious pun in the title. It’s also,” he said, warming to his subject, “in The Country Wife, that notorious play by Wycherley. It’s based ultimately on Terence’s play The Eunuch.”

“What’s that about?” asked Maurice.

“Well, the hero, Mr Horner, pretends to be impotent so that he may the more easily seduce the ladies of London society. The idea as I say derives from Terence, whose play caused a scandal in Germany in 1923, when the playwright Carl Zuckmayer put on a very free adaptation in Kiel, with contemporary references: it ran for one night only, since the performance resulted in the immediate, sofort, closure of the theatre by the police.”

“That must have been some performance!” said Ernest.

“Then there’s that pun also in Shakespeare,” contributed Robert, “when Hamlet talks suggestively to Ophelia at the play scene. The rude word in question is spelt out pretty much in Twelfth Night….”

Matthew recalled this being mentioned by Mrs Cairns all those momentous weeks ago, so he paid attention.

“It’s the joke letter supposedly sent by Olivia to Malvolio. He says he recognises the writing on the outside, the way she forms her letters, that these are her very Cs, her Us, and her Ts, ‘And thus makes she her great Ps.’ Well, what could be plainer? I guarantee the groundlings laughed at that. And note that the letters C and P (particularly a capital) don’t occur until later in the letter. So it’s obvious that we should look for something else here.”

Matthew smiled to know what Mrs Cairns had been on about, and couldn’t help saying “Oh! And in Henry the Fifth—”

“Why yes, boy!” Robert looked at him in appreciation, with a twinkle in his eyes. “In Henry V, the French princess gets an English lesson from her maid, where she learns to her dismay that the English for ‘pied’ is ‘de foot’, which of course sounds like the root of foutre. Then la robe is translated ‘de coun’ or gown, which is distressingly close to con. The groundlings wouldn’t get that, but the educated artisans would.”

“That reminds me about ‘count’, the noble term. From the Norman French of course, comte nowadays. But evidently the nobility in England felt it was too close to the obscenity – they didn’t like being called a count! So they maintained the Saxon term, earl.”

“But they left the countess alone! Another instance of the woman being neglected,” said Agatha disapprovingly.

“I know a joke about the word,” said Robert with an impish look to him.

Max rolled his eyes and said “I’m not surprised. What?”

“Well,” said Robert, rubbing his big nose, “it’s about an Irishman, lower-class of course, whose son gets on at college, gets a good job and so forth, and winds up at an elegant ball, and sends a snapshot to his father of himself in his evening finery, and writes on the back ‘What do you think of me in this get-up? I feel like a count!’ – And his father throws down the picture and says ‘Look at that! All that education, and he can’t spell a simple word like that!’”

The Americans laughed, and the children smiled, but the others were not very amused.

“I do think,” said Mildred rather severely, “that people should not tell jokes about the ignorance of the lower orders, if they’re English, and of other nations, if they’re Irish or Scotch or Welsh. And foreigners too, come to that. In fact, I’d say, the more I think of it, that the English upper classes have a regrettable attitude of careless superiority, which is not necessarily justified.”

“But surely, ma’am,” said the paleface, “it’s that very attitude that has led to the rule of Britain over half the world. That empire on which the sun never sets. It never sets because as things stand right now, whatever the hour or longitude, somewhere the sun is shining down on a section of Earth which is administered by England. And before you say what about the Irish and so on, let me remind you that the English had partners in their conquest. They were the leaders, oh yes, but the Scotch followed, the braw kilties that the Boche called the ladies from hell –”

“Oh I say, what was that?”

“They feared the Highland regiments more than the English Tommies, I’m told. But you follow me, I think. Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, and there’s Rugby and Winchester and all that lot, who quite deliberately, I feel, inculcate and encourage such pretensions of superiority, which carries over into later life and gives us excellent administrators of quite complicated territories, you know. India, for one. A class that has no such ideas about its God-ordained mission will not govern. Cannot govern. Which is why,” he said with a beaming smile, “if the Socialists come to power in that amazingly united kingdom, the edifice of empire will, ultimately, collapse. For goodness sake, look at Ireland!”

“So what, Charles, do you foresee as the next disaffected colony to secede from the Empire? The Americans did it, which is why perhaps the Canadians were allowed their own government, and South Africa would seem to have settled down with the Boers in some harmony, hasn’t it? Well?”

“I’d say India, myself,” said Charles, “and I’ll tell you why: the land has its own history much grander and venerable than Johnny-come-lately England. It has its own variety (or varieties) of thinkers, philosophers, intellectuals, who are at least potentially demagogues to turn the opinions of the people. – Who are reminded, I’m sure, of the atrocities of the Sahibs. The Mutiny was only one step in the direction of independence. We read about other deplorable things every so often. I mean, it’s not just one lonely incident; it’s a whole chain of such. Like the Bengal famine of 1770, in Bihar. Do you know that about one third – one whole third – of the population died? Last century the Great Famine of 1876 took five and a half million lives.”

“But surely,” spluttered Agatha, “that wasn’t a man-made cruelty! Blame it on Providence!”

“What I’m saying, ma’am, is that the Raj, the East India Company and its minions, has been negligent about its charge, and extremely unwilling, in fact, to do much more than feeble token exercises, besides deliberate actions taken against the natives when they get too uppity. I’m thinking of the disturbances in Amritsar just five or six years ago or so.”

“Ah yes,” said the greybeard, waving his cigar. “Six years. April 1919. The British soldiery, supported I think by those loyal Gurkhas, fired deliberately on an unarmed crowd, just because a paranoid officer feared another mutiny. He was sent home in disgrace, I believe, but the damage was done. That fellow Gandhi had a field day, and he organised some mass civil demonstrations, planned unrest, you might say. Which will continue, I predict. I must say that such events nowadays get a lot more attention than they used to, for communication is better, with wireless telegraphy and so forth – a far cry from signals a hundred years ago that could be doctored by the Count of Monte Cristo! So the unrest isn’t local any more, you see; it can, potentially, be nationwide! And to stop such movements the old British lion may have to concede, though it goes against the grain. You might not get an armed conflict in India however, as has happened elsewhere, like Ireland….”

“Actually, Max,” said Charles, “I have an awful presentiment about that large country. It’s too big, it’s unruly, and once the restraints of our benevolent lion are removed—”

“Yes, yes, I suppose you think the various sectors and sects will be at each others’ throats?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised. We’ve seen it in Ireland after all, and in Scotland two hundred years ago. I mean Catholic and Protestant of course. At the best of times they have an uneasy sort of truce. And at the worst—”

“At the worst,” said the American, “we get sheer savagery, like those pogroms in the Ukraine, and that incredible destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Which, I remind you, has not been properly punished – or even acknowledged and apologised for!”

“And what about the generals, who are supposed to know better, in the war; I see that General Mangin has died, last May. He was called the Butcher by his men, you know.”

“Really? I heard it as le buveur de sang, the drinker of blood. Like one of your vampires, Mr Summers! He was a real fighter, I mean by that a bloodthirsty belligerent, believed in la guerre à outrance, ‘total war’; and his philosophy was something like Quoi qu'on fasse, on perd beaucoup de monde. Whatever you do, you lose a lot of men. It can’t be helped, that’s the way it is. A very comfortable creed.”

“In time of war, I suppose it erases a lot of bother….”

“But you were saying a minute ago that the war and the mal de siècle are connected. If the lostness continues, you should look for another conflict!”

“Nevertheless,” said the American with a sort of shrug, “I’m thinking in my new book, Fiesta, that the lost are only down but not out, they’re a bit more resilient than that.”

“Ooh!” said Mildred, “can you tell us the plot?”

“No, Ernest, please,” said her companion. “I hate getting summaries of plots. I’d rather read the whole thing. When will we see it?”

The author smiled and grunted with another shrug. His wife, if she was, said gaily “We’ll just have to wait. He’s only got about fourteen chapters written.”

“You should write about the war,” said Agatha, “and lay out its awfulness. You’re a journalist, aren’t you? Better you than a fictionalising onlooker!”

Mr Summers looked up.

“And was it, really, as ghastly as they say? I must say that the returned warriors always seem rather reluctant to talk about it. It depends on where you were of course. I know some had it easy, it’s always like that. But you do get people who have been wounded, for instance, and they’re ready to talk about things—”

The American’s lady looked at him and said “Yes! But only after they get over it. Ernest here won’t tell you, but when he was driving an ambulance on the Austrian-Italian front he was wounded by shrapnel in both legs.”

“Oh dear!” the clergyman said, rather inadequately.

“Yes,” continued the girl, “and in spite of that he carried an injured soldier to safety. He—”

“Tattie, please! You don’t—”

“He got a silver medal for bravery from the Italians.”

“Ooh!” said the plump woman, and was evidently going to comment further, but the hero stopped her. “No, ma’am, no sympathy, please. At the very least, it stopped me thinking I was immortal. It brought me up short, that is, and made me realise my own mortality. Everyone goes into war, I think, believing it can’t happen to you. But a wound opens your eyes. And even if you’re not wounded, the experience of war has to stay with you, has to colour your vision. And only those who were there know what it was like.”

The unkempt fellow at the window looked round.

“No,” he said deliberately, defiantly, “absolutely nobody who wasn’t there can have, could have, the faintest of ideas about what it was like. Oh yes, some had it easy, Mr Summers, but in the trenches? In No Man’s Land? Where there’s two kinds of noise – one a hellish roar punctuated by screams, and the other a quiet that frightens you. No birds sing, of course.”

He caught the eye of Matthew and nodded. “Yes, son, like ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. And no birds sing. No, it’s a deathly quiet, and you’re waiting for something to happen, you want to scream Let it happen! – And of course it does, it starts up again, a monstrous cacophony that deafens you till you can’t think. It’s at that time, naturally, you get the order – one does it with a gesture – to go over the top. And by Christ that’s what you do, maybe without thinking at all, though if you did you’d want to give another gesture entirely aimed at the fat-arsed logicians behind the lines, far far away from shot and shell, who make all those easy decisions. As it’s been said, make an advance to this little spot against a withering Maxim gun in order to straighten out the line. Huh!”

Matthew ventured breaking the silence that followed his words.

“Yes, sir, that’s what it must have been like. I don’t know how you could stand it. And I bet an awful lot of the soldiers, and pilots and navy men too, lost their enthusiasm for the war pretty early.”

The man smiled sourly. “Yes, laddie, I lost it and many others did. But the most of them carried on. You may think we were stupid, to carry on the conflict when we were disgusted with what we were doing, with what we were expected to put up with? Is it the act of a hypocrite to fight an absurd war, knowing the futility of it, knowing that – in spite of assurances that it’ll make a difference, it’ll make things better for all, even end war for all time – in spite of that, knowing it’s just another exercise in an imperial game, a chess match where the kings are safe and only the pawns die! – we fight on to the last, quoting that marvellous line about dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

“That poem by Wilfred Owen,” said Maurice, “is the best of all the poems that came out of the war.”

The American roused himself to remark “Yeah, and remember the way those who flinched in battle were treated! There were lots of executions, weren’t there, on all sides, for the cowards who turned tail in their bewilderment. Some, I grant you, were real poltroons, but I guess many just didn’t know what was going on. Shell-shock was real, after all. The folks back home didn’t suffer it, so they didn’t understand it. Besides, even if the evidence was a bit shaky, and the guys were of good character or just average for their company, the decision would be made on the grounds of discipline. Show that cowardice will not be tolerated in the army. And then look at the retreat from Caporetto.”

“What was that?” asked the clergyman interestedly. “I’m asking because I had a correspondent there briefly, before the war.”

‘Ernest’ waved a hand in the air. “It was in 1917. I was driving an ambulance in Italy as Hadley said. The Russians had collapsed, so Austro-Hungary could throw more at Italy; and Germany pitched in. The Austrians and Germans managed to break through the lines and inflicted a terrible defeat on the Italian troops. There was no chance at all, really. They began with chlorine and phosgene and a heavy bombardment. The gas masks were no real defence. There was a retreat, which was slow and hectic and disorganised, and it was seen as a shameful episode, and scapegoats had to be found. This friend of mine was taken out of the line by these soldiers, NCOs, who said they were ‘battle police’. He was taken away to this place where officers were being interrogated and asked why they weren’t with their men. They were being executed for the ‘treachery’ that supposedly led to the retreat. These guys were evidently empowered to take out anyone over major rank who was not with his unit, and shoot them by the roadside without a trial or anything. My buddy understood that everyone they interrogated was being shot, no plea of innocence accepted. He didn’t wait to explain he wasn’t an officer, and the accent they didn’t like was American, and he just lit out of there and ran like hell through the line and into the river. No-one could be bothered, it seems, to chase him. All I’m pointing out is the scapegoat idea. Someone must be to blame for the mess we’re in, someone else of course.”

“Yes,” said the melancholy one, “that was the way it was. But there were other things about the trenches that the people back home had no conception of. The mad noise, the physical danger and all, were part of it, but the very feel of the trenches, the dirt, the lice!”

The plump lady shivered and looked at him as if to say he should stop his catalogue, but the man gave a shiver of his own and ploughed on, looking out the window at some far thing.

“Have you forgotten about the bodies? After a while they overwhelmed the clean-up squads. They lay out there on the field and rotted, and stank! My God, one doesn’t know about the stench of the battlefield. And it’s not just the dead that stink, oh no. The living can do their own bit. You can’t wash too well, so you stink, And there’s more. After all, it’s understandable that a man – or boy, more like! – getting his first baptism of bullets and shells, will lose control of his bladder, and his bowels! Oh, yes, ladies, I’m afraid so. Besides that, think of the result of a wound, a shell, on the body – if you’re blown up, your intestines are shattered, their contents, the gases and ordure are scattered. Not to mention the relaxing of the sphincters in the throes of death! The smell was practically physical, and the rotten meat attracted flies, of course. You’d pick up a body and have it fall to bits in your hands, and the disturbed flies would rise in a choking cloud in your face …. But that’s not the picture that comes to my mind. A picture that sits in my head as if it’s a frontispiece for the Gospel of Antichrist. It’s a friend of a friend, who was as smart and upright a soldier as any could wish. My friend told me how he turned into a pathetic caricature of a man – he caught dysentery, as so many others did. The trenches, did I say? were dirty, muddy, insanitary, full of vermin, big bold rats, oh…. Anyway he could hardly move, crawled about, his trousers round his ankles.”

Catherine looked at the man in horror.

“My other pal and one of his friends managed to get him to the latrine,” he said, with that odd faraway look to his face, “and tried to put him so that he could relieve himself. But he slipped out of their grasp and fell into the trench. They tried to pull him out but were too weak to do anything for a good while. By that time he was dead. He’d drowned in his own excrement.”

The room was silent save for a few intakes of breath.

The old man with the newspaper looked up and said gently “Ach, it is always so. And that way to die is most degrading of all, among all the other degradations of war. It has happened, I imagine, before. There’s a story, in fact,” he gave an odd quirky smile, “about that. It’s a story about a Jew.”

The redhaired woman looked with distaste at the speaker and muttered something about prejudice, but the Jew (as he seemed to be) went on.

“There’s nothing to prevent a Jew telling a story that pokes fun (or even derision) at a Jew, just as I suppose a Negro is the only one to get away with a story about a nigger. But this, it’s a folk tale I would say, is a good example of the established religion mocking the minority, and it doesn’t flatter the mockers either. It’s about a Jew who falls into a privy, a public one in the street, and men run to help him out. But it’s a Saturday, and the orthodox one says no, you can’t, it’s the Sabbath! So they shrug their shoulders and go away. The next morning they’re on their way to Mass when they hear him calling for help. They come to the privy and look down at him, and he says Help me! And they say ‘No, sorry, we can’t, it’s our Sabbath, when we mustn’t do any work.’ So they leave him, and when they haul him out on Monday, he’s dead.”

The American and his lady chuckled at this, the former saying something to the effect of having to tell that one to Harold, whatever that meant; but the bony one frowned and said sharply that she couldn’t see the point. Her companion shook her head and said it didn’t matter, one thing to understand from it was the antagonism between faiths, even when the faith was weak. “It carries over into the sects of Christianity, right? It’s not so long since schismatics, of any variety, were burned at the stake by the opposing sect.”

“Likewise,” said Charles, “the burning of heretics, so-called, because they refuse to accept the main belief, the religion of the rulers. Which in Europe, after all, was Christianity, and early on, the Roman variety, which indulged itself by festivals of intolerance like the famous Cremation of the Strasbourg Jewry on St Valentine’s Day, 1349. You’ll know all about that, sir. What do they call you?”

The old man nodded his head and said: “Yitzak. Which you call Isaac, yes?”

“Thank you. If I remember my Genesis – sorry, Berashith, isn’t that it? It means something like ‘He will rejoice,’ isn’t it? Well, I’m sorry to bring it up, but there it is, no cause for rejoicing! That was just another expression of mistrust and hatred of the different, you see. Also in tales like the martyrdom of Little Hugh of Lincoln, a great slander against the race.”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Robert. “Joyce has that ballad, with music yet, in Ulysses. Young Dedalus sings it to poor Bloom. He calls it Little Harry Hughes.”`

Matthew excused himself and made his way to the toilet, his passage studiously ignored by everyone except the Danish boys, who eyed him quite blatantly and smiled. They smiled again when he came out, and this time so did the boy in the corner, called Maurice, as if he recognised a kindred spirit. Matthew coloured and resumed his seat, trying to connect with the continuing conversation. They were evidently still talking about shit, specifically about people who died, or were killed, in the act of defecation.

“Yes,” said the bony lady, “I did read somewhere about Catherine the Great of Russia dying on the throne, if you follow me,” and she gave a deprecating cough.

“Oh!” exclaimed Matthew in a moment of rashness, “not a horse?” Then he blushed and pretended he hadn’t said that. Naturally the others looked at him for an explanation, and he stammered for a bit before the man called René took pity on him and did it for him.

“It’s a legend, or myth, or we can just call it a shameless libel, that the Empress, who was well known to have an active sex life up until she died, had been attempting to have intercourse with a stallion when the harness supposed to suspend the animal over her body broke, the horse fell and smothered her. But the other story is nearly correct. Evidently she collapsed in her closet and died shortly afterwards; though some said her gross weight cracked the toilet seat, and so on. No, a closer fit to the idea of a stercorous death is Edmund Ironsides of England, who died in 1016, supposedly stabbed from beneath while in the privy—”

“Surely not,” said the plump lady. “D’you mean the assassin was hiding under the seat, among all the …”

“Yes, of course. A rather stinky trap, but if one is determined, a little ordure can be tolerated. Henry of Huntingdon tells the story. I think it was – Eadric ? maybe, the father of the assassin, at any rate, went to Canute to hail him as sole ruler of England – says the king for this service I’ll exalt you higher than any other – he ordered him decapitated and the head placed on a stake on the highest tower in London.”

“Ah,” said Summers, “that reminds me of a story about Alexander the Great; when he conquered Persia, he promised to advance the slayer of Darius in exactly the same way. There were two of them – the story is in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, the Syriac version – and he promised them he’d raise them over all his army. Well, they boasted they’d killed the king, and he scourged them and impaled them on high stakes, as he promised.”

“I think there’s more persons, of course you only hear about the famous ones, that died in excrementitious circumstances,” said the labourer, searching for a cigarette.

The clergyman said thoughtfully, “I think Arius, the heretic anti-trinitarian, is reputed to have died thus. Certainly amid his own faeces, yes.”

“And what about the flatterers in Dante, wading through excrement? Because their words were just so much … shit.”

Matthew looked doubtfully at the fellow with the big nose, who had a sort of twinkle in his eye as he mouthed the vulgarism, and looked at the others with humour, saying “I know a joke about that. It’s about the condemned up to their chins in shit, and this new arrival is brought in by the devils, and as one they all shout ‘Don’t make waves!’”

The stout lady sighed and continued a line of thought she had started some time before.

“It all comes down to who is the top dog, and who is going to be the next top dog. With nations, it’s ambitious Prussians and proud French and disdainful English—”

“And envious Americans, maybe?”

“No, Ernest, that’s not the adjective we need,” said Max. “I can’t think how to categorise the American nation, though, not pejoratively anyhow. Adventurous, maybe. Rash, perhaps. At the moment, puritan, a dreadfully upright (but hypocritical) nation which has invented the speakeasy, along with jazz, which I must confess makes up for a lot.”

They fell to discussing music and performers, and the results of closing a place called Storyville, which left the youngsters far behind, so within a few moments they drank up and made to leave, followed by smiles from the company.

Outside they looked at each other and said they should tell Mrs G about this, and she might know who all those people were. “I must say,” said Matthew, “it was in a way a lot like that awful dinner party, but much more civilised somehow! I must remember to look up some of what they were saying. I’ve got a lot to learn, God knows, about history and art and stuff, but I’m young enough to have time to do that!”

It’s a pity we’re going home, thought Catherine, because Paris has suddenly become more interesting, and above all it’s a pity we won’t be coming back. Unless, oh my God, Mrs G keeps us in her entourage for another year – another twelve months of abuse! But don’t let’s think about that right now.

That evening they played a game of chess, somewhat sadly, reminiscing about the friends they’d made in Vaulx, and wondering what would happen to them. Then about Morelli, and Bertin, and Fauré, and—

“No,” said Matthew stoutly. “You and I are going to forget them deliberately, erase them (as well as we can) from our minds. Think about old Pascau and young Mireio, and what their life might turn out to be. And Father Michel, a delightful old fellow, and Mr Lebouc. I really enjoyed those meetings. And now—”

“I know what you’re saying, Matthew, and it makes me sad too. We’ll just keep thinking, won’t we, about the happy times? Forget the awful experiences, and remember happy times.”

He nodded, thinking If we can.

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[to be continued]

(End of File)