Two Solitudes (50 page)

During that year in Oxford Paul worked on a B. Litt., came to like his tutor better than any man he had ever known except Yardley, drank beer in the pubs, read dozens of books he had wanted to read for years, refused an invitation to play ice-hockey for the university, and laid the groundwork for the novel he felt had been stirring inside him since he could remember.

 

It was the novel which had brought him to Greece. Living was cheap there, and his tutor at Oriel had found a part-time job for him in Sparta with the museum kept by the British Association. As a result of the past ten months, he had four hundred pages of completed manuscript to show for his divided labours. And now he was in Athens on his way home.

He might have stayed longer if he had seen his way to finishing the book, but suddenly it had stopped moving and he was haunted by a sense of failure. Homesickness had moved in on him and there was nothing to do but put the book aside and find a ship that would take him home. The title of his book held its meaning clear,
Young Man of 1933
. The year of Hitler's rise, a young man caught between the old war that was history and the new one whose coming was so certain it made the present look like the past even before it had been lived through. The idea had gripped him like iron at the outset. Why it had suddenly begun to grow foggy he didn't know.

He picked up Heather's letter and focused his eyes on her lines of writing again. “You never knew my Grandfather Methuen, did you? He died today. He was eighty-two. I can't help feeling as though a good portion of Montreal had died with him. When I was little I was made to believe the whole city revolved around his whims. Now I know it will certainly go on without him, but something that made it stuffy and even rather funny will be gone. I'm going home on the night
train and I can't suppose I'll come back. But don't you imagine that maybe it won't be so bad having to live there again after having once been able to get away? What do you think, Paul? Mummy and I will be all alone in that ark of a house on the side of the mountain. I can't very well leave her alone now. Poor Mummy, how she's worked to be at home in that house! Now it's all hers, gargoyles, conservatory and all!”

Paul stopped reading and looked again at the postmark on the envelope, trying to think how many days it had been in transit. By now Heather would be living in Montreal again. And how much of New York would she have taken back with her? She had spent two years at Columbia taking an M.A. in the history of art. For a year she had taught in a preparatory school. During the past year she had been working in a museum. The coincidence of their most recent jobs had amused them both, in spite of the different nature of their occupations in their two museums as far apart as Sparta and New York.

He went on reading. “Did you know Grampa Yardley was very ill last winter? I can't remember whether or not I've told you. I wanted awfully to see him, but New York can seem such a long distance from every place else once you're in it. Now I'm going down to Halifax after everything is settled in Montreal and I'll try to get Mummy to drive down with me. It should do her good. You probably know from Grampa's letters to you how many friends he's made down there, but he's very frail now and he lives all alone in one room. Suddenly I feel as though I can hardly wait to see him. So many old people, especially the decent ones, are slipping off one by one while there's still time. Who'll be left? Huntly McQueen, I suppose. What is it about men like him? Men his age? They seem anaesthetized against the world we're living in. In your novel, do you think you can really drive it through their heads
how people like us feel? They hold on to the ball and won't pass it to one of us, and yet they don't seem to have the least idea what goal they're playing for! I don't suppose they think we do, either. Please come home soon, Paul. I wish you would. Now that I'm going back to Montreal I want you there, too. I can even wish you were here in New York right now. There's a quarter moon and the park is filled with young green things and in Rockefeller Center they've set out blue hyacinths and yellow forsythia. I keep wondering how you'd like that favourite spot of mine in all New York. If you said the R.C.A. Building couldn't equal the Parthenon I'd try to tell you how wrong you were. Whenever I get bogged down in despair about the States (isn't it funny how all Canadians do that, as if the Americans cared what we felt about them) I walk down Fifth Avenue and look up at that beautiful shaft and then I know that a country able to build such a structure can do anything…. Look after yourself, my dear. And come home soon!”

Paul leaned back in his chair and the familiar presence of solitude was close. People sauntered past or sat at tables in the sun. A loudspeaker in the square was broadcasting Danube waltzes. An itinerant bootblack wanted to shine his shoes. Two girls with almond eyes passed, laughing vividly, and his eyes followed them. After a moment he got up and walked across to a kiosk on the square, bought a postcard and returned to his table. He wrote Heather a short note saying that he was leaving for Canada as soon as possible and she might write to him next at Halifax. He stamped the card and mailed it, then sat down once more in the sunshine.

Heather wished he were in New York. But that was many days ago. He wished she were here in Athens. He'd like to take her to dinner at the Grande-Bretagne, and afterwards they would sip wine until dark, and then before the moon was up
they would drive to the Akropolis in an open carriage and he would lead her up through the Propylaea, then up the time-smoothed steps to the white floor of the Parthenon itself. The moon would rise enormous and round over Hymettus tonight. They would see Parnes, Pentelikon, Lykabettus, Aegelos and Salamis framed by successive pairs of columns; they would listen to the dog that howled at the moon somewhere among the broken stones and monuments behind the temple; and moonlight would touch the caryatids. Heather had a body like theirs; not the greyhound figure made popular by advertising models. Her lines were female and fruitful in the memory. They would stand touching each other while they looked across the dark plain where the Long Walls had run down to Piraeus. They would see the moonlight flickering along the coastal waters from Salamis down to Sunium, and he would tell her how in the old days, when the triremes rounded the cape on their way home, the quartermasters seeing the first glint of sunlight from the spear of Athene on the Akropolis had raised their arms to salute the goddess.

He got up and paid his bill, then strolled across the square toward the Grande-Bretagne. He had three days to kill in Athens and there was nothing to do but walk around the city. Alone, and hungry for a girl he could love, there was no savour in it for him now. He went into the hotel and passed through to the bar.

The place had been invaded by passengers from a Strength-through-Joy ship which was anchored at Phaleron, and the corridors, lobby and bar thundered with their conversation. Paul found an empty stool at the corner of the bar, ordered a beer and observed the room. The young Germans lounged easily with their collars open, occasionally running their hands through their hair, and sunburn made their teeth
seem brilliant when they smiled. They had a way of lifting their chins and laughing suddenly at each other. There were also a few Greeks at the bar, two French women who seemed to be residents of the hotel sitting at a side table, and an English couple in one corner. But the Germans dominated the room and their massed presence had already caused a mixture of fear, contempt and hostility in the others. With few exceptions, they were not particularly rugged. What Paul noted about them was their self-confidence. They knew they were hated here, that they had deliberately created the hatred, and they were enjoying it. He felt an unpleasant excitement grow along his nerves as he sat sipping his drink. If a fight started, he knew he was the only man in the room who could match any one of them.

Paul's attention was caught by a woman in her late thirties, evidently French, sitting near the bar smiling at a German who shared the table with her. Her face was soft-skinned and delicate, with large brown eyes and a small mouth. She was quite short, with flesh somewhat plump over very small bones, and her dress had been carefully designed by a couturier in the Place Vendôme to exaggerate the sensuous fragility of her body. Paul watched her. Hundreds of thousands of francs had been spent on her education and upkeep, and her accent as she spoke German was obviously Parisian. She wore a wedding-ring on her left hand, together with a square-cut diamond as large as her thumb-nail. She could not have known the German at her table more than three hours, but already her manner indicated an unspoken intimacy. He was the biggest and crudest man in the room, and many years her junior. His bulging body made him look like a cartoon of a Nazi; his head was shaved except for a stiff brush of hair in front and he had the hands of a prize-fighter. Once he turned to wink at a group of friends at another
table and they raised their glasses to him. Then his right hand, thick, square and with broken nails, closed over the woman's fingers and pressed. An expression of masked pain touched her face, naked and erotic. Her eyes showed a peculiar mixture of gratitude, encouragement and fear, and the German seemed puzzled by it, his confusion at war with his eagerness to get her out of the bar and possess her as quickly as possible. He spoke to her again. She shook her head. He leaned back, baffled, and ran his hand over his shaved head, then remembered that he was thirsty.

“Bier?” he said to her.

Paul heard her answer. “Was du willst.”

The German smashed his hand down so hard the table jumped. “Bier!” he shouted.

Paul paid for his drink and left the bar. He was too restless to sit still any longer and had to keep moving. But now that he was on the street again, Athens seemed more nearly empty than ever. He walked up to the Akropolis, but the scene had nothing to give him. About four o'clock he returned to the lower streets and tried to dull the ache in his mind by reading week-old English and French papers bought at a corner kiosk. He sat in the same restaurant in the Place de la Constitution in which he had read his mail that morning. The afternoon wore on and the city surrounded him like a giant presence of loneliness. It was no new feeling; most of his life he had known it, and now it was recurring again like a periodic disease. This loneliness of all large cities, the solitary man reading his newsprint, the instinctive hope that there is new life just around the corner if you go to it, but around the corner always the same emptiness, the urgency which makes you want to prowl always a street further; and through everything, beating into the mind like a
tom-tom, the shuffle of other people's shoe-leather counterfeiting the motion of life. He wondered if Heather had ever felt as he did now. Two solitudes in the infinite waste of loneliness under the sun. People kept passing the sidewalk café, girls in light dresses, mature women surprisingly smart in Parisian fashion, with smooth, cultivated skins and quiet knowledge, a sense of sex accompanying them like a subtle perfume, instilling into his mind the belief that they were pregnant with a sexual learning he was too immature to understand. At the table next to his own a woman sat smoking a long cigarette as she toyed with the stem of her wine-glass. He exchanged a glance and knew he could have her if he wished. Another time he might have let the routine take its course, but not now. He wasn't equal to that kind of loneliness today.

He left the café and wandered aimlessly a while longer, then stopped to eat supper in a small restaurant filled with workmen and smelling of cheap tobacco and goat's flesh frying in grease. He ordered what the menu offered, drank two glasses of vile-tasting resin wine and went out into the streets again.

His novel began to press forward in his mind. For a while he tried to keep it back, not to think about it, but it was useless. He had lived with it too intensely for too long. It was like an obbligato to everything else he thought or did. He remembered the team of Germans at the Grande-Bretagne, the soft face of the Frenchwoman pleading silently with the German to degrade her. Drumbeats began to hammer in his head. The young man of 1933, the individual into which he had tried desperately to breathe life. 1933–Hitler's year–when the
danse macabre
had burst out of the unconscious of so many millions, out of the alleys and side-streets into the open until it had become the world's way of life.

Young man of 1933–the year when farmers had begun to plough under the cotton, to process the hogs, to burn the wheat, when stevedores under the spreading arms of Christ in Rio de Janeiro had dumped coffee into the sea, while in Russia the famine killed off three million people and in the west, in the lands of the Greek heritage, old men took water and washed their hands.

Without thinking how he had got there, Paul found himself back in his room at the hotel. He went to the window, opened it and leaned out. Young man of 1933–the year the brazen cracking voice of Adolf Hitler invoked the new god while the sheep looked up. Eighty million sheep, remembering they were Goths. While in the west the old men lingered, piteous as doves in every parliament and stock exchange, naked to everyone's eyes and knowledge as they washed their hands.

And behind Hitler, what? The machine. The magic worthy of every worship, mankind reborn for the service of efficiency, the still small voice of God the Father no longer audible through the stroke of the connecting rod, the suave omnipotent gesture of the hydraulic press, the planetary rumble of the conveyor belt, the visions of things to come–whole cities abolished in single nights, populations uplifted according to plan, cloudy blueprints of engineers, millions calling for help and millions for war, millions for peace and millions for suicide, and the grandeur and the efficiency and the solitude.

Below Paul lay the city street. Athens could be London, Rome, New York, Paris, Berlin or any other great city. This was where it had started. In the city. Any city. The flop-houses of Vienna, the Babel of the Holy Roman Empire, emptiness dressed in baroque, the breaking of a dried-out heart sung through the nose in the Danube Waltz, the new city-hatred (contempt for all things but cleverness) of the slum man for
the Jew, the owner for the worker, the worker for his fear of himself, the bourgeois for his own thoughts in the dark, the hatred of them all for the old men washing their hands.