She did not particularly want to display Rudi to the rest of the club.
Up and down the scales went the girl at the piano. From a window above, Joanna, fitting in an elocution lesson with Miss Harper, the cook, in the half-hour before the Sunday joint was ready to go in the oven, said, ‘Listen’:
Ah ! Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden dime,
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
‘Now try it,’ said Joanna. ‘Very slowly on the third line. Think of a sweet golden clime as you say it.’
Ah ! Sun-flower! …
The dormitory girls who had spilled out of the drawing-room on to the terrace chattered. like a parliament of fowls. The little notes of the scales followed one another obediently. ‘Listen,’ said Rudi:
Everyone should be persuaded to remember how far, and with what a pathetic thump, the world has fallen from grace, that it needs must appoint politicians for its keepers, that its emotions, whether of consolation at breakfast-time or fear in the evening… .
Rudi said, ‘You notice his words, that he says the world has fallen from grace? This is the reason that he is no anarchist, by the way. They chuck him out when he talks like a son of the Pope. This man is a mess that he calls himself an anarchist; the anarchists do not make all that talk of original sin, so forth; they permit only anti-social tendencies, unethical conduct, so forth. Nick Farringdon is a diversionist, by the way.’
‘Do you call him Nick?’ Jane said.
‘Sometimes in the pubs, The Wheatsheaf and The Gargoyle, so on, he was Nick in those days. Except there was a barrow-boy called him Mr Farringdon. Nicholas said to him, “Look, I wasn’t christened Mister,” but was no good; the barrow-boy was his friend, by the way.’
‘Once more,’ said Joanna’s voice.
Ah.! Sun-flower! weary of time,
‘Listen,’ said Rudi:
Nevertheless, let our moment or opportunity be stated. We do not need a government. We do not need a House of Commons. Parliament should dissolve forever. We could manage very well in our movement towards a complete anarchist society, with our great but powerless institutions: we could manage with the monarchy as an example of the dignity inherent in the free giving and receiving of precedence and favour without power; the churches for the spiritual needs of the people; the House of Lords for purposes of debate and recommendation; and the universities for consultation. We do not need institutions with power. The practical affairs of society could be dealt with locally by the Town, Borough, and Village Councils. International affairs could be conducted by variable representatives in a non-professional capacity. We do not need professional politicians with an eye to power. The grocer, the doctor, the cook, should serve their country for a term as men serve on a jury. We can be ruled by the corporate will of men’s hearts alone. It is Power that is defunct, not as we are taught, the powerless institutions.
‘I ask you a question,’ Rudi said. ‘It is a simple question. He wants monarchy, he wants anarchism. What does he want? These two are enemies in all of history. Simple answer is, he is a mess.’
‘How old was the barrow-boy?’ Jane said.
‘And again,’ said Joanna’s voice from the upper window.
Dorothy Markham had joined the girls on the sunny terrace. She was telling a hunting story. ‘… the only one time I’ve been thrown, it shook me to the core. What a brute!’
‘Where did you land?’
‘Where do you think?’
The girl at the piano stopped and folded her scale-sheet with seemly concentration.
‘I go,’ said Rudi, looking at his watch. ‘I have an appointment to meet a contact for a drink.’ He rose and once more, before he handed over the book, flicked through the type-written pages. He said, sadly, ‘Nicholas is a friend of mine, but I regret to say he’s a non-contributive thinker, by the way. Come here, listen to this:’
There is a kind of truth in the popular idea of an anarchist as a wild man with a home-made bomb in his pocket. In modern times this bomb, fabricated in the back workshops of the imagination, can only take one effective form: Ridicule.
Jane said, “‘Only take” isn’t grammatical, it should be “take only”. I’ll have to change that, Rudi.’
*
So much for the portrait of the martyr as a young man as it was suggested to Jane on a Sunday morning between armistice and armistice, in the days of everyone’s poverty, in 1945. Jane, who lived to distort it in many elaborate forms, at the time merely felt she was in touch with something reckless, intellectual, and Bohemian by being in touch with Nicholas. Rudi’s contemptuous attitude bounded back upon himself in her estimation. She felt she knew too much about Rudi to respect him; and was presently astonished to find that there was indeed a sort of friendship between himself and Nicholas, lingering on from the past.
Meantime, Nicholas touched lightly on the imagination of the girls of slender means, and they on his. He had not yet slept on the roof with Selina on the hot summer nights — he gaining access from the American-occupied attic of the hotel next door, and she through the slit window — and he had not yet witnessed that action of savagery so extreme that it forced him involuntarily to make an entirely unaccustomed gesture, the signing of the cross upon himself. At this time Nicholas still worked for one of those left-hand departments of the Foreign Office, the doings of which the right-hand did not know. It came under Intelligence. After the Normandy landing he had been sent on several missions to France. Now there was very little left for his department to do except wind-up. Winding-up was arduous, it involved the shuffling of papers and people from office to office; particularly it involved considerable shuffling between the British and American Intelligence pockets in London. He had a bleak furnished room at Fulham. He was bored.
*
‘I’ve got something to tell you, Rudi,’ said Jane.
‘Hold on please, I have a customer.’
