The Englishman’s Boy

“Rachel?” the voice calls again.

“Be quiet,” someone says.

Emphatic footsteps. I’m too weak to get out of bed. The door opens and I see two silhouettes cut out of black tin. One of them moves along the wall; I can hear him sweeping the wallpaper with his hand, a faint sandpapery sound. He finds the light switch, my hand flies up to my eyes, but even in that instant of blindness I know who the intruders are.

“Hello, Harry,” says Chance.

The two are dressed identically in linen motoring coats which hang to mid-calf like the dusters cowboys wear. Like cowboys, both are burned brown as berries by sun and wind, a fine layer of dust powdering their features. Chance is thinner, his bones rise under the skin, stark in his face. Fitz is leaner too, stands with his arms folded across the front of his stained coat, reclining against the door frame.

“How did you get in?” My mouth is parched by fever; I have trouble forming the words.

“We knocked and got no answer,” says Chance. “You ought to lock your door when you go to bed, Harry.” He grins. “Not that that would have mattered. Fitz has a way with locks.”

“What time is it?”

Chance glances at his watch. “Four o’clock.”

Fitz laughs harshly.

“What the hell were you doing out there – in my apartment?” Suddenly I’m angry and suspicious.

Chance looks up at the ceiling, smiles to himself.

“Looking for papers,” announces Fitz. “Papers?

What papers?”

“Now, Harry, don’t bristle,” Chance chides me. “It occurred to us you might have neglected to give us everything relating to the picture. Research notes, drafts of the script, material we wouldn’t want to see circulating, people putting their noses into. We wanted to make sure all the loose ends were tied up. Seeing to legalities, as it were.”

“And what did you two detectives find? Nothing. Because I gave you everything, just like I said I did. And speaking of legalities, you happen to be housebreakers.”

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up,” says Fitz.

“Yes, please shut up, Harry, and don’t be difficult. I assure you that everything we disturbed is back in its place. Any letters of a clearly personal nature were not read. Besides, we had another reason for our visit. We bring news which is naturally of great interest to you.”

“What news?”

“We’ve finished shooting the picture. Four months of hard work. Harry, you can’t imagine the difficulties we had to overcome. And now Fitz and I have been driving day and night to rush film back for cutting. An arduous, exhausting journey. Some of those roads in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah are disgraceful, little better than cow trails. You’ll understand if I sit?” He doesn’t wait for permission but picks up a chair and places it at the side of my bed, sinks on it with a sigh. “There,” he says, “much better.”

The thought of Chance settling in panics me. “If you don’t mind -I’ve been dreadfully sick all day – dead on my feet -”

“Do you hear that, Denis? Harry’s been sick all day, dead on his feet. Now that he mentions it, I have to say he doesn’t look himself. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Looks like shit, you ask me.”

“I feel like shit. And you’re not making me feel any better.”

“I think you’ll be very pleased with our picture.” Chance eases himself back in the chair, crosses his legs under the spreading skirts of his motoring coat. “In particular, the performance of the young man who portrays Shorty McAdoo. He conveys magnificently Mr. McAdoo’s visionary ruthlessness.”

“Then he’s conveying what isn’t there. And so are you. Shorty McAdoo is just an unhappy, guilty old man.”

“Yes, but he was young once, wasn’t he? Come, come, Harry, no sour grapes. And no false morality either, please. False morality is what I found so disappointing in your letter of resignation. It wasn’t that I needed you – I never needed you – but to find that the man to whom I had opened my heart and revealed what was at stake could attempt to wash his hands of his actions, that was most disappointing.”

“I explained myself in the letter. I couldn’t write the scenario because I was too inexperienced, too untalented -”

Chance reaches across the bed to lay an intimidating finger to my lips, stopping me. “There, there, Harry,” he says coldly. “I’m not a fool. I know the sort of things that go through a young man’s mind. You want to believe you obeyed your conscience. I find that sheer hypocrisy. Because all along you had no qualms about lying to McAdoo, misleading him. Why? I’ll tell you why, Harry. Because you have a sick mother in an expensive asylum and I was paying you a lot of money to mislead him. But more important, I think, is that you are an intelligent young man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but only far enough to realize that to get any higher you would need help. I was the man who could give it. Isn’t that so?”

I refuse to answer.

“I suppose you justified yourself by the argument of necessity. You had to do it. And I sympathize, Harry.” He touches my arm in his best bedside manner. “Because I happen to believe that true morality consists in recognizing necessity and then summoning up the courage to act in accordance with it. Which you did – after a fashion. But where we seem to part ways is that I believe this morality is only truly honourable when we follow it to its logical conclusion, and let it be our guide in the large questions as well as the petty ones.”

“Large questions? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Was it something I said about the Jews that got you up on your high horse, Harry? Fitz tells me you’re romantically involved with a Jewess – Rachel Gold I think he said her name is. Now I have no objections to such alliances when they are purely physical ones. Surrender your body to a woman if you must, but remember to keep your independence and integrity intact. I suspect this woman has been a bad influence on you. The Jews are a sentimental and emotional people, Harry. We need only look at the pictures they make to confirm it. Which is why they are so dangerous. The morality of necessity – of survival – has no room for sentimentality. The Bolsheviks are not sentimental. The Fascists are not sentimental. The Americans who made this country were not sentimental. Far from it. Do you need proof? While I was researching our picture I made a point of reading the diaries and journals of early traders and settlers. One entry in particular made a great impression on me. It was simply two lines written on September 30, 1869. ‘Dug potatoes this morning. Shot an Indian.’ That was all. It was not accompanied by any tortured self-examination of conscience. Because the diarist knew his enemy would not have indulged in anything of the kind if he had killed him. The Indian, we might say, was a Bolshevik in a loincloth. Kill or be killed. They both understood compromise between them was impossible.”

“Perhaps it was not up to the Indian to compromise. Ever consider that?”

“What would you advocate, Harry? Offering your throat to the knife because you might be wrong? History deals us our hand and we must play it. We do not choose our enemies. Circumstances choose them for us. I see the enemies who threaten my country. But I refuse to offer my throat to them.” He tips forward in his chair, one hand resting on the bed. “I am not preaching anything new, Harry. I am only saying what Christ and Abraham Lincoln said before me, ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ That is a fact.”

“What are we talking about? Immigrants?”

“In part.”

“Immigrants like Fitz. Paddies and bog-trotters.”

“Fuck you,” says Fitz from the doorway.

“Harry, you answer clear thinking with half-baked cleverness. Don’t you believe Fitz is capable of writing, ‘Dug potatoes this morning. Shot an Indian’?”

The shooting of the picture has obviously taken a toll on Chance; the once plump face has been brought to the brink of haggardness, and the eyes – the eyes are pleading with me.

“The house must stand. Lincoln fought a war to keep it standing, pitted blood brother against blood brother. And then Mr. Griffith made a picture, made The Birth of a Nation, and reconciled the blood of North and South in the chalice of art. Now it is necessary to go one step further. If Griffith wrote history in lightning, the time has now come to rewrite history in lightning. Yes, rewrite the history of the foreigner, erase completely those sentimental flowers of memory and light their