The City of Comrades

by Basil King

Then I wasn’t interested in it any more. I had pretentiously thought of myself as dedicated to a cause, and now the cause had dissolved into nothing on this leaden, overcharged air. It would be ridiculous to wean these people away from their work, even if I could play like the Pied Piper and have them follow me. I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to marry the woman I loved, and settle down quietly, industriously, to spend my days in an office and my nights at home, like the countless human ants that were running to and fro. My celibacy of the will was gone. My consecration was gone. Where these austerities had been there was now only that yearning of whatever it is that draws a man toward a woman, and I asked nothing but the freedom to enjoy. I was determined to enjoy. The resolve came over me with this first glimpse of New York. It came over me in a tide of desire which was all the fiercer for its long repression. It may have been the demand of the flesh for compensation. That which had not merely been denied, but brutalized and broken, rose with the appetite of a starving beast.

So, thirdly, I was not fit for any high undertaking. It was not my real self that had made these vows; it was a phantasm self evoked by the vast emotions of a strife in which the passions raged on a scale that lifted the human temporarily out of itself. But now that the strife had been left behind, the human fell back into the same old rut.

In the same old rut I found myself. I had reverted to what I had been before there was a war at all. My carnal instincts were as strong as ever; as strong as ever was my longing for Regina Barry as my wife. It was stronger than ever, since I meant to get her by hook or by crook, if I couldn’t do it by the methods which colloquially we call straight.

It was, however, the difficulties of hook and crook that oppressed me. The straight line was in this case that of least resistance. I grew more convinced of it as the day advanced.

There was everything to make my return to the old quarters a moment of depression. The quarters themselves, which had seemed palatial after the Down and Out, were modest to the point of being squalid. As Cantyre had said, Lovey had kept them as clean as an operating-room, but cleanliness couldn’t relieve their dingy shabbiness or make up for the absence of daylight.

Moreover, Cantyre’s own proximity was trying to me. There was only the elbow of a corridor between his rooms and mine. He would resume the old chumming habits of running in and out, while I was sharpening a knife to stab him in the back.

And in the processes of unpacking Lovey got on my nerves. He got on my nerves as a sweet, old, fussy mother gets on those of a wayward son during the hours he is compelled to stay at home. Dogging me about from one room to another, his affection was like a draught of milk held out to a man whose lips are parched for brandy.

It was a relief, therefore, when the telephone rang and Annette van Elstine asked me to come and have tea with her. I knew that Annette was not craving to see me merely as her cousin; and as my cousin I could have waited patiently for the pleasure of seeing her; but with her scent for drama and her insatiable curiosity she would raise the issues of which I wanted to talk even if I got no good from it.

I found her as little changed as if Time had not passed nor War dropped his bomb on the world.

Annette’s smartness, as I have already told you, was difficult to define. It was not in looks or dress or manner of living or gifts of intellect. If I could ascribe it to a cause I should put it down as authority of position combined with the possession of a great many personal secrets. She knew your intimate history for the reason that she asked you intimate questions. Authority of position enabled her to do this—or at least she acted as if it did—with the right of a cross-examiner to probe the truth in court. She could convey the impression that her interest in your affairs was an honor—as if a queen were to put her royal finger in your family pie—so that quite artlessly you unlocked your heart to her. Other people’s unlocked hearts were her kingdom, since, as far as I could see, she had nothing in her own.