I'm Dying Laughing (61 page)

‘But Monsieur Jean-Claude and children,’ she said, thumping on the table with her fist, ‘yes, he did have a weakness; it was to regret it, to apologize, instead of taking what he needed, what everyone had, what everyone thought practical, and keeping it without apology. Wasn’t it a time of conquest, when revenues were pouring in from all the backward, low-browed peasants, the ignorant, stupid tribes without arts or sciences or political knowledge, that the Romans conquered? And why should you conquer without getting tribute? Didn’t they all have triumphs in Rome showing what they had taken from the backward peoples, the rough barbarian gold and jewels and stuffs? And wasn’t it their right? They went out there and put order into the provinces, they taught them how to grow crops and build houses. There they were dressed in a rag or a loincloth or a bit of bark if they dressed at all, living on roots and painting themselves blue, and the Romans came at the height of their civilization, with their arts and sciences, their building and road-making and they taught them everything. They made the soil produce and it was natural for them to take the fruits; there was plenty because of the superior methods of agriculture. They brought civilization all over Europe, where before there had only been yelling, ignorant barbarians living in forests, building rafts and killing each other in stupid little forays. The Romans came and civilized the land and the land brought out luxury and corn. It was coming to them. Why was he ashamed? Was there anyone who did not do the same? It was because he was not an aristocrat, for aristocrats never are sorry or ashamed, they know the rules of conquest and of living better than your neighbour, but because he was at heart a mild, good-natured middle-class man. He was kind to his wife and he adored his daughter. Oh, poor Cicero; and in the end, brought to an unfortunate end, to shame, with all his kindness to his family and all the letters he wrote to his friends, showing such devotion, and his magnificent, passionate oratory defending in the courts, so that he was thought sublime, the greatest orator of Rome. Think of it! And he apologizes, he is ashamed because he lives as well as the next man. What are debts in a society where debts are an accepted thing? They are not a shame, they are a means of living. I despise those who are afraid of debts. It only shows what a mild nature he had, too mild, more milky than kind, that he was afraid; yes, it showed his lower-class origin. He would have been happier and done better and been more respected if he had told them to go hang themselves with his IOU’s round their necks! Let us be realists and not schoolmasters who know nothing of the world, Monsieur Jean-Claude. I want my children to be realists in an age just as difficult and full of crises as Cicero’s. I don’t want you putting into Christy’s head these little middle-class, scholarly ideas. Christy belongs to patrician society, he is a patrician and he must not learn the mawkish, ignoble, sheepish, humble, oh so humble and petty comments of a mean little bookworm. Christy must be trained for his class and his position; that is why he is here. Christy will never associate with anyone who thinks like that. Oh, I hate and despise what is modest forelock-pulling, and demeaning. Monsieur Jean-Claude, remember that you are teaching an aristocrat, a scion, a patrician; and let us look at things from that point of view. Cicero was quite right in everything he did; why should he abase himself, get down in the dust, when no one else did? I expect it was just artist’s temperament. He must have been very tired at times; and then you get the moods of subjection and self-abasement. He had to work for his money and work damn hard. That is why he felt abasement; it was fatigue. What a wonderful man he was! Christy, I want you to think about this wonderful man, the greatest, sublime genius of prose in ancient Rome who, in spite of all his worries, was so tender and good to his friends, such a good father and anxious husband, always worrying about whether he had done his duty to his loved ones. And think, Christy, that that is the duty of those in public honour, to have these doubts and these worries but never to show them. That was where he was wrong—to show them. See how now after two thousand years nearly we are picking on him like crows pecking an old rag because he was so tender, good and honest that he worried about his debts! That is something we must never do. If we contract debts it is because we have credit and if we have credit it is that we have earned it by our labour, our position, our name. When credit has been given to us we do not owe the money back. Remember that Christy. Not that you will ever owe a penny. But me, ah me—but if
you like,
Frankie, you can remember that Cicero worried about his debts and his spending for that is middle-class and that is the best they can do, as they nose their way through their miserable mean world. And that is the world you live in, Frankie, you are going to live in, you will never get out of it—you have no signs on you that you will ever rise out of the middle-class swamp and sump you were born in, so you may as well begin to worry right now about the debts no one will allow you and the luxury you will never have. That is for you, those lessons are for you, for the frumpish world of the dumb, down—dreary middle-class. Oh, what a middle class man must be this dreary little scholar, if you can call him that, who wrote this bitter and ignorant attack on Cicero; such a wretched little mental pauper should never be allowed into the forum of scholarship to spit at his betters. Oh, I despise him. You went astray, Jean-Claude. I don’t like this way of teaching. Let us give honour where honour is due and let us be men of the world here, not the base, cowardly, timid gentry who are afraid to have a debt. Don’t nations have debts? Could they get along without debts? Don’t cities and provinces and villages and hamlets have debts? And isn’t it a sign of their standing when at last they can contract a debt; and the better the standing the greater the public market in which they can contract their debts, until nations have debts on an international level. And is that a shame and disgrace? Don’t let us bandy these words like housewives. If you have never been in business, then debt seems a shame; but banks are there for debts, not for savings; business could not go ahead if everyone paid cash—no, they want you to contract debts. True, Cicero lived in an old-world setting where big business was unknown but still he shows his humble origins, I think. And I am very sorry he had that headache. His wife, instead of divorcing, should have said to him, It doesn’t matter; it belongs to the rank you have achieved, I know. And instead of having to marry his daughter for money, his daughter whom he so dearly loved, his own child, this charming little girl whom he adored, he could have been free of this load on his conscience. Oh, dear, dear me, poor Cicero!’

Emily wiped her eyes. She sighed.

‘Well, Monsieur Jean-Claude, let us have no more of this little fungus-grown pedant, this petty little jealous dominie. Let us think of the greatness of great men.’

The tour of Paris lasted two days only, when Frankie, silent, sullen, left for her little room in her cheap hotel. Emily went to the hotel with her, coaxed Mike the brother and insisted upon paying the hotel bill. When Emily herself had seen the girl to the hotel, she returned haughtily to Christy and said, ‘And now Christy that you have been with this dumb Dora two days you can see the sort of necking companion you got hold of.’

Christy protested that she was not a necking companion; and during these few days, at any rate, she had not been.

‘Then why does she call you “darling Christy” and write you that slush? Oh, Christy, I can’t trust you out of my sight. You promised me so many things and you’re just a little liar. You have disappointed Mother, Christy.’

Seven days later, when Frankie had left the capital, Emily allowed Christy to move over the Suzanne’s apartment in the Park Montouris.

To him, Emily, who was now very lonely, wrote a letter and he answered:

‘Dear Emily, not Mother,

Yes, yes, yes, I am a wretch, I know it. I have always been that, I know. And now when I stop and throw a glance backwards on the snows of yesterday, I know more, I am a liar and with something of the cheat in me. I have always been that, I think. You should never have believed in my grand promises. There’s a song going about here now which is very popular and which expresses it, “You should never have believed me when I said I loved you for I always was a liar.” Well this song is for me. But in spite of that, I’m very fond of myself; and of you too. Please love me in spite of my faults. For, in fact, he or she who has no great faults in his (her) character is nothing but a sausage. Well, so much the worse. I’m like that. Just as you say. A wretch and a liar. So much the worse for you and me and all my friends. Well, apart from that, I’ve been very much taken up with the work for my examinations. Everyone is at me to work; I have worked, though I always have the peculiar (senseless) feeling that people do not do it for me, but for some other reason. How can that be? That expresses my lack of belief in myself. And yet, don’t weep for me. I somehow believe in myself. My preparations are finished now, but I’ve the habit, I still want to work. But I want to be home, I mean America, on a visit and I think it will be good to be home. There are problems here and a sort of anxiety I never did solve. To be frank, I understood you in America and I do not think I understand you here. (That was my mind going downhill I suppose?) Meanwhile, if Fairfield comes and is allowed, I think I will go with her, Grandma thinks it a good idea, to the Wiesbaden Music Festival, there will be a good many people and all kinds of madmen for music. I have a friend going through Paris—and if you could put him up in my old room? Please. He hasn’t a penny. I myself will come back on my way home and see you.

‘If you write to me, Emily, of course I will write to you. But no doubt I will always be disappointing to you, for I am, I know, a disappointing fellow. Not to myself, but my whole life long I must live with myself; and so must make a compromise. That is something you never did. And so, dear Emily, so that you will not catch me up and expect too much from me on any subject, I say goodbye. But only till we meet again. Your loving son, Christy.’

Emily was shocked by this letter; she cried. Stephen was absent and had denounced her to friends in America—a recent letter even said, though she could not trust the writer, that he had spoken of divorce, ‘the only thing to save us both’. What was she to do now? To whom could she turn? Suzanne still came every day for her French lesson; but in the afternoon now, her mornings being given over to Christy in their own home. Emily thought with bitterness of Suzanne and Christy, in their own home, paid for chiefly by themselves and Christy; of Suzanne, just like a bride of Christy, the old hard-baked woman.

Except for the little tour with Frankie and Christy, Emily had not left the house during Stephen’s absence; most of her time in her workroom, where she did three or four hours a day writing pieces for sale, and the rest of the time in the usual way, frittering her time away, as Stephen said. When exhausted with the paper world, and not with Christy, she went to the kitchen to work out fanciful menus for possible guests, Vittorio, Stephen and the Trefougars, Mamma and Fairfield; and she amused herself making special dishes for herself when the servants were out. But she was restless, very unhappy. ‘I am unhappy, unfortunate, most unhappy,’ she said to herself. She would say it aloud and begin to weep. What friends had she? She and Violet Trefougar had talked to each other every time a postcard or letter arrived from some new place in Switzerland or over the border. Three times Violet had come to lunch; Emily receiving her in a voluminous house-gown, or in a handsome dressing-gown.

‘I shall never get into a dress again, I never shall leave the house again,’ said Emily. ‘Jacqueline keeps on letting out my slips and all my other clothes; I have no blouse to wear. The suit she made for me only two weeks ago is too small. She must let it out. What I want is to have people come here, stand all round me, eat around me, while I lie on my bed, some grand, brocaded bed, in a luxurious dressing-gown. Oh, what luxury! The end of care! I can’t reduce. I must eat, Violet! Oh, soon, these dreadful days, I don’t know whether they are days of freedom or prison; soon our men will be back and I must, I must reduce. But the only joy I get these days, the only joy, Violet, is in eating. It is a real joy and nothing else is as good. I wrote to my beloved dear Vittorio and he answers me with a scrap of paper, he says two words on the telephone. He came here once; we lunched, I in my dressing-gown. I threw my arms around him, Violet, kissed him, oh, I love him so much, what joy at last to have him here with me, to talk to him—if only—but what is the use?—he did not stay half an hour after lunch. He had a meeting and from then on, nothing doing. He can’t come. Too busy. Is it the fat? He doesn’t like such lardy women? Or was it the dressing-gown; not formal enough? But in high high society, women receive in a trailing, languorous house-gown, don’t they? I thought he would understand. I can never be happy. Do you know I cry every day, Violet, and blame all my dearest and nearest; they are all my scapegoats. How stupid and dull I am becoming, like a backyard wife, who doesn’t even go to the movies, whose husband abandoned her because of the tattletale grey in her hair! Do you know there is grey in my hair? You can’t see it, because I am fair; but I am going grey. So soon! My life is finishing so soon. No one’s fallen in love with me. They only think of my fame, which is imaginary, and my money, which is a debt deeper than the deepest well. They think I’m happy and each time I see anyone and see those thoughts in their mind, I think, Oh, how dreadfully unhappy I am. What is the matter with me? I’m the happy one, I’m supposed to be deleerious with joy, making other people laugh. Laugh, clown, laugh! Is it true that clowns are lugubrious? Violet, I cannot go on so melancholy. I don’t believe in it. It’s wrong. Be my friend, Violet darling. You are such a lady, so kind, so intelligent, and you’ve so much trouble. Much, much more than me. Who am I to groan and squeal? Violet, darling, what do you do?’