My last year as an artist in Europe was a sad year every place. In the night clubs grouped young men groped virginal silk to the whine of violins, a summer idyll at Nice had been wrecked in the thunderstorms of fall, and Lady Luck showed a great deal of spirit, but it was only of sheer contradiction.
My friend Sethos, who kept in condition for violin playing by taking fencing lessons and reading Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal to English governesses in the park, he too saw the trouble the year would hold.
“Yet to me an empty life is a perfect definition of happiness.”
“That's the noon apéritif talking,” I said.
“Stevie, your Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre are coming to an end. You talk like one going home.”
“I think so. I've learned a little.”
“No one can travel and still admire mankind. Or women. In love, Stevie, the strategy of flight is the only victory.”
But I wasn't in love, and Sethos went off, after telling me all experience is disappointing… art is the only creative force… too bad I had never studied the violin. Without art we live only on the fringes of awareness and never come fully awake… I must really take up the fiddle. With music only the present is real, the past and the future, as in life, are always shifting… he knew where I could get a good second-hand Dutch fiddle for two hundred francs.
What had been the wonderful days of “before 1929” faded away quickly in France, and there were a lot of us who turned our faces towards the setting sun and the taste of home cooking and the shape of the hills beyond Jersey City and St. Louis and Los Angeles. But how to bridge the big blue pond was a problem.
The days when saying one was an American and being given everything that one wanted—those days were over with the last rolled stocking on the last boy-legged flapper wearing the last bobbed hair in Europe. Sterner times were ahead, and grass was going to grow on Fifth Avenue, they told us.
Somewhere in New York were several dozen paintings I had painted, and waiting for me was an art show in one of those 57th Street show places where people brought their best manners and checkbooks. But I could not, at the time, get together enough change to buy out even the cigarette tray in a Russian night club.
My friend Sethos, the brown man who played first violin on the great ship “France,” came to me one day and smiled in that wonderful Egyptian way of his and said, “How would you like to fiddle on the “France”?
“I can't fiddle.”
“That is nothing,” said Sethos. “We need a second fiddle on the next crossing to New York.”
“Keep looking.”
“You want to go home.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I want to go home too, but you see I can't. There is the matter of the mother-in-law and my second wife, and the taxes I have not paid. But why should I bore you? Anyway, when a man wants to go home I want to help.”
“That's nice, Sethos… but I can't fiddle.”
Sethos grinned and took my arm. “Look… it is not the fiddling that matters… it's Belloc. He hires for the French Lines, the biggest crook that ever cut a young girl's throat. But if you please Belloc you get the job.”
“Why should he hire me?” I asked.
Sethos rubbed his brown cheeks and said, “Listen, my artist, France is full of holes… every day some rat pulls more of this wonderful country down a rat hole. Everything is for sale, everything can be had. Belloc likes to give jobs to people like you. You want passage… he wants your pay in his pocket. Well?”
“Second fiddle?”
“Like a second edition of a book… what value has it? Come on.”
We went to a small bar where they did open-fire cooking, and in a back room sat Belloc. He was a beautiful looking swine. Smooth as lard and made of the same stuff. He was as wide as he was tall, and he wasn't very tall. His face had been made by pushing a finger into suet to mark out eyes, nose, and mouth. He had some gray hair cropped close as a sheep-eaten lawn, and his fingers ended in dumplings, each dumpling having a ring on it. He had a pleasant voice and spoke like an educated man who had cheated at his exams.
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