Читать книгу Meet Me on the Barricades - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 4

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When the rehearsal came to a happy end with apologies and extravagant compliments from Turano, it was quite late. Simpson hurried from the hall, nodding casually to his colleagues.

After five years with the New York Symphony Orchestra, he still had little in common with the polyglot groupings which went to make up the ensemble. At rest periods or before performances they stood about in small national knots, the Contis with the Del Vecchios, the Ottos with the Sigmunds, the Saschas with the Mischas. Being the only Anglo-Saxon in the entire orchestra, Simpson soon developed a feeling of inferiority as though he were an unwanted alien.

Outside on Fifty-seventh Street the windows of fashionable shops were gayly lighted. Well-dressed men and women entered restaurants, horns tooted, voices laughed. The city uttered its night call. Tall buildings escalated toward the deep purple light over New York. Cafés, theatre lobbies, smiling faces seemed to beckon to Simpson, hinting at pleasures to come. But he paid no heed. Instead he hurried eastward toward Third Avenue. And under his arm he carried a leather case containing his oboe.

No lad since the beginning of time ever made firm resolve to be an oboist when he grew up. But when Herbert was a boy his father, whose life was a melancholy affair, said:

“Herbert, if I were you I’d learn to play the violin.”

“Why?” the lad asked.

“Because when you’re old and lonely you can play sad pieces in a minor key.”

Now, to a thoroughly normal boy this would have sounded remote and far-fetched. But Herbert was not a normal boy. Ever since early childhood he had suffered from a weak heart, the result of an almost fatal attack of inflammatory rheumatism. Sickly, pale, and yet eager, he spent his early days at a window watching other boys playing robustly. The desire to excel, which sometimes resides most powerfully in the hearts of handicapped youngsters, expressed itself in music. He applied himself assiduously to the violin and soon played with astonishing skill.

But music in itself was not enough and soon the boy had created for himself a dream-world in which all things became possible and in which an ailing heart was no obstacle. Thus, merely by concentrating and staring off into space, he was able to escape the more painful and restraining aspects of everyday reality. In this dream-world he was successively a renowned baseball player who had once pitched a no-hit, no-run game; a world champion pugilist who was also a dilettante in the arts; and a conquering general who fought only in heroic wars of liberation. As time passed his daydreams began more and more to take on the solid aspect of reality while the daily world became a vague and unhappy place from which one escaped at every opportunity.

At high school Herbert played second violin in the school orchestra. One day at rehearsal his teacher, feeling that the ensemble lacked wind instruments, said:

“From now on, Simpson, I think it’d be a good idea if you played the oboe.”

For a few days the boy hesitated. But when he had occasion to hear the instrument’s sorrowful, plaintive tones, he was captivated.

Thus Simpson became an oboist....

East along Fifty-ninth Street he walked, scarcely observing the precipitous social descent as evidenced in the shop windows: a diminuendo of displays ranging from costly evening gowns and expensive but dubious objets d’art to dismal secondhand bookstores where the result of years of creation may be had, neglected and flyblown, for fifteen cents. At Third Avenue he bought an evening newspaper, mounted the steps of the elevated station.

On the platform he waited, reading his paper. Across its pages marched the news of the day: a sensational murder, a sleazy political scandal, an interview with a child prodigy. These things Simpson read cursorily and passed on.

His essential interest, however, lay in the dispatches from abroad, for intellectually he was the victim of the foreign correspondents who see everything, understand precious little, and write about it with great talent. Their ability to reduce everything to the level of personality had become a mode of thought with him. He had even improved upon the method by introducing his own personality into nearly all the dispatches as he read. Thus, he became the perfect reader, to whom reading is impossible without personal identification.

When Simpson was twenty years old he had been a radical for a few brief but delightful months. It was during the summer of 1912. He had attended a mass meeting in support of the Lawrence textile strikers. Here he witnessed a hot contagious enthusiasm, a multitude welded together by common aspiration, a selflessness which hitherto had been unknown to him.

In the weeks which followed he was overwhelmed by the impact of new people, alien types, strange but exciting doctrines. He was subjected to an eloquence which left him exhausted but happy. Here were people who had harnessed their daydreams to a scientific social concept and who one day would alter the essential conditions under which mankind lived.

As a daydreamer he was compelled to admit his purely amateur standing; these people were professionals. But they were more than mere visionaries. They demanded not only emotional acceptance of their theories but action, self-sacrifice, discipline.

And this was beyond Simpson. He instinctively recoiled from the implications inherent in revolutionary socialism. The mere possibility of strikes, demonstrations and armed insurrection terrified him so that when the immediate situation which had drawn him into the movement had subsided, he retreated to his music again.

But after that he was never the same. He had seen a vision. And although fear of reality made actual participation impossible, revolution had become an integral and important part of his dream-world. In real life he could not bring himself to become so much as a distributor of leaflets, but in his daydreams he was a veritable firebrand.

He flipped the pages of his newspaper until he came to the news of the civil war in Spain. Under the dispirited, jaundiced lights of the elevated station he read:

“Late today one of the suburbs of Barcelona lay in smouldering ruins following a fascist air-raid ... the rhythm of this bombing contained a diabolical logic—first, hand grenades and heavy projectiles to stampede the population, then machine-gunning to drive them below, next heavy incendiary bombs to wreck houses and burn them over the victims.”

At the pit of his stomach he experienced a cold, heavy sensation, a feeling compounded of impotent rage and resultant despair.

—Fascist bastards! Innocent men, women and children [he thought]. Nameless heaps, bundles of blood-soaked humanity. They sang in the sunshine of Spain, drank its great wines, clenched their fists in the salute of solidarity....

The cataclysmic roar of an approaching shell!

The gigantic horn motif of the last movement of the Schubert C Major Symphony!

A train pulled into the station.

Inside the car, Simpson struggled for a strap, settled himself to continue reading of the air-raid on Barcelona, of the heroism of the Catalonian clergymen who blessed and prayed for the kneeling crowds, socialists, anarchists and communists, in crumbling dugouts. The image of genuflecting anarchists and socialists filled him with a vague disquietude for a second—but for a second only. Rage, the most positive of all the emotions, now seized him.

Tremblingly he lowered the paper, stared at the advertisements but instead of the faces of pretty girls he saw the fascist horde, steel-helmeted, rigid, brutal, at whose head stood Hitler with painted cheeks, mascaraed eyes, leering in perverted lechery [he had read somewhere that the Austrian house-painter was homosexual], and Mussolini with a scabrous, decayed face [a gossiping columnist had written that the Italian renegade was in the last stages of syphilis.]

He turned away with contempt and in disgust, for in matters of sex Simpson was occasionally conformist and uniformly prophylactic. Thus, abetted by journalism and at the stroke of one transient thought, he had solved the most pressing problem of our time—fascism. His sense of moral superiority had provided the basis for an emotional catharsis; analytical thought was consequently unnecessary.

A headline proclaimed still another bombardment of Shanghai by the Japanese and the story underneath told of unburied bodies of coolies which lay rotting in the streets of the Chinese quarter of the city. The war in China, however, did not greatly move him, for while he could easily picture himself as a Spaniard or a German, he simply refused to imagine himself as a Chinese. Too much was involved in the process. Moreover, the names of Chinese cities were almost unpronounceable: Shihkiachwang, Kaocheng, Taiyuan....

On an inside page of the newspaper he found another dispatch from Spain, read of the taking of a strategic hill on the Madrid sector by the Loyalist forces. He lowered the paper, exultant, elated....

His imagination annihilated reality, telescoped time and space.

They lay in shallow shell-holes nervously watching their artillery tear the opposing positions to pieces, saw geysers of earth shooting up along the line of the Insurgent trenches.

Pedro H. Simpson, captain in the Loyalist forces, his face tanned, nervously fingers a thin, flexible mustache. He wears a red beret pulled smartly over his right eye, a snugly fitting khaki tunic, a highly polished Sam Browne belt, scintillating Salisbury boots. He stares intently at his synchronized wristwatch, then addresses his men, the remnants of the battle-torn 14th Machine-Gun Company, heroes of Toledo, Malaga and a score of lesser engagements. He speaks in perfect English which is touched with the faintest trace of an intriguing Spanish accent.

“Comrades, it is nearly zero hour. Two more minutes!”

His men nod, eagerly awaiting the signal to attack. One, however, a young student from the University at Salamanca, begins to whimper, breaks down, grovels in abject fear. Comrade Don Pedro places a fatherly arm about the lad’s shoulders.

“Courage, little brother ...”

(The train lurched. No, he said to himself, ‘little brother’ is Russian and besides the two situations are entirely different. The sending of Russian divisions would mean the flare-up of a new world war. Besides they would have to come through the Mediterranean, run the gauntlet of the German and Italian fleets. Suicide! Geography! History! International Diplomacy! Peace is Indivisible! Defend Democracy!)

“Courage, compañero [he thinks of the word in italics, the only way he has ever known it]; “by noon we shall have avenged the dastardly bombing of Madrid. And we shall celebrate with wine, song and lusty fascist wenches. For you must remember that while political intercourse with avowed fascists is a cardinal sin, sexual intercourse is more or less pardonable, particularly in time of war. Besides [he winks], rape will not be necessary, eh, my valiant men?”

A wisp of La Paloma, a few bars, floats through his brain.

Heartily, he brings his hand down on the youngster’s back. At first the lad smiles feebly, then he laughs outright.

The preliminary barrage rises to new heights.

One minute before zero!

A tutti of guns of all calibres, an inspired performance in percussion. Abstracted, lost in wonder at the virtuosity of this artillery display, Captain Simpson listens.

“God, what a crescendo!” he exclaims, “louder than thunder, more original than Stravinsky!”

The air is filled with the piercing shrieks of the high-arching canopy of projectiles overhead.

Zero!

Enthralled by the grandeur of the artillery concert he fails to observe for a moment that his men have started to attack without him. Abashed, he hurries after them; nonchalantly, he takes his place at their head, leading the advance.

[Countless scenes from war pictures flicker before his eyes.]

The earth heaves, rocks, staggers; the terrain is torn, hacked, pulverized.

[He walks through an inferno of Hollywood battle locations.]

The machine-gun crew moves slowly across the field at a weighted pace, burdened by the gun and ammunition, sweating under the glittering, merciless Spanish sun.

[The pages of a dozen war novels flutter in his mind. Putrescent, shapeless, the corpse of Kemmerich lies in the path of his advance. Broadbent reclines in a shell crater, looking away from his shattered leg where a pool of blood grows as though fed by some subterranean spring. At the bottom of that chalk pit a trench rat steps daintily onto Paolacci’s chest, prepares to eat with relish the lieutenant’s lower lip.]

The curtain-fire lifts, Simpson and his men lunge forward with a final effort, automatics drawn. Happily, there is no opposition; the trench is unoccupied when they leap into it.

The enemy has fled!

Soon the gun is mounted; parado becomes parapet. To the rear the Insurgents are in full flight, discarding arms and equipment as they run. Simpson orders a burst of machine-gun fire. The gun sweeps an arc of the field. Fascists fall, rigid, as though they were life-sized wooden targets. Not a shot is wasted, not a man survives. Now to consolidate the position!

Spotless, leather still gleaming, Simpson superintends the operations. All is quiet now and the men sing as they labor.

He lights a cigarette and takes a neatly folded newspaper from his haversack. A newspaper from back home, God’s own country, one of the peace-loving democratic countries. He turns the pages of the paper idly, homesick, savoring each story, even enjoying the advertisements.

The news items, however, are strangely reminiscent. They bear the same date-line as the day he stood up and told Turano to take it easy when that Sibelius symphony was all gummed up.

(As in a dream he hears the grinding of brakes, experiences an odd sensation as though the trench were a vehicle in motion. He shrugs his shoulders, turns another page of the newspaper.)

Ah, the page opposite the editorials; political wisdom, cartoons, literary gossip. Under the heading of “News about Books and Authors,” he reads:

“The editors of The Nation gave a party on Tuesday for Louis Fischer, their European correspondent, recently returned from Spain. The affair was held at the luxurious penthouse home of Maurice Wertheim where fine paintings by Picasso, Gauguin, Degas and other costly moderns adorn the walls. A smartly dressed, sophisticated crowd asked questions for nearly an hour about Mr. Fischer’s experiences in Spain but were finally stopped so that everyone might eat, drink and dance....”

At that moment the counter-attack begins. The roar of shells, ear-splitting detonations. It is no longer daylight; all is dark and the night is lit up with red, green and blue distress signals. A shell lands in the next bay.

Another! This time almost directly on the parapet. An ugly, jagged fragment of metal strikes the student from Salamanca. He sinks slowly to the bottom of the trench. Piteously, he looks up to Simpson, who now kneels at his side.

“My captain, comrade, I am dying!”

—Premonition [Simpson thinks], soldiers sometimes sense the approach of death. Form of telepathy. Yes, but with whom? Maybe God. Superstition. Must be a scientific explanation, undiscovered as yet. Psychology....

The lad grows incoherent, babbles; Simpson listens closely, catches a phrase:

“Morituri te salutamus.” Simpson bows his head reverently.

—Latin. I know what that means. Dying, we salute you.

The student goes limp, collapses. At that moment a wave of bitterness overcomes him—the resentment of the hard-bitten fighting man for contemptible civilians and armchair revolutionists who make cause of his agony. He thinks:

—Penthouse apartments, expensive paintings, smart crowds eating, drinking and dancing while we—while we die here in bloody Spain!

A salvo of shells tears into the trench, shattering it. [Blackout.]

The train roared into the station at 133rd Street. White-faced, stunned, Simpson staggered out with the Westchester crowd, clutching his oboe case. In a daze he tramped the ugly wooden ramp to the Westchester Station, to all appearances a little tired suburbanite coming home after a day’s mundane work. On the Mount Vernon train he found a comfortable seat, slumped wearily into it, a veteran returning from the wars.