The Heart to Artemis Page 4

  In room after room, gilded ropes kept the crowds from pressing too closely against the furniture; the walls were hung with tapestries, there were curtains as stiff and solid as marble. Every object was carved and suitable in size only for a giant or else a dwarf. Mermaids slipped out of mother-of-pearl water lilies to clasp with breakable fingers the handles of tall vases. The legs of a small table were distorted into strange shapes while the interior of a great glass cabinet became a shell of glittering surfaces, enamel, garnet, coral or amber that reproduced in miniature insects and orchids, reptiles, parroquets, or the strangest of aquatic plants.

  There is really no link between 1900 and the present day. It was an incredibly restricted time. An invitation to tea was a sacred obligation; in the rare event that a bill could not be paid directly to the shopkeeper in cash, a check was immediately sent to him with a precisely worded letter on hand-woven paper. It was easier to alter the laws of the land than to miss a dinner party to which an invitation had been accepted. The decree that conventionality was itself godliness left no room for vision. Many of the ordinary sensations of atmosphere were unknown because the air had to reach us through mufflers and veils. It was not fashion but the taboo against exposure of the skin. Our symbol of freedom was Nature, we were the last descendants of Rousseau (though we were unable to read his books) and as movement was difficult because even a man’s clothes hampered his agility, we tried to become a unity with the landscape. Some of the people about me literally lived on views. The storm and the savage became emblems of mystery with walks and drives through the countryside the only permissible form of self-expression. No wonder that so many masochistic heroines of the period as an ultimate in self-torture took to their beds.

  So perhaps the age, as it felt itself dying, flowered into this immense jungle of tiny and useless possessions? Surely modern art was born at the Paris Exhibition? After walking all day between jeweled thimble cases and Fragonard pictures reproduced on bead bags so tiny that they could not even hold a handkerchief, thousands of people must have longed for blank walls and straight lines.

  My self-confidence, however, was not to last the day. It was late in the afternoon before we started back to our hotel. A monster darted out of one of the still unfinished passages of the Exhibition, a huge white face with great, vermilion lips bent as if to bite me, two white tentacles dotted with scarlet pompons moved to pick me up. I do not think that I had seen a clown before. In utmost terror, I opened my mouth and howled.

  Even a clown could not spoil my pleasure in the moving railway but I had a second fright inside the picture gallery. I ran in unsuspectingly to face a large and realistic painting of the Crucifixion. It was not a bit like the illustrations in my Sunday book, The Peep of Day, but a mass of blood, contortion and terror. How could a child of five possibly understand such matters? So I began to cry if I were taken into the pavilions. How did I know what other mysterious doom might be waiting inside? Besides it was dull, the showcases were high above my head. We soon arrived in best English fashion at a compromise. My parents hired a wheeled chair pushed by a bearded, elderly Frenchman. Of course I did not sit in it, I was far too active but I explored every inch of the grounds in his charge while my parents examined acres of furniture.

  He spoke no English but I found out somehow that he had a family. I loved trying to talk to him. My father had begun to teach me French before we had crossed the Channel and I read my little red lesson book for pleasure. At first I had to learn so many words daily, then my father promised me a new English book for every French story that I read and narrated correctly to him afterwards. I was seven before I managed a whole book by myself. It was the inevitable Malheurs de Sophie. A second language was one of the richest gifts that my father ever gave me. Think of the wealth in my head! Apart from Mallarmé, I have always preferred the freedom of English poetry but French fiction is more mature. I owe my first steps in psychology to it; it sharpened my reasoning powers. Oddly enough, it had also a moral value. After I left home in 1920 when the task of my generation was to break the unhealthy taboos of the nineteenth century, I seldom made the mistake of repeating them by plunging into their opposites. There was always Flaubert at my elbow and later Stendhal to remind me to look at the meaning behind the act rather than at the deed itself. I thought and dreamed in French for a large portion of my childhood but it was, alas, before the days of phonetics and as the rules of pronunciation were never properly explained to me, my accent remains Churchillian, my inflections incurably British, to this day.

  We used to drive through the Bois on those May afternoons, usually in an open victoria. The traffic was bewildering, it seemed faster than in London and, for me, on the wrong side of the road; I do not remember seeing any motorcars although on a later visit the first taxi that I noticed was French. Its driver sat in a goatskin coat high above the engine and aroused much admiration.

  There were no patient horses pulling huge water carts like the ones we saw at home, men watered the streets instead with hoses. The problem of dust was a real one; it rose in clouds unless the roads were damp because this was long before the days of tar. I supposed the Tour Eiffel to be a giant roundabout somehow connected with the Exhibition.

  I liked these drives, there were Arab horsemen to watch with long cloaks falling over their beautiful horses. The nurses looked gay with colored ribbons that would have made such excellent kite streamers, floating from their white caps. They held their charges firmly by the hand. Most of the little girls wore fawn or pale blue coats; this surprised me because colors were frowned upon in England, we were dressed in white or navy blue. The always more fortunate boys built castles in a gravel pit. “It’s dangerous, darling, you might catch something if you played there.” The hooves flashed, the wheels turned so swiftly along the avenues that I wondered how we could ever cross to the other side and the scenes reappeared, years afterwards, in the drawings of Toulouse-Lautrec.

  Who knows? Could I have seen a writer who was to teach me so much about my craft walking along the Bois with her little black bull-dog? If so, I should have noticed only Toby Chien. 1900 saw the publication of Colette’s first book, and I wish that I could say that I remembered her because the two writers of the generation that preceded me who most truthfully expressed the atmosphere of my childhood were Colette and Dorothy Richardson, one from each side of the Channel. I caught, I think, the last influences of their age. Like them, I have always been passionately interested in concrete things, in “what is” rather than in metaphysical speculation. (In this, the wheel has turned again as we approach Robbe-Grillet and his school.) Each period has its own characteristics and what I feared and hated in the nineteenth century were its irrational conventions. Alas, as I have written elsewhere, to be sensitive to an environment as an artist has to be is also a disadvantage. The future generation, busy with its own conflicts, will live on our victories and be contemptuous of our defeats. People speak of a present commercialization of sex; this is true but shallow. Sex is not dominant as it was in the Victorian age when it was repressed so completely that unconsciously every act, every code of manners, was colored by it. Colette will be read for her style, Dorothy Richardson for her share in the evolution of the novel but a few years after we who survive are dead, who will recognize their courage and their honesty? Both were true revolutionaries, fighting not for dogmas of any color but for the elementary rights of an inarticulate body of women who were treated like slaves until the end of the First World War.

  Colette was twenty-seven in 1900, I was five. Almost fifty years later I wrote to explain what her books had meant to me, less as a writer than a historian. She replied; I am told that this was rare in her old age and through Adrienne Monnier we were to have met, but before this could happen she died. Perhaps it was as well. Knowing her command of language, I should have been shy face to face with her, speaking my British-sounding French.

  I have recognized moments of my foreign childhood since in several books. There are ext
erior scenes from Si le grain ne meurt that are as evocative as old photographs although I was mercifully spared Gide’s scruples. One Paris, however, would have seemed completely strange to me. The Champs Élysées of Marcel Proust was near in time but so remote from my experience that the place belonged (as it did) to a totally different city.

  I have had the same feeling when reading the contemporary English memoirs that have recently appeared. Many of them describe a world of great estates, retainers and traditions of which I never even heard when I was a child. We belonged to the solid, Protestant “middle” and we stuck to its training. There was no loosening of any customs for us when King Edward came to the throne. Our household was less extravagant than thrifty and the emphasis was on character rather than caste. I once saw a socialist report upon my father. It listed his business activities but then added, “There is no sign that he has ever tried to use wealth or power for his personal advantage.”

  My first visit to France blurs into a second that we made the following summer. There were giant hoardings where the plaster buildings had been and a general air of indifference and dust. On one eventful afternoon, however, we were resting upstairs in the hotel on a particularly hot afternoon. I had been given a copy of a child’s version of Robinson Crusoe to keep me quiet. It was such a disappointment after the excitement of the title that I threw it down in anger. The hero had scruples about going to sea! He was not a child but had the tiresome views of any grownup about danger and a most uninteresting desert island. There were none of Pastor Robinson’s lovely explanations about how to grow fruit trees and evaporate salt, no tame ostrich and no dog like Turk. My personal experience with a parrot had also been unfortunate. One had taken the trouble to push its beak through the cage and nip me although, and this was what had hurt me most, I had been careful not to tease it. Alas, I had no other book so I went to the window to watch the passers-by.

  The square was always crowded. How could so many horses get into it at the same time? Big drays full of barrels blocked the impatient carriages. A boy dodged between them with one of those long unfamiliar sticks of bread under his arm, the round stiff bowlers of the men shone in the heat, occasionally a woman crossed the road, in a hat as wide as a door, holding up a handful of skirt. What a dull world it was, nothing ever happened, oh, when should I be able to be a cabin boy and climb up a mast?

  Suddenly in the middle of this so ordinary afternoon, people began to run. They came in dozens from the side streets, carriages stopped, men cheered. It was the first time that I had heard the collective roar of a crowd. Immediately opposite but so far away that I could not see his features distinctly, an old man came to the front of a balcony. My father rushed into the room, “Kruger is speaking,” he said and we lined up in front of the long window.

  I supposed that these people had come to take him prisoner but as soon as he held up his hand the square was silent. He began to speak, they started to applaud.

  I was extremely puzzled, Kruger was our enemy. In spite of my family’s refusal to speak of the Boer War in front of me, I was intensely curious about the struggle. (Is nationalism a phase of immaturity? If so, a child has time to develop but it is a long and dangerous process when it comes to countries.) Suppose I left the room unperceived and reached the hall, could I escape before the concierge stopped me? If I were able to wriggle through the crowds I would seize him myself. I did not stop to think of the problems involved in taking Kruger across a friendly land to Dover but I did feel that in gratitude England should make me a sailor.

  We looked down upon a mass of heads. I decided regretfully that I should have no chance of crossing the square in time and opened my mouth to yell derisive remarks in English. At that moment Kruger finished his speech, he left the balcony and the square rocked with cheers. “Why is he free?” I said, “Where are the soldiers?” At six it was so difficult to understand that France and South Africa were not at war.

  I should have been even more astonished had I known that Kruger would live at Clarens for several years, half a mile away from where I was to spend most of my life and where his house is now a museum.

  Other things were equally strange. A day or two later I saw a line of young men with colored cockades marching down the street between two lines of soldiers. Even to my eyes they looked unhappy, “it’s the conscripts,” people said, the term was new to me and I asked its meaning. “If you were a French boy, you would have to go into the army whether you liked it or not,” my father explained, to my indignation. If you forced a man to be a soldier it took away the freedom of choice that was the crown of being grown-up and why did they put Liberté on the inscriptions if it meant nothing? Truly my elders were peculiar!

  It was only on my third visit, when I was seven, that I came to know the Champs Élysées possessively and with the full rights of any Parisian child.

  It happened on a gloomy day. I had spent the morning looking at dull pictures in the Louvre. I was also very hungry because I could not eat French food. Perhaps a far-off ancestor had been an Eskimo? Perhaps there was something lacking in my constitution? I was able to bear the hottest sun but an east wind made me seasick and I was a continual source of embarrassment to my mother because if people offered me chocolates I refused them scornfully but it was unsafe to leave a bottle of olive or even cod-liver oil within my reach. I disliked sauces and unfamiliar flavors. I wanted bacon for breakfast and roast beef for lunch, I longed for my nursery tea of bread and butter spread with golden syrup. I hated brioches and French pastry. Yes, the Café Voisin where we often used to eat was wasted on me, I was utterly and vociferously English in my tastes. My parents had ordered a carriage that particular afternoon, it meant another two hours of sitting still. At that moment, my German governess interceded for me, could she not take me to the Champs Élysées for a treat? Paris was not London and, to my surprise, my family agreed. Half an hour later I was sharing the reputed French freedom from convention. I was sitting in the coachman’s seat of a small goat cart and I was driving it myself.

  We were halfway along the path that ran parallel with the road when a carriage stopped at the curb and I heard my name. Oh well, I had not really expected anything so wonderful to last but my parents waved, told me to enjoy myself and drove on. What was a sin in England (because you might catch measles, darling) was not wicked in Paris. I smiled when I heard phrases later about “Continental morality.” I knew all about the double standard, had I not experienced it myself, aged seven?

  Now for the first time I saw Paris from my own level of vision. Leaves had fallen on the paths, I took off my gloves to hold the reins more firmly and was not ordered to put them on again. The figures that looked at the cart admiringly were both my own age and size. The trip ended when we reached some crossroads. We sat down on a bench in front of a Punch and Judy show instead of going back. The excited children about me whispered or shouted but I was still unable to understand all the French words and it was too much like being told not to fidget in a carriage. “It’s not real,” I complained, suspicious of the puppets and their sometimes visible strings. I had no use for make-believe, mine was an active world. Wisely, my governess led me away but the painted box, Dog Toby in his frilled collar and the man who came out in his shirt sleeves and walked up and down the lines holding out a cap marked one end of my new geographical chart. The other was a stall among the trees. Its owner was cooking what appeared to be pancakes on a miniature stove. A boy stood in front of him with half a one in his mouth, other children played ball or ran up and down, pretending to be trains. “They are called galettes,” my governess explained. I supposed that the word was part of a lesson but as she had been so kind to me I would learn it to please her. We did not move, there was another whisk of batter into the pan and a moment later I was handed two of them on a plate.

  I did not know what to do. Nobody had ever given me anything to eat in the open air before. My governess smiled encouragingly. I bit the galette excitedly, it was hot, papery, and fl
avored with some mild spice. It was not an English bun but this was freedom and I would teach myself to like them. All the same, I wondered whatever could have happened. The universe seemed to have turned completely upside down.

  The climax of that day was yet to come. There was a roundabout beyond another line of trees. An old woman in a striped skirt sat on a throne on one side of it and as the painted horses passed her by, black, brown or chestnut with white spots, she slid rings down a metal bar for their riders to catch.

  The horses stopped, the ring emptied. I was lifted onto a saddle, my steed had a bunch of feathers fastened above its head, and bright, painted reins. They gave me a stick with a hook that was doubly satisfying because it resembled the iron hoop that I had never been allowed to own. I could hold on to the pole that kept the animals in position but I was too big, was I not, to be strapped? The woman walked round collecting dues, was it ten, was it twenty centimes? The machinery and the music started together, slowly at first, then faster and faster while we leaned forward to snatch our rings and our sticks jingled with their sliding circles. A baby cried, it had a belt on too, oh, how I despised it! I was a warrior, astride a horse at last, I lunged ferociously, the rings got tighter because there was some mechanism whereby they were looser for the younger children but tighter for us, until as we came to an unexpected stop I had tied with a bigger boy as the winner. Solemnly we were offered sticks of pink, white and orange candy done up in frilled paper. A remnant of English nursery training persisted and I was about to shake my head when my governess reminded me to say, “Merci, Madame.” In a daze of surprise I followed her towards the Tuileries sucking the first lollipop of my life, earned as well in open combat. No wonder that after such an afternoon to be in France seemed more “grown-up” than living in England. The Champs Élysées was admirable for my seven-year-old mind. It is interesting to recall that I was introduced to it by a German.