The City of Comrades

by Basil King

That was at the great weekly gathering, which took place every Saturday night. Among the hundred and fifty-odd men who had assembled in the two down-stairs sitting-rooms it was not difficult to single out Coningsby, since he was the only man I could see in whom there was nothing blasted or scorched or tragic. There was another there of whom this was true, but I didn’t meet him till toward the end of the evening.

I had now been some ten days within the four walls of the club, not sobering up, as you know, but trying to find myself. The figure of speech is a good one, for the real Frank Melbury seemed to have been lost. This other self, this self I was anxious to get rid of, had left him in some bright and relatively innocent world, while it went roaming through a land of sand and thorns. I had distinctly the feeling of being in search of my genuine identity.

For this I sat through long hours of every day doing absolutely nothing—that is, it was absolutely nothing so far as the eye could see; but inwardly the spirit was busy. I came, too, to understand that that was the secret of the long, stupefied forenoons and afternoons on the part of my companions. They were stupefied only because sight couldn’t follow the activity of their occupation. Beyond the senses so easily staggered by strong drink there was a man endeavoring to come forth and claim his own. In far, subliminal, unexplored regions of the personality that man was forever at work. I could see him at work. He was at work when the flesh had reached the end of its short tether, and reeled back from its brief and helpless efforts to enjoy. He was at work when the sore and sodden body could do nothing but sit in lumbering idleness. He was at work when the glazed eye could hardly lift its stare from a spot on the floor.

That was why tobacco no longer afforded solace, nor reading distraction, nor an exchange of anecdotes mental relaxation. I don’t mean to say that we indulged in none of these pastimes, but we indulged in them slightly. On the one hand, they were pale in comparison with the raw excitement our appetites craved; and on the other, they offered nothing to the spirit which was, so to speak, aching and clamorous. Apart from the satisfaction we got from sure and regular food and sleep, our nearest approach to comfort was in a kind of silent, tactual clinging together. None of us wanted to be really alone. We could sit for hours without exchanging more than a casual word or two, when it frightened us to have no one else in the room. The sheer promiscuity of bed against bed enabled us to sleep without nightmares.

The task of chumming up had, therefore, been an easy one. So little was demanded. When a new-comer had been shown the ropes of the house there was not much more to do for him. One could only silently help him to find his lost identity as one was finding one’s own.

“That’s about all there is to it,” Andrew Christian observed when I had said something of the sort to him. “You can’t push a man into the kingdom of heaven; he’s got to climb up to it of his own accord. There’s no salvation except what one works out through one’s own sweat and blood.” He gave me one of his quick, semi-humorous glances. “I suppose you know what salvation is?”

I replied that I had heard a great deal about it all my life, but I was far from sure of what it entailed in either effort or accomplishment.

“Salvation is being normal. The intuitive old guys who coined language saw that plainly enough when they connected the idea with health. Fundamentally health is salvation and salvation is health—only perfect health, health not only of the body, but of the mind. Did it ever strike you that health and holiness and wholeness are all one word?”

I said it never had.

“Well, it’s worth thinking about. There’s a lot in it. You’ll get a lot out of it. The holy man is not the hermit on his knees in the desert, or the saint in colored glass, or anything that we make to correspond to them. He’s the fellow who’s whole—who’s sound in wind and limb and intelligence and sympathy and everything that makes power. When we say, ‘O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ we mean, O worship the Lord in the beauty of the all-round man, who’s developed in every direction, and whose degree of holiness is just in proportion to that development.”