Under the Volcano (35 page)

   
Yvonne glanced again at the Consul
who was sitting meditative with pursed lips apparently intent on the arena. How
little he knew of this period, of her life, of that terror, the terror, terror
that still could wake her in the night from that recurrent nightmare of things
collapsing; the terror that was like that she had been supposed to portray in
the white-slave-traffic film, the hand clutching her shoulder through the dark
doorway; or the real terror she'd felt when she actually had been caught in a
ravine with two hundred stampeding horses; no, like Captain Constable himself,
Geoffrey had been almost bored, perhaps ashamed, by all this: that she had,
starting when she was only thirteen, supported her father for five years as an
actress in "serials" and "westerns'; Geoffrey might have nightmares,
like her father in this too, be the only person in the world who ever had such
nightmares, but that she should have them... Nor did Geoffrey know much more of
the false real excitement, or the false flat bright enchantment of the studios,
or the childish adult pride, as harsh as it was pathetic, and justifiable, in
having, somehow, at that age, earned a living.
   
Beside the Consul Hugh took out a
cigarette, tapped it on his thumbnail, noted it was the last in the package,
and placed it between his lips. He put his feet up on the back of the seat
beneath him and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, frowning down
into the arena. Then, fidgeting still, he struck a match, drawing his thumbnail
across it with a crackle like a small cap-pistol, and held it to the cigarette,
cupping his quite beautiful hands, his head bent... Hugh was coming towards her
this morning, in the garden, through the sunlight. With his rolling swagger,
his Stetson hat on the back of his head, his holster, his pistol, his
bandolier, his tight trousers tucked inside the elaborately stitched and
decorated boots, she'd thought, just for an instant, that he
was--actually!--Bill Hodson, the cowboy star, whose leading lady she'd been in
three pictures when she was fifteen. Christ, how absurd! How marvellously
absurd! The Hawaiian Islands gave us this real outdoor girl who is fond of
swimming, golf, dancing, and is also an expert horsewoman! She... Hugh hadn't
said one word this morning about how well she rode, though he'd afforded her
not a little secret amusement by explaining that her
horse--miraculously--didn't want to drink. Such areas there are in one another
we leave, perhaps for ever, unexplored!--She'd never told him a word about her
movie career, no, not even that day in Robinson... But it was a pity Hugh
himself hadn't been old enough to interview her, if not the first time, that
second awful time after Uncle Macintyre sent her to college, and after her
first marriage, and the death of her child, when she had gone back once more to
Hollywood. Yvonne the Terrible! Look out, you sarong sirens and glamour girls,
Yvonne Constable, the "Boomp Girl," is back in Hollywood! Yes, Yvonne
is back, determined to conquer Hollywood for the second time. But she's twenty-four
now, and the "Boomp Girl" has become a poised exciting woman who
wears diamonds and white orchids and ermine--and a woman who has known the
meaning of love and tragedy, who has lived a lifetime since she left Hollywood
a few short years ago. I found her the other day at her beach home, a
honey-tanned Venus just emerging from the surf. As we talked she gazed out over
the water with her slumbrous dark eyes and the Pacific breezes played with her
thick dark hair. Gazing at her for a moment it was hard to associate the Yvonne
Constable of today with the rough-riding serial queen of yesteryear, but the
torso's still terrific, and the energy is still absolutely unparalleled! The
Honolulu Hellion, who at twelve was a war-whooping tomboy, crazy about
baseball, disobeying everyone but her adored Dad, who she called "The
Boss-Boss," became at fourteen a child actress, and at fifteen, leading
lady to Bill Hodson. And she was a powerhouse even then. Tall for her age, she
had a lithe strength that came from a childhood of swimming and surfboarding in
the Hawaiian breakers. Yes, though you may not think it now, Yvonne has been
submerged in burning lakes, suspended over precipices, ridden horses down
ravines, and she's an expert at "double pick-offs." Yvonne laughs merrily
today when she remembers the frightened determined girl who declared she could
ride very well indeed, and then, the picture in progress, the company on
location, tried to mount her horse from the wrong side! A year later she could
do a "flying mount" without turning a hair. "But about that time
I was rescued from Hollywood," as she smilingly puts it, "and very
unwillingly too, by my Uncle Macintyre, who literally swooped down, after my
father died, and sailed me back to Honolulu!" But when you've been a
"Boomp Girl" and are well on your way to being an "Oomph
Girl!" at eighteen, and when you've just lost your beloved
"Boss-Boss," it's hard to settle down in a strict loveless
atmosphere. "Uncle Macintyre," Yvonne admits, "never conceded a
jot or tittle to the tropics. Oh, the mutton broth and oatmeal and hot
tea!" But Uncle Macintyre knew his duty and, after Yvonne had studied with
a tutor, he sent her to the University of Hawaii. There--perhaps, she says,
"because the word 'star' had undergone some mysterious transformation in
my mind"--she took a course in astronomy! Trying to forget the ache in her
heart and its emptiness, she forced an interest in her studies and even dreamed
briefly of becoming the "Madame Curie" of astronomy! And there too,
before long, she met the millionaire playboy, Cliff Wright. He came into
Yvonne's life at a moment when she was discouraged in her University work,
restless under Uncle Macintyre's strict regime, lonely, and longing for love
and companionship. And Cliff was young and gay, his rating as an eligible
bachelor was absolutely blue ribbon. It's easy to see how he was able to
persuade her, beneath the Hawaiian moon, that she loved him, and that she
should leave college and marry him. ('Don't tell me for Christ sake about this
Cliff," the Consul wrote in one of his rare early letters, "I can see
him and I hate the bastard already: short-sighted and promiscuous, six foot
three of gristle and bristle and pathos, of deep-voiced charm and
casuistry." The Consul had seen him with some astuteness as a matter of
fact--poor Cliff!--one seldom thought of him now and one tried not to think of
the self-righteous girl whose pride had been outraged by his
infidelities--"businesslike, inept and unintelligent, strong and
infantile, like most American men, quick to wield chairs in a fight, vain, and
who, at thirty still ten, turns the act of love into a kind of
dysentery...") Yvonne has already been a victim of "bad Press"
about her marriage and in the inevitable divorce that followed, what she said
was misconstrued, and when she didn't say anything, her silence was
misinterpreted. And it wasn't only the Press who misunderstood: "Uncle
Macintyre," she says ruefully, "simply washed his hands of me."
(Poor Uncle Macintyre. It was fantastic, it was almost funny--it was
screamingly funny, in a way, as one related it to one's friends. She was a
Constable through and through, and no child of her mother's people! Let her go
the way of the Constables! God knows how many of them had been caught up in, or
invited, the same kind of meaningless tragedy, or half-tragedy, as herself and
her father. They rotted in asylums in Ohio or dozed in dilapidated
drawing-rooms in Long Island with chickens pecking among the family silver and
broken teapots that would be found to contain diamond necklaces. The
Constables, a mistake on the part of nature, were dying out. In fact, nature
meant to wipe them out, having no further use for what was not self-evolving.
The secret of their meaning, if any, had been lost.) So Yvonne left Hawaii with
her head high and a smile on her lips, even if her heart was more achingly
empty than ever before. And now she's back in Hollywood and people who know her
best say she has no time in her life now for love, she things of nothing but
her work. And at the studio they're saying the tests she's been making recently
are nothing short of sensational. The "Boomp Girl" has become
Hollywood's greatest dramatic actress! So Yvonne Constable, at twenty-four, is
well on the way for the second time to becoming a star.
   
--But Yvonne Constable had not become
a star for the second time. Yvonne Constable had not even been on her way to
becoming a star. She had acquired an agent who managed to execute some
excellent publicity--excellent in spite of the fact that publicity of any kind,
she persuaded herself, was one of her greatest secret fears--on the strength of
her earlier rough-riding successes; she received promises, and that was all. In
the end she walked alone down Virgil Avenue or Mariposa beneath the dusty dead
shallow-planted palms of the dark and accursed City of the Angels without even
the consolation that her tragedy was no less valid for being so stale. For her
ambitions as an actress had always been somewhat spurious: they suffered in
some sense from the dislocations of the functions--she saw this--of womanhood
itself. She saw it, and at the same time, now it was all quite hopeless (and
now that she had, after everything, outgrown Hollywood), saw that she might
under other conditions have become a really first-rate, even a great artist.
For that matter what was she if not that now (if greatly directed) as she
walked or drove furiously through her anguish and all the red lights, seeing,
as might the Consul, the sign in the Town House window "Informal Dancing
in the Zebra Room" turn "Infernal"--or "Notice to Destroy
Weeds" become "Notice to Newlyweds." While on the
hoarding--"Man's public inquiry of the hour"--the great pendulum on
the giant blue clock swung ceaselessly. Too late! And it was this, it was all this
that had perhaps helped to make meeting Jacques Laruelle in Quauhnahuac such a
shattering and ominous thing in her life. It was not merely that they had the
Consul in common, so that through Jacques she had been mysteriously able to
reach, in a sense to avail herself of, what she had never known, the Consul's
innocence; it was only to him that she'd been able to talk of Hollywood (not
always honestly, yet with the enthusiasm with which close relatives may speak
of a hated parent and with what relief!) on the mutual grounds of contempt and
half-admitted failure. Moreover they discovered that they were both there in
the same year, in 1932, had been once, in fact, at the same party,
outdoor-barbecue-swimming-pool-and-bar; and to Jacques she had shown also, what
she had kept hidden from the Consul, the old photographs of Yvonne the Terrible
dressed in fringed leather shirts and riding-breeches and high-heeled boots,
and wearing a ten-gallon hat, so that in his amazed and bewildered recognition
of her this horrible morning, she had wondered was there not just an instant's
faltering--for surely Hugh and Yvonne were in some grotesque fashion
transposed!... And once too in his studio, where the Consul was so obviously
not going to arrive,
   
M. Laruelle had shown her some stills
of his old French films, one of which it turned out--good heavens!--she'd seen
in New York soon after going east again. And in New York she'd stood once more
(still in Jacques's studio) on that freezing winter night in Times Square--she was
staying at the Astor--watching the illuminated news aloft travelling around the
Times Building, news of disaster, of suicide, of banks failing, of approaching
war, of nothing at all, which, as she gazed upward with the crowd, broke off
abruptly, snapped off into darkness, into the end of the world, she had felt,
when there was no more news. Or was it--Golgotha? A bereaved and dispossessed
orphan, a failure, yet rich, yet beautiful, walking, but not back to her hotel,
in the rich fur trappings of alimony, afraid to enter the bars alone whose
warmth she longed for then, Yvonne had felt far more desolate than a
streetwalker; walking--and being followed, always followed--through the numb
brilliant jittering city--the best for less, she kept seeing, or Dead End, or
Romeo and Juliet, and then again, the best for less--that awful darkness had
persisted in her mind, blackening still further her false wealthy loneliness,
her guilty divorced dead helplessness. The electric arrows thrust at her
heart--yet they were cheating: she knew, increasingly frightened by it, that
darkness to be still there, in them, of them. The cripples jerked themselves
slowly past. Men muttered by in whose faces all hope seemed to have died.
Hoodlums with wide purple trousers waited where the icy gale streamed into open
parlours. And everywhere, that darkness, the darkness of a world without
meaning, a world without aim--the best for less--but where everyone save
herself, it seemed to her, however hypocritically, however churlish, lonely, crippled,
hopeless, was capable, if only in a mechanical crane, a cigarette butt plucked
from the street, if only in a bar, if only in accosting Yvonne herself, of
finding some faith...le Destin de Yvonne Griffaton... And there she was--and
she was still being followed--standing outside the little cinema in Fourteenth
Street which showed revivals and foreign films. And there, upon the stills, who
could it be, that solitary figure, but herself, walking down the same dark
streets, even wearing the same fur coat, only the signs above her and around
her said: Dubonnet, Amer Picon, Les 10 Frattelinis, Moulin Rouge. And
"Yvonne, Yvonne!" a voice was saying at her entrance, and a shadowy
horse, gigantic, filling the whole screen, seemed leaping out of it at her: it
was a statue that the figure had passed, and the voice, an imaginary voice,
which pursued Yvonne Griffaton down the dark streets, and Yvonne herself too,
as if she had walked straight out of that world outside into this dark world on
the screen, without taking breath. It was one of those pictures that, even
though you have arrived in the middle, grip you with the instant conviction
that it is the best film you have ever seen in your life; so extraordinarily
complete is its realism, that what the story is all about, who the protagonist
may be, seems of small account beside the explosion of the particular moment,
beside the immediate threat, the identification with the one hunted, the one
haunted, in this case Yvonne Griffaton--or Yvonne Constable! But if Yvonne Griffaton
was being followed, was being hunted--the film apparently concerned the
downfall of a Frenchwoman of rich family and aristocratic birth--she in turn
was also the hunter, was searching, was groping for something, Yvonne couldn't
understand what at first, in this shadowy world. Strange figures froze to the
walls, or into alleyways, at her approach: they were the figures of her past
evidently, her lovers, her one true love who had committed suicide, her
father--and as if seeking sanctuary from them, she had entered a church. Yvonne
Griffaton was praying, but the shadow of one follower fell on the chancel
steps: it was her first lover and at the next moment she was laughing
hysterically, she was at the Folies Bergères, she was at the Opera, the orchestra
was playing Leoncavallo's Zaza; then she was gambling, the roulette wheel spun
crazily, she was back in her room; and the film turned to satire, to satire,
almost, of itself: her ancestors appeared before her in swift succession,
static dead symbols of selfishness and disaster, but in her mind romanticized,
so it seemed, heroic, standing weary with their backs to the walls of prisons,
standing upright in tumbrils in wooden gesticulation, shot by the Commune, shot
by the Prussians, standing upright in battle, standing upright in death. And
now Yvonne Griffaton's father, who had been implicated in the Dreyfus case,
came to mock and mow at her. The sophisticated audience laughed, or coughed, or
murmured, but most of them presumably knew what Yvonne never as it happened
ever found out later, how these characters and the events in which they had
participated, contributed to Yvonne Griffaton's present estate. All this was
buried back in the earlier episodes of the film. Yvonne would have first to
endure the newsreel, the animated cartoon, a piece entitled The Life of the
African Lungfish and a revival of Scarface, in order to see, just as so much
that conceivably lent some meaning (though she doubted even this) to her own
destiny was buried in the distant past, and might for all she knew repeat
itself in the future. But what Yvonne Griffaton was asking herself was now
clear. Indeed the English sub-titles made it all too clear. What could she do
under the weight of such a heritage? How could she rid herself of this old man
of the sea? Was she doomed to an endless succession of tragedies that Yvonne
Griffaton could not believe either formed part of any mysterious expiation for
the obscure sins of others long since dead and damned, but were just frankly
meaningless? Yes, how? Yvonne wondered herself. Meaningless--and yet, was one
doomed? Of course one could always romanticize the unhappy Constables: one
could see oneself, or pretend to, as a small lone figure carrying the burden of
those ancestors, their weakness and wildness (which could be invented where it
was lacking) in one's blood, a victim of dark forces--everybody was, it was
inescapable!--misunderstood and tragic, yet at least with a will of your own!
But what was the use of a will if you had no faith? This indeed, she saw now,
was also Yvonne Griffaton's problem. This was what she too was seeking, and had
been all the time, in the face of everything, for some faith--as if one could
find it like a new hat or a house for rent!--yes, even what she was now on the
point of finding, and losing, a faith in a cause, was better than none. Yvonne
felt she had to have a cigarette and when she returned it looked much as though
Yvonne Griffaton had at last succeeded in her quest. Yvonne Griffaton was
finding her faith in life itself, in travel, in another love, in the music of
Ravel. The chords of Bolero strutted out redundantly, snapping and clicking
their heels, and Yvonne Griffaton was in Spain, in Italy; the sea was seen,
Algiers, Cyprus, the desert with its mirages, the Sphinx. What did all this
mean? Europe, Yvonne thought. Yes, for her, inevitably Europe, the Grand Tour,
the Tour Eiffel, as she had known all along.--But why was it, richly endowed in
a capacity for living as she was, she had never found a faith merely in
"life" sufficient? If that were all!... In unselfish love--in the
stars! Perhaps it should be enough. And yet, and yet, it was entirely true,
that one had never given up, or ceased to hope, or to try, gropingly, to find a
meaning, a pattern, an answer--