Earthly Powers (56 page)

       There was now tangoing for the nearly sober and dervish-style whirling for the drunk. Tom had his arm about his bride; both were leaning against the stageright knobbed and voluted column of the proscenium arch. Tom was nodding, and Estella looked vacant, at something an old woman in black, somebody's dresser perhaps, was telling them. "All she craved was a bit of affection and love but he had to be poured into bed every night he come home. There's a warning for everybody in that." Seeing me coming she repeated "For everybody" and went off for more drink.

       "Much happiness again, dear brother," I said in a stage tone. "Dear Estella," I added.

       "I don't think we've been introduced."

       "Oh, come off it, Stell. If she can put up with the life," Tom said. "Well, she has already. Manchester next week, the old Palace. Not much of a honeymoon, is it, Stell?"

       "You're looking fit," I said. "That cough seems to have gone."

       "Stell found me a remarkable cough medicine, Dr. Gregg's. She gave me the whole bottle when I was near dead with bronchitis. I passed out for three days, marvellous dreams. When I woke up I was as clear as a bell. Astonishing little girl, aren't you? Who's that woman there trying to embrace Hortense? Ah, that's stopped her." Hortense had hit out. Jenny Tarleton seemed very surprised. Ernie Callaghan grabbed Hortense and was tangoing with her in long flat-footed strides. The band was playing "Jealousy."

       "Hortense," I said, "has taken to sculpture."

       "Why do you say that?" Estella said. "I don't see the connection."

       "Muscle," I said. "She's good with a hammer and chisel."

       "I think I know you," Estella said. "You're a friend of Peter Warlock's."

       "Much happiness," I said again. "Not much more I can say really, is there? I'm glad you've taken the plunge."

       "What a horrid thing to say," Estella said. "Does she do religious sculptures and things?"

       "She's going to do a Madonna and Child, she says."

       "Do you believe in chastity? I think chastity's marvellous."

       "Not too much chastity," Tom said.

       "All you can get," I said sincerely. The King of Bohemia was zigzagging toward us, sword ready for accolade.

       "Well," I said to Hortense, when we were taking a late-night pot of tea in our drawing room, both, having drunk so much, being thirsty, "do we go and support the petitioners?"

       "That was a horrible little woman. I had to hit her, you know. Clawing and fumbling like that. But I can't help feeling a bit sorry for her."

       "Lesbians," I said, stretching my legs on a limegreen pouffe, "are said to know far more about giving sexual satisfaction than men. They have patience, for one thing. They're not in a hurry to get it all done. Like," I guessed, "Domenico."

       "You have this great gift for making everything sound horrid. And what do you know about Domenico?"

       "Men are like that. With women, anyway. Poor Tom. I don't think there's much sex in poor Tom. What's known as a white marriage. Do we go tomorrow?"

       "You put me in an awkward position, don't you? I mean, about freedom and so on. You must go, of course. You must be in the forefront and to hell with the consequences."

       "Such as a truncheon or a police horse's hoof. I don't really believe, Hrtense," I said, getting up with energy to pour myself more tea. "I really don't        think it's right to be the way we are, those of us that are, I mean. I don't        glory in it. It's not right and it's against Nature. It's a curse. That silly girl was 2 going on about chastity tonight. I found chastity and I felt no frustration. I found a way out."

       "I've heard all about that, what happened in the Federated Malay States." She pronounced Malay with two ays and a stress on the first syllable. "That seemed to me to be unnatural."

       "Like Jesus Christ? Like priests?"

       "Now it's you who's being blasphemous. Get on the telephone to the Vatican or wherever fat Carlo is. He'll tell you what to do. He'll talk about free will and standing by your brothers in adversity."

       "He'll talk about free will used evilly, as you damned well know, What I talk about is predestination and not liking what's been predestined. But I agree with one thing—it's nothing to do with the state or the secular law. Damn it, we'll both go. But we'll both run away if there's trouble. This martyrdom is all nonsense."

       "Run away, oh no."

       "Run away or else get an eye kicked out or your crowning glory pulled off along with your scalp. We both have duties elsewhere."

       "I do. Do you?"

       "I may," I said, "one day write a good book. Perhaps all the tripe I'm doing is a preparation for that. Schicksal."

       "Sister Gertrude, Rude Gert, Tom is silly really but you have to laugh, was always going on about Schicksal. I know all about Schicksal. It's nonsense. And now I'm going to bed." She went with no good-night kiss for her elder brother, locking her bedroom door with a loud click of the bolt. Stupid girl, what did she expect? My rushing in to peep at her naked? Somnambulistic incestuous rape?

       Dreams have been too often my surrogate for experience. I sank to sleep before being able to finish my last cigarette. Almost at once I heard Big Ben's thirteen tons clang the hour of two and then clang it again, then again, a kind of chuckling grinding between the repeated messages, something wrong with the works. I was standing naked facing the public entrance in Old Palace Yard: the door was open but nobody was within. The Yorkshire magnesian limestone of the Houses of Parliament was visibly corroding in the acid rain of London: knobs and nuts of black petrous matter dropped and feebly plashed in the puddles. "Now," I cried, and I turned. I faced a horde of sexual aberrants at their worst, hissing, camping, simpering, Val nowhere to be seen. Oh do fetch the bobbies, the little darlings. We do so want to be done. Bits of corroded stone were picked up and thrown at me, weakish, girlish. Hortense appeared in underwear from within the building, coming through the Norman Porch and high-heeling down the stairs with a clatter. Domenico, dressed as a fascist, cried "Disgraziata" and hurled a hefty missile, grey lead tortured into a cricket ball. This caught Hortense in the right eye. Blood spurted and then the eye itself stared out dead on the end of its stalk. There were cheers. That will spoil her 3 beauty, disgraceful little bitch. Her scream seemed to be a waking not a dream one. It woke me as if it were in my bed. I knifejacked to sitting, shaking and sweating. The rain was teeming, and Brook Street was full of drowned quivering lamps. I relighted that discarded cigarette.

       And now, as so often happened, my brain in a fever took over the datum of the dream and enriched and expanded it. Norman Douglas spoke pedantically on behalf of the buggers. "We have this right, you see, to shove it up. On a road in Capri I found a postman who had fallen off his bicycle, you see, unconscious, somewhat concussed. He lay in exactly the right position. I buggered him with athletic swiftness: he would come to and feel none the worse." The Home Secretary nodded sympathetically while the rain wept onto him in Old Palace Yard. "I mean, minors. I mean, there'd be little in it for us if you restricted the act to consenting males over, say, eighteen. Boys are so pliable, so exquisitely sodomizable. You do see that, don't you, old man?" The Home Secretary nodded as to say, Of course, old public school man myself, old boy. I saw a lot of known faces, Pearson, Tyrwit, Lewis, Charlton, James, all most reasonable, claiming the legal right to maul and suck and bugger. I put myself in the gathering and said, also most reasonable, that it was nothing to do with law: you were still left with the ethics and theology of the thing. What we had a right to desire was love, and nothing hindered that right. Oh nonsense, he's such a bore. As for theology, isn't there that apocryphal book of the Bible in which heterosexuality is represented as the primal curse?

       That was my own invention, which was to appear the following year as a superbly printed little pamphlet from the Black Sun Press. Am I now, knowing what happened to this publication, knowing how it is in use at this moment as a text read aloud at homosexual marriages, indulging in the false insights of pretended prophecy? I have already, by reproducing that text earlier in these memoirs, avowed authorship, and it is for the first time in print. I have provided a kind of theological justification for homosexuals to whom instinct is not enough. Why did I do this? Reaction, partly, against the sanctimonious rebukes of Raffaele Campanati; the surrogation of a fury of lust unappeased; the fulfilment of the right of even the bad artist to see how far imagination can take him; submission to a rational demon. Shakespeare could have done it, and better, had he been called upon. Write me, O writer, a justification of Jew-baiting and death camps, put it in the invented mouth of an invented zealot, make it convince. The artist's pride: he must see if he can do it. What is the point of the dialectic of fiction or drama unless the evil is as cogent as the good?

       "There is," Norman Douglas said with a Scots twang, "the question of sterile seed. Its spending in the vas naturale mulieris is as much of a pollution as its spurting in male mouths and around male thighs and buttocks. I mean, old man, if you're holding to the strict Aristotelian view. Yes, I know, if you know 3 you're sterile, which is perhaps a good reason for not wishing to know. You speak truth in that mock biblical thing of yours: the primal function of the flow was the expression of joy and it remains so. What, are we to be chained, like beasts, to biology?"

       The rain was still heavy as Hortense and I sat facing each other over the breakfast brought to our suite: kippers, kidneys, eggs, toast, strong Claridge's tea. I said, "It won't happen. They're not the sort of people who'll face the" rain.

       "It'll stop," she said. "It's too heavy not to." Both her eyes burnt cool and steady at me: that dream had not been a melodramatization of her catching ocular cold from a draught or bumping her brow on a darkling visit to the bathroom. But the rain continued as we went out into the West End on our different missions: she to buy toys for the twins, I to visit my diastematic agent. They wouldn't face the rain, which mewled consistently all day. The Evening Standard proved me wrong. A procession of men, young and not so, carrying slogans blurred by the wet—We are as God made us—Justice for the Gay—got mixed up on Bridge Street with a hundred or so unemployed from the North, the destination of both groups the House of Commons. The unemployed, outraged by the frivolity and, yes, indecency of the deviant demonstrators, initiated violence to which some of the others responded, though many ran away. The police, apparently, looked on for a time before intervening. There were no serious injuries except for a young man who was blinded by a stone in the left eye. Representatives of both groups were permitted, under police escort, to present signed petitions, the one to the Member for Warrington, Lanes, the other to the Home Secretary. Having delivered his document, the leader of the deviant demonstration, a poet well-known in Soho, Valentine Wrigley, shouted obscene slogans in the outer corridors of the House of Commons. The police had remonstrated kindly but he had knocked a portcullised cap off a constable's head. He had been taken in charge.

       "They don't," I said to Hortense over tea, "really want the big gesture. They don't really want a change. They want to be naughty and they want to be noticed, no more. For their activities to be proscribed by law is meat and drink to them. And they call themselves early Christians. They want the titillation of acknowledged wickedness. There's no mention of any women being there. So much for your Miss Tarleton."

       "Not mine."

       The Well of Loneliness was not to be republished in Great Britain for another twenty-one years. It remained and remains a bad book. At the trial in the United States in 1929, the New York judge rendered the same judgment as the London magistrate, but his verdict was unanimously reversed by a higher court. You could no longer prosecute a book on its subject matter alone. There was never much point in moral activism in Great Britain, it was always a matter of waiting for the Americans to move. The colonies still worked for the old mother bitch.

CHAPTER 43

A decade ends in zero, not nine, and the twentieth century will still be going on (or, if this book survives its epoch, was still going on), though very wearily, in the year 2000. Still, the switchover to a new ten is dramatic and feels like a beginning. In 1929 we were ten years away from a new war and eleven years beyond the end of an old one. An age was beginning in one sense; in another it was ending in spectacular style. There was, for instance, the Lateran Treaty which Monsignor Carlo Campanati, collaborating behind the scenes with Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, did so much to implement.

       It was February 11, a wet day in Rome, and the Angelus was clanging and throbbing. The noon gun fired from the Gianicolo as Cardinal Gasparri, accompanied by Monsignor Campanati, drove into the Piazza Laterana. Into the Palazzo Laterano strode Benito Mussolini and his aides. On a long table, gift to the papacy of the people of the Philippines, the papers lay waiting, along with polished silver inkwells, blotters clean as a baptised infant soul, a beautiful gold pen.

       Cardinal Gasparri said in greeting to the Duce, "This is the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. Auspicious, auspicious."

       "Is this Our Lady of Lourdes the same as all the other Our Ladies?" the bullfrog atheist asked.

       "That is unworthy," Monsignor Campanati said.

       "I've had just about enough of you," the Duce said surlily. "I'll be glad when this is over."

       "It is also," Cardinal Gasparri said, "the seventh anniversary of the crowning of His Holiness."

       "Yes yes," the Duce said. "By a retrospective act that coronation is converted into a purely spiritual ceremony. That is what the Italian State is paying for."