Cards of Identity (16 page)

‘Just the whole situation, sir. It seems so – so –
irremediable
.’

The members chuckle. ‘We shall have to cheer you up,’ says the President. ‘Put your wits to work. Who do you think that man was, or is, or will prove to be?’

‘I suppose that’s in the lap of Tray, sir.’

‘Quite so. So our question really is: who is Tray?’

‘I think she is a nurse, sir.’

‘Indeed? Why?’

‘She wasn’t syringing that rose at all. She was washing his hair. And her duplicity was so ruthless. Although her lip had a tremulous quaver, her forearm was like iron. I felt I was back in that
R.A.F
. hospital.’ He shudders at the memory.

‘I think you are cheating, my boy. You saw the words St Thomas’s Hospital Nurses Hockey Team written on her belt.’

‘Now you are teasing me, sir.’

‘Perhaps I am. But let us assume you are right. What victim would arouse such ardour in a nurse?’

For a moment Stapleton is puzzled; then suddenly he cries: ‘Oh, o course, now I see! How blind I am!’

‘Are we right, Mallet?’ asks the President.

‘Absolutely right. We got him at the local surgery.’

They all give Stapleton a hearty clap, and he beams and blushes all over, quite delighted. He strides ahead of the others to enjoy his triumph alone, and when, a moment later, he relives the scene at the
rose-bed, all the sadness has departed from it. It has become quite a brilliant scene, in fact, with all the roses in full bloom and himself rising high like a lily in the centre of them.

Father Orfe walks ahead and catches Stapleton up. He puts a paternal arm on his shoulder and starts a conversation. Suddenly the same idea strikes Dr Shubunkin and Mr Jamesworth, and they, too, hurry forward and lay their arms affectionately around Stapleton’s remaining vacant spaces.

‘That boy will go far,’ murmurs the captain to the President, as they watch Stapleton being moved forward on eight legs.

‘It would seem so. May I have a word with you in private?’

‘Of course, sir. Club trouble?’

‘As usual.’

‘I am sorry to hear it. Of course, they are always frisky when case-histories are in the air.’ He signs to Beaufort to take over the duties of host, and conducts the President to the breakfast-room.

*

The old fellow is out of sorts. He peers through the key hole to see if anyone is in the passage. He takes a chair between two windows. He says, ‘I’m afraid I am not myself, Mallet. The fact is, the Club has been most restless lately. Young Stapleton is not being embraced by his elders for nothing.’

‘Surely we expect that, sir? Every club has its factions. Every faction goes recruiting.’

‘Let me tell you something. Father Orfe has taken to blasphemy.’

‘Blasphemy!
But when he is not drunk, he is the most pious of men.’

‘No more. I take for granted that every cistern in the Club should be blocked with a priest’s empties and that dead men should be found in rows every time his mattress is turned. Priests must have some way of showing how dependent we all are on grace. But to become an atheist as well …’

‘Have you discussed it with him, sir?’

‘A month ago I called him in and had a sharp talk. I said I had nothing against his drinking, but the atheism was quite unnecessary. I reminded him that a priest must have
some
religious side and that he was becoming top-heavy by taking up still another opposite.’

‘What was his answer?’

‘He accused me, in the blandest way, of being old-fashioned. He tells me proudly that in addition to drinking and blaspheming he is contemplating suicide. He insists that all this has made him vastly more redeemable than he used to be.’

‘One sees his point, of course.’

‘Does one? I didn’t. I simply summoned a Rules Committee. I thought it best to choose a chairman who was not – well – not
too
symphathetic to the Orfe faction, if you know….’

‘Quite, quite; one has to do that.’

‘I chose Shubunkin. He, as you well know, is our sex member: there is nothing, from a rise in the bank rate to a fishing-smack, which he cannot sexually explain. For years, he has analysed Orfe’s asceticism in language that I would rather not repeat. I was confident that for once he would make a good chairman. Indeed, frankly, I hoped that he would give Orfe such a drubbing that the two of them would become more deadly factional than ever – always so much easier for a president, you know.

‘Judge of my horror when Shubunkin read his committee’s report. They gave Orfe a clean slate and even commended him. Moreover, Shubunkin let fall a hint that the Orfe method might well be followed by others. Surveying the Orfe territory, Shubunkin declared that it was now a well-known fact that atheism and alcoholism were primary evidences of a Christian society. He saw no reason why suicide should not be equally desirable, as a means of emphasizing the sacred nature of human life. He concluded with a
most
disturbing passage. Applying the Orfe method to his own speciality, he concluded that sexual intercourse was the primary element in chastity and virginity. No, I have that wrong. It was the other way round. Chastity and virginity were forms of sexual intercourse. He hinted that he intended to follow up this fruitful line – in other words, that he was damned if he was going to let sex lag behind Christianity. The whole Club is seething with it, and I am most upset.’

‘Have you tackled Shubunkin, sir?’

‘I could hardly do so when I had myself selected him to tackle Orfe. The whole business dumbfounds me: never would I have imagined an alliance between the club ascetic and the club sexualist. We have had members who despaired of maintaining a clear-cut identity and who were helped to choose new ones more in keeping with their abilities.
We have had members who dallied with the temptation to be their own opposites and were consequently more than ever true to type. But this new development is something different. It is anarchy. Imagine its being taken up by the whole club! We would all become unrecognizable.’

‘It is not an idea that spreads easily, sir. Most members would see it as a diminution of the chosen self.’

‘Alas! it will not be presented to them as that. It is Orfe’s contention that one is never
more
oneself than when one is
not
being
oneself. This absurd idea has struck him like a ray of light. He is enveloped by it. What you don’t seem to understand, Mallet, is that once such an idea emerges,
all
the factions are bound to take it up. They simply can’t afford to be backward in an intellectual advance. If the identity is to be recognizable only by its paradoxical opposite, well then, every faction is going to start playing opposites. You know where
that
will lead. Members will begin to feel
guilty.
And I refuse absolutely to preside over a
guilty
club
.’

‘You don’t think they are just a little bored, sir?’

‘But they are Tories to a man, Mallet – the more so because they think themselves pioneers. What they love about our great theory is that it is absolutely unchangeable.’

‘Perhaps you can joke them out of it.’

‘I am much too old for that. I am going to be iron-handed with them. If I joke, it will be to pain, not please. A faintly bored urbanity has been my usual means of self-expression, but I see no reason why a president should not be exceedingly sharp, canny, and unpleasant. Do you?’

‘I would only warn against your fighting their paradoxes with one of your own.’

‘I am very angry about this. After many battles, I had looked forward to a comfortable last decade in the presidential chair.’

‘That is a typically presidential hope, is it not, sir?’

‘It is. I am sure my predecessor held it strongly, poor fellow. The trouble was, he was unable to rise to the last, decisive battle. Well, I must leave you or they will think I have been talking behind their backs.’

‘I see there has been a change in our schedule.’

‘Yes. None of our foreign members this year. Only ourselves.’

‘That seems odd.’

‘The Americans have written a very vague letter saying that they are having to testify before some committee and think it wiser not to ask for passports. Apparently there is some new movement afoot over there, according to which no change in identity is permissible after a certain age. One of our members was a bar-tender at the age of twenty-three, and it appears that he must remain a twenty-three-year-old bar-tender, despite the fact that he is now fifty-four and vice-president of a shoe company…. As for the French members, they say they would rather not leave the country because they may be called upon at any moment to form a
government.
It sounds too ridiculous. Either I am getting old or the world is getting very odd. Why, when I first became a member of this club, each man’s identity was absolutely clear. The two clergy members were unmistakable clergymen: I never even saw them drunk. Our statistician lived only for statistics; our brigadier-general was quite uninterested in art, as was our Marxist. No one ever saw the Club economist playing the violin, or the literary critic gardening. I was the first to welcome the amusing notion of opposing tendencies and have always taken for granted that the heart should be gnawed by that which it has removed. But look at what it has all led to – this tolerance! Between you and me, Mallet, we should never have allowed Orfe to start drinking.’

*

Four days pass before the Club session begins because there is much preliminary work to be done. The session would be pretty empty if it consisted of nothing but the transmission of ideas: something must be added to relieve the tedium, and this is supplied by a collection of devices which keeps every member of the Club so passionately active that he forgets the end to which it is all directed. Committees are set up to deal with stenography, catering, hours, schedules, rules of procedure, etc. Each committee must have a secretary; each secretary must have an assistant; each assistant must have a typewriter; each typewriter must have something to type. As the Club is a small one, most members are obliged to serve on more than one committee: this means that the secretary of one committee is frequently the assistant to the secretary of another committee; or the typewriter of, say, the Catering Committee can be used by this body only at hours when the Hours Committee has not designated it for use by the Rules Committee. All
this leads to misapprehension and quarrelling, and there is no doubt that none of the Committee-men would carry on the struggle at all if they were not conscious of the presence, in the bedrooms overhead, of the Club intellects straining every brain-fibre to produce histories of attenuated merit. And the histories will not, of course, merely be read aloud and then forgotten: on the contrary, each will be read aloud a second time in French, by a member of the Translation Committee, after which it will be mimeographed, in both versions, by the Duplication Committee and copies handed round for all members to explore a third time. Information on all matters must not only be handed in pamphlet form to each member (including those who wrote the pamphlet) but be pinned to a cork board in the hall and given
in
advance
to all committees so as to avoid schedular confusion. To youngsters like Stapleton, who are pining for the bilious thrills of intellectual dispute, much of this subsidiary work seems dull and even unnecessary. But even Stapleton has to confess what a
difference
four days of scurrying makes to the
atmosphere:
it is impossible to say that nothing is happening when every member of the Club has mimeographed sheets sticking out of all his pockets, and at every meal every cruet supports some fresh order or rule that every man must study if his letters are to be posted, his slop-pail emptied, his history read, his Ovaltine brought to his night-table. At all hours of the day, a little cluster of members is round the bulletin board; and there is no more disappointing sight in human life than that of an ardent man running to read the latest bulletin and finding only the few score old ones that he knows by heart.

But the main importance of all this work is that it makes every man-jack of the Club discover anew that he is
identified
with the Club and, without it, would probably have no identity at all. Each time he reads a fresh bulletin he has the impression that he is reading his autobiography. Moreover, he is secretly convinced that he himself is the mainspring of the Club, that it is round his identity that the Club’s identity is built. If he is one of the intellectuals, he takes for granted that the history which he is now dragging-out is what makes the Club the brilliant thing it is. If he is merely a stupid secretary, he believes that without the innumerable orders, rules, and schedules that he is promulgating, the high-brows upstairs would soon be in a pickle. It is in this way that great bodies of men act in concert to move mountains:
though few have seen a mountain, all are capable of movement. Their identities become manifold: each man is magnified, first, by his identification with the Club; second, by his membership in a faction of the Club; third, by his pivotal position in being the one on whom everything depends; fourth, by the stimulating increase in sense-of-identity that is generated by the other three causes all working hysterically together. No wonder that after only four days every member feels that he has lived at Hyde’s Mortimer all his life. Not even in nightmare does he hear the roar of the angry, winter sea and imagine its castellated waves sweeping him and his friends off the face of the earth for ever.

*

That all the struggle, suffering, and self-discipline is worthwhile is evident on the morning of the fifth day. The parquet floor of the old hall is covered by lines of wooden chairs joined together at the top, so that if one member shifts forward in his seat he carries, if he is able, a dozen with him. The intellectual members are already drooped in these chairs, their faces white and fallen, their finger-tips brushing the floor, evidence of the efforts they have put out and the benzedrine they have taken in. A few, like Stapleton, are quivering on the edges of their seats reading sheaves and sheaves of mimeography over and over for the umpteenth time: they are the children who will go completely mad if the party doesn’t start soon. The older members, with records of twenty annual sessions, enter the hall with the utmost calm, and gravely press past the knees of those who are already seated, to chairs which experience has shown them are the best. Others stand by the wall, talking in low voices and sometimes smiling, and it is here that one notices particularly the secretaries of the various committees. Like the intellectuals, they are in a state of exhaustion, but they show by their tense expressions that they are not yet able to relax. Only when the first speaker has gone to the rostrum and intoned the first words of his depressing message to humanity will these devoted harbingers of thought drop suddenly into their chairs and let the bowstrings of their minds so slacken that they could not fire even a dart of inked paper.