Of Time and the River (128 page)

Starwick’s face had flamed crimson during the course of this jeering parody: he returned the other’s look with hard eyes, and said with cold succinctness:

“Quite! . . . If you don’t mind, could we go along now and,”— his flush deepened and he concluded with painful difficulty, “. . . and . . . and do what you said you would?”

“But of COURSE!” the other cried, with another parody of Starwick’s tone and manner. “At once! Immediately! TOUT DE SUITE! . . . as we say over here! . . . Now, THERE you are!” he said enthusiastically. “THERE you are, Frank! . . . TOUT DE SUITE!” he murmured rapturously. “TOUT DE SUITE! . . . Not ‘at once!’ Not ‘right away!’ Not ‘immediately!’ But TOUT DE SUITE! . . . Ah, Frank, how different from our own coarse tongue! Quel charme! Quelle musique! Quelle originalité! . . . I MEAN, the whole thing’s there! . . . It really is, you know!”

“Quite!” said Starwick as before, and looked at him with hard, embittered eyes. “Could we go now?”

“Mais oui, mais oui, mon ami! . . . But first, I want you to meet yon noble youth who wipes his nose with such a simple unaffected dignity, and is, withal, so FRENCH about it! . . . I know him well, we artists have the common touch, n’est-ce pas? Many a time and oft have we talked together. . . . Why, Frank, you’re going to love him like a brother . . . the whole, great heart of France is beating underneath that waiter’s jacket . . . and, ah! such grace, such flashing rapier-work of Gallic wit, such quick intelligence and humour. . . . Ecoutez, garçon!” he called; the boy turned, startled, and then, seeing the young men, his thick lips slowly wreathed themselves in a smile of amiable stupidity. He came towards them smiling eagerly, a clumsy boy of eighteen years with the thick features, the dry, thick lips, the blunted, meaty hands and encrusted nails of the peasant. It was a face of slow, wondering intelligence, thick-witted, unperceptive, flushed with strong, dark colour, full of patient earnestness, and animal good- nature.

“Bonsoir, monsieur,” he said, as he came up. “Vous désirez quelque chose?” And he grinned at them slowly, with a puzzled, trustful stare.

“But yes, my boy! . . . I have been telling my friend about you, and he wants to meet you. He is, like me, an American . . . but a true friend of France. And so I told him how you loved America!”

“But yes, but yes!” the boy cried earnestly, clutching eagerly at the suggestion. “La France and l’Amérique are of the true friends, n’est-ce pas, monsieur?”

“You have reason! It’s as you say!”

“Vashingtawn!” the boy cried suddenly, with a burst of happy inspiration.

“But yes! But yes! . . . Lafayette!” the other yelled enthusiastically.

“Pair-SHING!” the boy cried rapturously. “La France et l’Amérique!” he passionately proclaimed, and he turned slowly to Starwick, joined his thick, blunt fingers together, and thrusting them under Starwick’s nose, nodded his thick head vigorously and cried: “C’est comme ça! . . . La France et l’Amérique!”—he shook his thick joined fingers vigorously under Starwick’s nose again, and said: “Mais oui! Mais oui! . . . C’est toujours comme ça!”

“Oh, my God!” groaned Starwick, turning away, “how dull! How utterly, UNSPEAKABLY dreary!”

“Monsieur?” the boy spoke inquiringly, and turned blunt, puzzled features at Starwick’s dejected back.

Starwick’s only answer was another groan: flinging a limp arm over the back of his chair, he slumped in an attitude of exhausted weariness. The boy turned a patient, troubled face to the other youth, who said, in an explanatory way:

“He is profoundly moved. . . . What you have said has touched him deeply!”

“Ah-h!” the boy cried, with an air of sudden, happy enlightenment, and thus inspired, began with renewed ardour, and many a vigorous wag of his thick and earnest beak, to proclaim:

“Mais c’est vrai! C’est comme je dis! . . . La France et l’Amérique—” he intoned anew.

“Oh, God!” groaned Starwick without turning, and waved a feeble and defeated arm. “Tell him to go away!”

“He is deeply moved! He says he can stand no more!”

The boy cast an earnest and immensely gratified look at Starwick’s dejected back, and was on the point of pushing his triumph farther when the proprietor angrily called to him, bidding him be about his work and leave the gentlemen in peace.

He departed with obvious reluctance, but not without vigorously nodding his thick head again, proclaiming that “La France et l’Amérique sont comme ça!” and shaking his thick, clasped fingers earnestly in a farewell gesture of racial amity.

When he had gone, Starwick looked round wearily, and in a dispirited tone said:

“God! What a place! How did you ever find it? . . . And how do you manage to stand it?”

“But look at him, Frank . . . I mean, don’t you just LO-O-VE it?” he jibed. “I mean, there’s something so GRAND and so SIMPLE and so UNAFFECTED about the way he did it! It’s really QUITE astonishing! It really is, you know!”

The poor bus-boy, indeed, had been intoxicated by his sudden and unaccustomed success. Now, as he continued his work of clearing tables and stacking dishes on a tray, he could be seen nodding his thick head vigorously and muttering to himself: “Mais oui, mais oui, monsieur! . . . La France et l’Amérique. . . . Nous sommes de vrais amis!” and from time to time he would even pause in his work to clasp his thick fingers together illustrating this and to mutter: “C’est toujours comme ça!”

This preoccupied elation soon proved the poor boy’s undoing. For even as he lifted his loaded tray and balanced it on one thick palm he muttered “C’est comme ça,” again, making a recklessly inclusive gesture with his free hand; the mountainously balanced tray was thrown off balance, he made a desperate effort to retrieve it, and as it crashed upon the floor he pawed frantically and sprawled after it, in one general ruinous smash of broken crockery.

There was a maddened scream from the proprietor. He came running clumsily, a squat, thick figure of a bourgeois Frenchman, clothed in black and screaming imprecations. His moustaches bristled like the quills of an enraged porcupine, and his ruddy face was swollen and suffused, an apoplectic red:

“Brute! Fool! Imbecile!” he screamed as the frightened boy clambered to his feet and stood staring at him with a face full of foolish and helpless bewilderment. “. . . Salaud! . . . Pig . . . Architect!” he screamed out this meaningless curse in a strangling voice, and rushing at the boy cuffed him clumsily on the side of the face and began to thrust and drive him before him in staggering lunges.

“—And what grace, Frank!” Eugene now said cruelly. “How GRAND and SIMPLE and how unselfconscious they are in everything they do! I MEAN, the way they use their hands!” he said ironically, as the maddened proprietor gave the unfortunate boy another ugly, clumsy shove that sent him headlong. “I MEAN, it’s like a fugue—like Cimabue or an early primitive—it really is, you know—”

“Assassin! Criminal!” the proprietor screamed at this moment, and gave the weeping boy a brutal shove that sent him sprawling forward upon his hands and knees:

“Traitor! Misérable scélérat!” he screamed, and kicked clumsily at the prostrate boy with one fat leg.

“Now where?—where?” Eugene said maliciously, as the wretched boy clambered to his feet, weeping bitterly, “—where, Francis, could you see anything like that in America?”

“God!” said Starwick, getting up. “It’s unspeakable!” And desperately: “Let’s go!”

They paid the bill and went out. As they went down the stairs they could still hear the hoarse, choked sobs of the bus-boy, his thick face covered with his thick, blunt fingers, crying bitterly.

He didn’t know what Starwick wanted the money for, but it was plain he wanted it for something, badly. His agitation was pitiable:— the bitter exasperation and open flare of temper he had displayed once or twice in the restaurant was so unnatural to him that it was evident his nerves were being badly rasped by the long delay. Now, he kept consulting his watch nervously: he turned, and looking at Eugene with a quiet but deep resentment in his eyes, he said:

“Look. If you’re going to let me have the money, I wish you’d let me have it now—please. Otherwise, I shall not need it.”

And Eugene, touched with a feeling of guilt at the deep and quiet resentment in his companion’s face, knowing he had promised him the money and feeling that this taunting procrastination was ungenerous and mean, said roughly:

“All right, come on. You can have it right away.”

They turned into the Rue St. Honoré, turned again, and walked to the Place Vendôme, where there was a small exchange office—or “all-night bank”—where travellers’ cheques were cashed. They entered, he cashed his three remaining cheques: the amount was something over 900 francs. He counted the money, kept out 500 francs for Starwick, stuffed the rest into his pocket, and, turning, thrust the little sheaf of banknotes into Starwick’s hand, saying brutally:

“There’s you money, Frank. And now, good-bye to you. I needn’t detain you any longer.”

He turned to go, but the implication of his sneer had not gone unnoticed:

“Just a minute,” Starwick’s quiet voice halted him. “What did you mean by that?”

He paused, with a slow thick anger beating in his veins:

“By what?”

“By saying you needn’t detain me any longer?”

“You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

“You mean the money?”

“Yes.”

Starwick looked quietly at him a moment longer, then thrust the little roll of banknotes back into his hand.

“Take it,” he said.

For a moment the other could not speak. A murderous fury choked him: he ground his teeth together, and clenched his fist, he felt a moment’s almost insane desire to grip that soft throat with his strangling hand and beat the face into a bloody jelly with his fist.

“Why, God-damn you—” he grated between clenched teeth. “Goddamn you for a—!” He turned away, saying harshly: “To hell with you! . . . I’m through!”

He began to walk away across the Square at a savage stride. He heard footsteps following him: near the corner of the Rue St. Honoré Starwick caught up with him and said doggedly:

“No, but I’m going with you! . . . I really MUST, you know!” His voice rose and became high, almost womanish, with his passionate declaration: “If there’s anything between you and me that has to be settled before you go away, you can’t leave it like this . . . we’ve got to have it out, you know . . . we really must!”

The other youth stood stock-still for a moment. Every atom of him— blood, bone, the beating of his heart, the substance of his flesh— seemed to congeal in a paralysis of cold murder. He licked his dry lips and said thickly:

“Have it out!”—The blood swarmed through him in a choking flood, it seemed instantly to rush down through his hands and to fill him with a savage, rending strength, the curse was torn from him in a bestial cry and snarling:

“Have it out! Why, you damned rascal, we’ll have it out, all right! We’ll have it out, you dirty little fairy—” The foul word was out at last, in one blind expletive of murderous hate, and suddenly that tortured, impossibly tangled web of hatred, failure, and despair found its release. He reached out, caught Starwick by the throat and collar of his shirt, and endowed with that immense, incalculable strength which hatred and the sudden lust to kill can give a man, he lifted the slight figure from the ground as if it were a bundle of rags and sticks, and slammed it back against the façade of a building with such brutal violence that Starwick’s head bounced and rattled on the stone. The blow knocked Starwick senseless: his hat went flying from his head, his cane fell from his grasp and rattled on the pavement with a hard, lean clatter. For a moment, his eyes rolled back and forth with the wooden, weighted movement of a doll’s. Then, as Eugene released his grip, his legs buckled at the knees, his eyes closed and his head sagged, and he began to slump down towards the pavement, his back sliding all the time against the wall.

He would have fallen if Eugene had not caught him, held him, propped him up against the wall, until he could recover. And at that moment, Eugene felt an instant, overwhelming revulsion of shame, despair, and sick horror, such as he had never known before. For a moment all the blood seemed to have drained out of his heart and left it a dead shell. He thought he had killed Starwick— broken his neck or fractured his skull: even in death—or unconsciousness—Starwick’s frail body retained its languorous dignity and grace. His head dropped heavily to one side, the buckling weight of the unconscious figure slumped in a movement of terrible and beautiful repose—the same movement that one sees in a great painting of Christ lowered from the cross, as if, indeed, the whole rhythm, balance and design of that art which Starwick had observed with such impassioned mimicry had left its image indelibly upon his own life, so that, even in death or senselessness, his body would portray it.

At that moment the measure of ruin and defeat which the other young man felt was overwhelming. It seemed to him that if he had deliberately contrived to crown a ruinous career by the most shameful and calamitous act of all, he could not have been guilty of a worse crime than the one he had just committed. It was not merely the desperate, sickening terror in his heart when he thought that Starwick might be dead—that he had killed him. It was even more than this, a sense of profanation, a sense of having done something so foul and abominable that he could never recover from it, never wash its taint out of his blood. There are some people who possess such a natural dignity of person—such a strange and rare inviolability of flesh and spirit—that any familiarity, any insult, above all any act of violence upon them, is unthinkable. If such an insult be intended, if such violence be done, the act returns a thousandfold upon the one who does it: his own blow returns to deal a terrible revenge; he will relive his crime a thousand times in all the shame and terror of inexpiable memory.

Starwick was such a person: he had this quality of personal inviolability more than anyone the other youth had ever known. And now, as he stood there holding Starwick propped against the wall, calling him by name, shaking him and pleading with him to recover consciousness, his feeling of shame, despair, and bitter ruinous defeat was abysmal, irremediable. It seemed to him that he could have done nothing which would more have emphasized his enemy’s superiority and his own defeat than this thing which he had done. And the feeling that Starwick would always beat him, always take from him the thing he wanted most, that by no means could he ever match the other youth in any way, gain even the most trifling victory, was now overpowering in its horror. With a sick and bitter heart of misery, he cursed the wretched folly of his act. He would willingly have cut off his hand—the hand that gave the blow—if by so doing he could undo his act, but he knew that it was now too late, and with a feeling of blind terror he reflected that this knowledge of his defeat and fear was now Starwick’s also, and that as long as Starwick lived, he would always know about it, and realize from this alone the full measure of his victory. And this feeling of shame, horror, and abysmal, inexpiable regret persisted even after, with a feeling of sick relief, he saw Starwick’s eyes flutter, open, and after a moment of vague, confused bewilderment, look at him with a quiet consciousness.