Under the Volcano (42 page)

Beside the Consul Hugh took out a cigarette, tapped it on his thumbnail, noted it was the last in the package, and placed it between his lips. He put his feet up on the back of the seat beneath him and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, frowning down into the arena. Then, fidgeting still, he struck a match, drawing his thumbnail across it with a crackle like a small cap-pistol, and held it to the cigarette, cupping his quite beautiful hands, his head bent… Hugh was coming towards her this morning, in the garden, through the sunlight. With his rolling swagger, his Stetson hat on the back of his head, his holster, his pistol, his bandolier, his tight trousers tucked inside the elaborately
stitched and decorated boots, she'd thought, just for an instant, that he was — actually! — Bill Hodson, the cowboy star, whose leading lady she'd been in three pictures when she was fifteen. Christ, how absurd! How marvellously absurd!
The Hawaiian Islands gave us this real outdoor girl who is fond of swimming, golf, dancing, and is also an expert horsewoman! She
… Hugh hadn't said one word this morning about how well she rode, though he'd afforded her not a little secret amusement by explaining that her horse — miraculously — didn't want to drink. Such areas there are in one another we leave, perhaps for ever, unexplored! — She'd never told him a word about her movie career, no, not even that day in Robinson… But it was a pity Hugh himself hadn't been old enough to interview her, if not the first time, that second awful time after Uncle Macintyre sent her to college, and after her first marriage, and the death of her child, when she had gone back once more to Hollywood.
Yvonne the Terrible! Look out, you sarong sirens and glamour girls, Yvonne Constable, the ‘Boomp Girl', is back in Hollywood! Yes, Yvonne is back, determined to conquer Hollywood for the second time. But she's twenty-four now, and the ‘Boomp Girl' has become a poised exciting woman who wears diamonds and white orchids and ermine — and a woman who has known the meaning of love and tragedy, who has lived a lifetime since she left Hollywood a few short years ago. I found her the other day at her beach home, a honey-tanned Venus just emerging from the surf. As we talked she gazed out over the water with her slumbrous dark eyes and the Pacific breezes played with her thick dark hair. Gazing at her for a moment it was hard to associate the Yvonne Constable of today with the rough-riding serial queen of yesteryear, but the torso's still terrific, and the energy is still absolutely unparalleled! The Honolulu Hellion, who at twelve was a war-whooping tomboy, crazy about baseball, disobeying everyone but her adored Dad, who she called ‘The Boss-Boss', became at fourteen a child actress, and at fifteen, leading lady to Bill Hodson. And she was a powerhouse even then. Tall for her age, she had a little strength that came from a childhood of swimming and surfboarding in the Hawaiian breakers. Yes, though you may not think it now, Yvonne has
been submerged in burning lakes, suspended over precipices, ridden horses down ravines, and she's an expert at ‘double pick-offs'. Yvonne laughs merrily today when she remembers the frightened determined girl who declared she could ride very well indeed, and then, the picture in progress, the company on location, tried to mount her horse from the wrong side! A year later she could do a ‘flying mount' without turning a hair. ‘But about that time I was rescued from Hollywood,' as she smilingly puts it, ‘and very unwillingly too, by my Uncle Macintyre, who literally swooped down, after my farther died, and sailed me back to Honolulu!' But when you've been a ‘Boomp Girl' and are well on your way to being an ‘Oomph Girl!' at eighteen, and when you've just lost your beloved ‘Boss-Boss', it's hard to settle down in a strict loveless atmosphere. ‘Uncle Macintyre', Yvonne admits, ‘never conceded a jot or tittle to the tropics. Oh, the mutton broth and oatmeal and hot tea!' But Uncle Macintyre knew his duty and, after Yvonne had studied with a tutor, he sent her to the University of Hawaii. There — perhaps, she says, ‘because the word “star” had undergone some mysterious transformation in my mind
'—
she took a course in astronomy! Trying to forget the ache in her heart and its emptiness, she forced an interest in her studies and even dreamed briefly of becoming the ‘Madame Curie' of astronomy ! And there too, before long, she met the millionaire playboy, Cliff Wright. He came into Yvonne's life at a moment when she was discouraged in her University work, restless under Uncle Macintyre's strict régime, lonely, and longing for love and companionship. And Cliff was young and gay, his rating as an eligible bachelor was absolutely blue ribbon. It's easy to see how he was able to persuade her, beneath the Hawaiian moon, that she loved him, and that she should leave college and marry him
. (‘Don't tell me for Christ sake about this Cliff,' the Consul wrote in one of his rare early letters, ‘I can see him and I hate the bastard already: short-sighted and promiscuous, six foot three of gristle and bristle and pathos, of deep-voiced charm and casuistry.' The Consul had seen him with some astuteness as a matter of fact — poor Cliff! — one seldom thought of him now and one tried not to think of the self-righteous girl whose pride had been outraged by his infidelities —
‘businesslike, inept and unintelligent, strong and infantile, like most American men, quick to wield chairs in a fight, vain, and who, at thirty still ten, turns the act of love into a kind of dysentery…')
Yvonne has already been a victim of ‘bad Press' about her marriage and in the inevitable divorce that followed, what she said was misconstrued, and when she didn't say anything, her silence was misinterpreted. And it wasn't only the Press who misunderstood: ‘Uncle Macintyre', she says ruefully, ‘simply washed his hands of me
.' (Poor Uncle Macintyre. It was fantastic, it was almost funny — it was screamingly funny, in a way, as one related it to one's friends. She was a Constable through and through, and no child of her mother's people ! Let her go the way of the Constables! God knows how many of them had been caught up in, or invited, the same kind of meaningless tragedy, or half-tragedy, as herself and her father. They rotted in asylums in Ohio or dozed in dilapidated drawing-rooms in Long Island with chickens pecking among the family silver and broken teapots that would be found to contain diamond necklaces. The Constables, a mistake on the part of nature, were dying out. In fact, nature meant to wipe them out, having no further use for what was not self-evolving. The secret of their meaning, if any, had been lost.)
So Yvonne left Hawaii with her head high and a smile on her lips, even if her heart was more achingly empty than ever before. And now she's back in Hollywood and people who know her best say she has no time in her life now for love, she thinks of nothing but her work. And at the studio they're saying the tests she's been making recently are nothing short of sensational. The ‘Boomp Girl' has become Hollywood's greatest dramatic actress! So Yvonne Constable, at twenty-four, is well on the way for the second time to becoming a star
.

– But Yvonne Constable had not become a star for the second time. Yvonne Constable had not even been on her way to becoming a star. She had acquired an agent who managed to execute some excellent publicity — excellent in spite of the fact that publicity of any kind, she persuaded herself, was one of her greatest secret fears — on the strength of her earlier rough-riding successes; she received promises, and that was all. In the end she
walked alone down Virgil Avenue or Mariposa beneath the dusty dead shallow-planted palms of the dark and accursed City of the Angels without even the consolation that her tragedy was no less valid for being so stale. For her ambitions as an actress had always been somewhat spurious : they suffered in some sense from the dislocations of the functions — she saw this — of womanhood itself. She saw it, and at the same time, now it was all quite hopeless (and now that she had, after everything,
outgrown
Hollywood), saw that she might under other conditions have become a really first-rate, even a great artist. For that matter what was she if not that now (if greatly directed) as she walked or drove furiously through her anguish and all the red lights, seeing, as might the Consul, the sign in the Town House window ‘Informal Dancing in the Zebra Room' turn ‘Infernal' —or ‘Notice to Destroy Weeds' become ‘Notice to Newlyweds'. While on the hoarding — ‘Man's public inquiry of the hour' —the great pendulum on the giant blue clock swung ceaselessly. Too late! And it was this, it was all this that had perhaps helped to make meeting Jacques Laruelle in Quauhnahuac such a shattering and ominous thing in her life. It was not merely that they had the Consul in common, so that through Jacques she had been mysteriously able to reach, in a sense to avail herself of, what she had never known, the Consul's innocence; it was only to him that she'd been able to talk of Holywood (not always honestly, yet with the enthusiasm with which close relatives may speak of a hated parent and with what relief!) on the mutual grounds of contempt and half-admitted failure. Moreover they discovered that they were both there in the same year, in 1932, had been once, in fact, at the same party, outdoor-barbe-cue-swimming-pool-and-bar; and to Jacques she had shown also, what she had kept hidden from the Consul, the old photographs of Yvonne the Terrible dressed in fringed leather shirts and riding-breeches and high-heeled boots, and wearing a ten-gallon hat, so that in his amazed and bewildered recognition of her this horrible morning, she had wondered was there not just an instant's faltering — for surely Hugh and Yvonne were in some grotesque fashion transposed!… And once too in his studio, where the Consul was so obviously not going to arrive,
M. Laruelle had shown her some stills of his old French films, one of which it turned out — good heavens! — she'd seen in New York soon after going east again. And in New York she'd stood once more (still in Jacques's studio) on that freezing winter night in Times Square — she was staying at the Astor — watching the illuminated news aloft travelling around the Times Building, news of disaster, of suicide, of banks failing, of approaching war, of nothing at all, which, as she gazed upward with the crowd, broke off abruptly, snapped off into darkness, into the end of the world, she had felt, when there was no more news. Or was it — Golgotha? A bereaved and dispossessed orphan, a failure, yet rich, yet beautiful, walking, but not back to her hotel, in the rich fur trappings of alimony, afraid to enter the bars alone whose warmth she longed for then, Yvonne had felt far more desolate than a streetwalker; walking — and being followed, always followed — through the numb brilliant jittering city —
the best for less
, she kept seeing, or
Dead End
, or
Romeo and Juliet
, and then again,
the best for less
— that awful darkness had persisted in her mind, blackening still further her false wealthy loneliness, her guilty divorced dead helplessness. The electric arrows thrust at her heart — yet they were cheating: she knew, increasingly frightened by it, that darkness to be still there, in them, of them. The cripples jerked themselves slowly past. Men muttered by in whose faces all hope seemed to have died. Hoodlums with wide purple trousers waited where the icy gale streamed into open parlours. And everywhere, that darkness, the darkness of a world without meaning, a world without aim —
the best for less
— but where everyone save herself, it seemed to her, however hypocritically, however churlish, lonely, crippled, hopeless, was capable, if only in a mechanical crane, a cigarette butt plucked from the street, if only in a bar, if only in accosting Yvonne herself, of finding some faith…
Le Destin de Yvonne Griffaton
… And there she was — and she was still being followed — standing outside the little cinema in Fourteenth Street which showed revivals and foreign films. And there, upon the stills, who could it be, that solitary figure, but herself, walking down the same dark streets, even wearing the same fur coat, only the signs above her and around her said:
Dubonnet, Amer
Picon, Les Io Frattelinis, Moulin Rouge
. And ‘Yvonne, Yvonne!' a voice was saying at her entrance, and a shadowy horse, gigantic, filling the whole screen, seemed leaping out of it at her: it was a statue that the figure had passed, and the voice, an imaginary voice, which pursued Yvonne Griffaton down the dark streets, and Yvonne herself too, as if she had walked straight out of that world outside into this dark world on the screen, without taking breath. It was one of those pictures that, even though you have arrived in the middle, grip you with the instant conviction that it is the best film you have ever seen in your life; so extraordinarily complete is its realism, that what the story is all about, who the protagonist may be, seems of small account beside the explosion of the particular moment, beside the immediate threat, the identification with the one hunted, the one haunted, in this case Yvonne Griffaton — or Yvonne Constable! But if Yvonne Griffaton was being followed, was being hunted — the film apparently concerned the downfall of a French-woman of rich family and aristocratic birth — she in turn was also the hunter, was searching, was groping for something, Yvonne couldn't understand what at first, in this shadowy world. Strange figures froze to the walls, or into alleyways, at her approach: they were the figures of her past evidently, her lovers, her one true love who had committed suicide, her father – and as if seeking sanctuary from them she had entered a church. Yvonne Griffaton was praying, but the shadow of one follower fell on the chancel steps: it was her first lover and at the next moment she was laughing hysterically, she was at the Folies Bergères, she was at the Opéra, the orchestra was playing Leoncavallo's
Zaza
; then she was gambling, the roulette wheel spun crazily, she was back in her room; and the film turned to satire, to satire, almost, of itself: her ancestors appeared before her in swift succession, static dead symbols of selfishness and disaster, but in her mind romanticized, so it seemed, heroic, standing weary with their backs to the walls of prisons, standing upright in tumbrils in wooden gesticulation, shot by the Commune, shot by the Prussians, standing upright in battle, standing upright in death. And now Yvonne Griffaton's father, who had been implicated in the Dreyfus case, came to mock and mow at her. The
sophisticated audience laughed, or coughed, or murmured, but most of them presumably knew what Yvonne never as it happened ever found out later, how these characters and the events in which they had participated, contributed to Yvonne Griffaton's present estate. All this was buried back in the earlier episodes of the film. Yvonne would have first to endure the newsreel, the animated cartoon, a piece entitled
The Life of the African Lungfish
and a revival of
Scarf ace
, in order to see, just as so much that conceivably lent some meaning (though she doubted even this) to her own destiny was buried in the distant past, and might for all she knew repeat itself in the future. But what Yvonne Griffaton was asking herself was now clear. Indeed the English sub-titles made it all too clear. What could she do under the weight of such a heritage? How could she rid herself of this old man of the sea? Was she doomed to an endless succession of tragedies that Yvonne Griffaton could not believe either formed part of any mysterious expiation for the obscure sins of others long since dead and damned, but were just frankly meaningless? Yes, how? Yvonne wondered herself. Meaningless — and yet,
was
one doomed? Of course one could always romanticize the unhappy Constables: one could see oneself, or pretend to, as a small lone figure carrying the burden of those ancestors, their weakness and wildness (which could be invented where it was lacking) in one's blood, a victim of dark forces —everybody was, it was inescapable! — misunderstood and tragic, yet at least with a will of your own! But what was the use of a will if you had no faith? This indeed, she saw now, was also Yvonne Griffaton's problem. This was what she too was seeking, and had been all the time, in the face of everything, for some faith — as if one could find it like a new hat or a house for rent! —yes, even what she was now on the point of finding, and losing, a faith in a cause, was better than none. Yvonne felt she had to have a cigarette and when she returned it looked much as though Yvonne Griffaton had at last succeeded in her quest. Yvonne Griffaton was finding her faith in life itself, in travel, in another love, in the music of Ravel. The chords of
Bolero
strutted out redundantly, snapping and clicking their heels, and Yvonne Griffaton was in Spain, in Italy; the sea was seen, Algiers,
Cyprus, the desert with its mirages, the Sphinx. What did all this mean? Europe, Yvonne thought. Yes, for her, inevitably Europe, the Grand Tour, the Tour Eiffel, as she had known all along. — But why was it, richly endowed in a capacity for living as she was,
she
had never found a faith merely in ‘life' sufficient? If that were
all
!… In unselfish love — in the stars! Perhaps it should be enough. And yet, and yet, it was entirely true, that one had never given up, or ceased to hope, or to try, gropingly, to find a meaning, a pattern, an answer –