Trust (58 page)

William's answer:

February 14, 1938. Your inordinately diffuse letter and enclosure, marked "Air Mail," due to insufficient postage for its weight arrived by ship. Consonant with my duties as trustee, I am ready to make immediately available to you whatever funds, in accordance with the arrangements separately attached, you may authorize, from the date of this letter forward. Pursuant to this I have asked Mr. Connelly to set forth in detail necessary procedures for you to follow. You will find, together with his explanations, a list of thirty-two European cities, including London, in which various banks are now open to your signature. Mr. Connelly has, I believe, anticipated any questions that may arise, particularly in the matter of drawing checks and opening further accounts. Mr. Peat and Mrs. Charlottine of Nothham, Peat and Mr. Charlottine of New York will assume direction of the properties listed on the enclosed sheet marked with their letterhead. In all other categories I have retained personal discretionary powers, according to the terms of the trust, and continue to stand ready to aid and advise in all fiduciary and financial matters. Yours sincerely.

Allegra to William:

March 22, 1938. About the nursemaid. Mrs. Amy Mealie. She's Welsh. I want to bring her home with me when I decide to come but don't know how to do it and what she's got to do to come. She's already applied for a passport. Will there be some stupidity about bringing in an immigrant? She says the baby's been starved, I wasn't feeding it right. I
knew
that, alter all. She took it to a specialist, there's something wrong with its inner ear, that's how come it pukes so much, but it's supposed to get better gradually as it grows up. It might be a hereditary condition, not from me. Mrs. Mealie gives it liquid vitamins. Connelly didn't write how to fix it so Mrs. Mealie can write checks on her own when I'm not around. Because sometimes she needs things in a hurry and she's very strict in her morals and doesn't believe in credit and meanwhile there I am away and out flying all over London in different places doing this and seeing that, and everything's just the opposite of how it used to be when we came just to march. I ride around in a hired car the whole day and my hair is cut very short (in Brighton it got to be like a serpent) and you can't tell me apart from any old eccentric Countess. And last week Enoch went to Spain. It's to assassinate some Fascists there, not that I think he can really
shoot
anyone, even though I saw his gun. It's tiny and black and looks fake, but isn't, which is very sinister. He went as a sort of correspondent for this Liverpool paper that wants biographical sketches of the Falangist leaders for a column they have, called "Notes from the Land of Quixote." They print maps and follow the war from day to day. Enoch thinks if he can get to some of these Fascists through this job he can shoot them. It's terribly dangerous and naturally he's very brave but honestly I think war is too stupid to bother with. Sometimes I feel I'm the only real pacifist left in the world. Enoch used to be the most
passionate
pacifist you'd ever want to meet and was always talking about beating swords into ploughshares and all of that, and now he's not a pacifist even about Spain. None of the pacifists are any more, it's peculiar. You don't say anything about finding Nick. I keep waiting for you to say something about
looking
for him. Please note the new address above. It's a very nice flat, very big—it has so many rooms the whole Spanish Civil War could be fought in it and you'd never notice. I hired a man to cook. He cooks Viennese, he's a refugee from over there, not that he's a real chef or anything, in fact he used to have a china factory, but they always gave dinner parties and he was what in German he calls a praisecook, it's a gourmet who cooks to get the applause of his guests. Everything is always a bit greasy, but otherwise he's all right. He wanted me to take his wife on for the baby, but I already had Mrs. Mealie who's very good and besides I didn't like the look of the wife, too withdrawn and fragile. As you can imagine they were well off over there and one could see she didn't care for being a servant only on account of Hider. The class-consciousness of the bourgeoisie is the most offensive sort, they despise work. Two different Jewish families in Manchester took in their boys and I don't know where the wife is now, he never says. You find refugees scattered all over London with their horrible broken English, and they're not cheaper, they're more
expensive,
in fact. I'm glad about the money, but you should have sent it before, in Brighton.

Allegra to William:

April 12, 1938. Did you find out anything about Nick? I saw Dickie Sparrs two weeks ago and he heard Hugh was in Sweden. He doesn't think Nick ever joined Hugh in the first place, since Hugh hasn't been in Sicily since August. Dickie's mother mails him
The New York Times
wherever he happens to be, with messages along the sides of the international-news columns telling to watch out for this and watch out for that, and not to go here and not to go there, and to avoid getting mixed up
socially
with Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and Stalin, so that's how I saw the announcement about your engagement. I didn't know Sarah Jean
too
well at Miss Jewett's, she was part of a clique that stayed out of everything except Saturday afternoon horses. I remember she used to be very religious, especially about the New Testament. Once when I asked her to demonstrate against something with us she said render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. I didn't agree with her then but I do now, on account of what happened to Enoch. It's too stupid, he didn't get to see the Falangist leaders or
anybody.
Going across the border they attacked the bus he was in and stole his gun and kicked in all the windows and fought with pieces of window glass and cut practically a pound of flesh from his left arm. It wasn't even Fascists that did it, it was Loyalists. There was a person on the bus they wanted to kill and they killed him. Somebody fixed a tourniquet after they left or Enoch would be dead now. It's really too stupid. Marching is one thing, but after all when you think how many innocent babies there are in the world, on
both
sides of any cause, no cause seems worth killing either side's babies for. Nick once told me the reason he was against the Movement was that it judged the world by every possible value except the personal ones, which are the only sort that count. (Not that he's acted as though they count to
him.)
And you know my thought on this? It's that surely nothing is as personal as a baby—something I've just learned, and I learned it by myself. Enoch's opinion is that I got sentimental about the baby the very minute I stopped having anything to do with it—he gives Mrs. Mealie the credit for my caring about All the Innocent Babies in the World (he's very sarcastic about it). He and Nick
always
used to disagree about Personal vs. Abstract. Enoch said swords-into-ploughshares was an abstraction, and the greatest idea on earth; and Nick said Jesus-raising-Lazarus was a personal happening, and the greatest idea on earth.

Enoch:
Off
earth, you mean. It certainly didn't happen here. Maybe it happened in heaven.
Nick: Here, says the story.
Enoch: Heaven isn't here, you'll agree to that.
Nick: Modest! Only until you fellows bring it, I suppose.
Enoch: We fellows aren't such ninnies as to want to duplicate the Christian notion of heaven. It would obligate us to infer hell, and having inferred it to condone it. We're not that barbarous—at least not so barbarous as the average preacher, you see. Besides, the answer to Jesus and Lazarus is dust unto dust.
Nick: Some state the same thing vice versa, and call it just as true. The answer to dust is resurrection.
Enoch: The most successful religions are those that tell lies in the most picturesque way.
Nick: At any rate the answer to swords and ploughshares is rust unto rust. And when a man lets his Things rust, he slips back into prehistory.
Enoch: Only into the prehistory of Things. Only into the prehistory of
homo faber. Homo sapiens
—which is to say man when he has acquired moral possibilities—has no prehistory, he has history only. Technology progresses. A flint hammer becomes a bomb. A cave becomes a skyscraper. This is
homo faber
progressing—man the maker. We call the Things we don't remember his making, prehistory; and the Things we seem to remember, because he described them for us, history. But
homo sapiens
doesn't progress. He is always the same. He was modern from the very beginning. We date him from the moment he learned that killing, which didn't bother him, and being killed, which did, were really the same act That moment is when human history began. It began when
homo faber
became
homo sapiens
—when manufacturing man became moral man. Having made, he thought about what he had made, and what he ought to do and ought not to do about what he had made. Moral man has no prehistory, because before history there was no man, there were only beasts. One never speaks of the history of beasts, though some, like the beavers and the birds, are very fine manufacturers of their own environment.
Nick: A beast can't ma£e a telescope.
Enoch: It's only a beast who does. A telescope is the eye sharpened. But it is only the eye. It isn't something
other
—it's the beast extended. The naked eye is the telescope's prehistory. You won't discover the nature of man in the little bundles he carries with him always—they're only his mess of pottage. His birthright is something else.
Nick: His birthright is personal—you can't deny that
Enoch: It belongs to him personally, he personally must act on it, but in itself it's an abstraction. His birthright is a message against killing; against killing as a theory and a methodology. Of course you can't prove that the message is
there,
the way the telescope can prove the distant stars are there. That's because we don't know whether the message proceeds out of ourselves, the way the telescope proceeds out of ourselves.
Nick: Watch it you're on the margin!
Enoch: The margin of what?
Nick: Arguing for God.
Enoch: God is an abstraction that can't be proved.
Nick: God is a person who was never born.
Enoch: Now
you're
on the margin. You're about to make out a God as tangible as a mess of pottage. I call that idolatry.
Nick: So do I, and gladly. But a God like a mess of pottage isn't tangible enough—he's too mushy. I want a God I can touch with a clang! That's why I've had to settle for gods. There's one Allegra knows about, in the tree, a goddess with a hide as firm as metal. We haven't seen her, but we've felt her. We've struck her. She's there, all right.
Enoch: Mess of pottage.
Nick: Better than a pot of message.

—I still laugh when I think of that! They used to talk like that on summer nights sometimes, always like that, and it's queer that afterward Nick was quick to leave tree and me, and Enoch was just as quick to buy his little black gun. And all in spite of how they talked. I remember what they said, but I can't remember
how
except through a kind of membrane. I don't know what the membrane is, maybe time, maybe only having had to listen to them through the baby's crying. It never cries now, and looks smooth and healthy, and sometimes even bleats out a noise that sounds like me-me-me, which Siegfried says stands for Mrs. Mealie. It's still not awfully good-looking but Siegfried (the cook) thinks it shows high intelligence and is going to begin talking very early. I don't know whether he means it or not, he's very sly and says things just to ingratiate himself. He hasn't mentioned his wife again but now what he wants is to bring his oldest boy to live here, there's a school nearby that's offering scholarships to refugee children of a certain age. He promises he would keep him in the kitchen and quiet and out of sight, but I've had to decide against it, it's the old story of the camel and the Arab's warm tent, pretty soon it would be his wife and the two other boys (who I understand are practically only
babies
—you can imagine what a nuisance that would be), and there wouldn't be room for
us
to
breathe
in. Mrs. Mealie wouldn't like it either. They're awfully pushy people, I have to admit you used to be right about that aspect. Of course Enoch is different. When I told Enoch about Siegfried, you know what he said?—Moses was really an Egyptian, Jesus was really a Samaritan, so Siegfried must be really a Jew.

Me: But they're all Jews, I know that much. Siegfried especially.
Enoch:
Especially
Siegfried, since he's absolutely indistinguishable from any other Viennese of his class. Nothing is what it seems—that's the first rule of tyranny—and if it seems to be what it is, then it ought to be disproved by logical schemes grounded in false premises. Better yet, it ought to be abolished by force.

—I don't always follow him when he's being sardonic, and since that Spanish business, and his arm, he's hardly ever
not
sardonic. I think the reason is he's reading philosophers now. Also his arm
is
still in bad shape and very painful, the doctor said it's a wonder it didn't have to be amputated. He stays in his hideous little Adam Gruenhorn room practically day and night, all bandaged up, reading like mad. He's reading Materialism and Idealism. What it means, you see, is that there are two sorts of philosophers, Materialist and Idealist. One thinks the world is bad and really there, the others think the world is good and not really there. The Materialists—the ones who think the world exists but is bad—believe in God, but hate him for creating a bad world; and the Idealists—the other camp—are atheists who would love God if only they believed in him. Anyhow that's how Enoch explained it. Then I asked him what you would call a person like you, for instance, who thought the world was both good
and
there—whether he'd be a Materialist or an Idealist, and Enoch said neither, he'd be a fool. So then I gave him the news about your engagement, sort of to make the point for you, and he warned me strictly not to omit congratulating you. I suppose that was sardonic too. Though it really
is
a thing to marvel at: the way life works out. I mean it would have been perfectly sensible if you had
begun
with Sarah Jean in the first place, and then you wouldn't have had to feel ashamed and degraded because of the divorce. I hope contemplating this doesn't make you terribly sad, if you
do
like me and don't hate the irrevocable for
being
irrevocable. I do, I wish I could have the past back, not to do things over again in a different way but to realize while I'm living those things that this is my only chance at them. Because you don't recognize till afterward which moment of all the moments you've experienced is going to be the great high full one; and by the time you've sorted it out from the rest, it's gone. You can
think
about what's gone, but you can't
live
it. I wish there were a signal system that said: Now, it's Now, so look with all your might, and taste with all your might, and feel with all your might, and
be
with all your might; it's Now and it won't ever come again. A signal, not a thing like a chime but a familiar human voice, because think!—you might that very minute be taking it all for granted, you might be distracted by a fly in the room or an itch in your toe or a sign on the road, and never at all be aware you were in the prime of your one and only deep and beautiful hour. I wish in Brighton I had heard a voice I could trust say: "Brighton"—just the one name, like that, not "Europe," not "England"—just: "Brighton," and I would have understood. But there wasn't a voice. Or maybe there wasn't a voice I could trust. Or maybe I was feeling too happy to listen. The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself. Enoch looked queer when I told him that, and said it was enough of a burden on mankind that we
always
notice our unhappy times. Then he said I ought to be a Pilgrim Father like you, so I'd never worry about the irrevocable and would just accept it under the heading of Predestination. And then he snorted like a walrus from behind his bandages and asked me if I'd ever thought how interesting it is that people who believe in Predestination are also obliged to believe that God is a very bad planner—taking for example your having to marry and divorce me in order to marry the sort of person you ought to have married to begin with. I explained it isn't exactly Predestination you believe in, only a vague sort of idea about heaven's will, though you probably never even
think
about it, it would embarrass you if you ever did. And you know what Enoch answered?—Since we can realize our destinies only after the fact, determinists should never speak of heaven's
will,
but only of heaven's
was.
—He's terribly clever, but over my head, and sometimes I get a
little
sick of always having to think so hard when I'm with him. Oh look, after all Enoch's warnings I'm nearly forgetting to tell you Congratulations after all. It's really the best thing you could have done, and very nice for poor Sarah Jean too. It was such a humiliation for her when Alan Pettigrew broke their engagement—it must be five years already!—to marry that lively girl from the West that nobody ever heard of. Everybody thought it a tragedy, but fate had something else in mind. Life!
C'est la fille!
Anyhow Alan Pettigrew was always a devious little boy. Even way back in dancing school he was always changing partners on his own, and never kept the one Miss Lamb paired him with—remember Miss Lamb's pairing system? She listened to all the old grannies. Sarah Jean and Alan Pettigrew, me and you. And see how different it all is now! P.S. I've just read this whole letter over. You won't like the philosophy parts. But really believe me in spite of them I'm much graver-minded than I used to be. You can't have had and lost Brighton without ending up a lot graver-minded than you started out. P.P.S. Let me know what to do about Mrs. Mealie and the $$$!