At first I thought that my eyes were playing a trick upon me. I held the page close to the light, wondering if I might not have begun to suffer delusions, the not unfamiliar concomitant of solitude and old age. But my eyes were adequate and the hallucination, if real, was vastly convincing: my name was no longer there. Eugene Luther no longer existed in that Testament which was largely his own composition.
I let the book shut of itself, as new books will. I sat down at the desk, understanding at last the extraordinary ignorance of Butler: I had been obliterated from history; my place in time erased. It was as if I had never lived.
Three
1
I have had in the last few days some difficulty in avoiding the company of Mr Butler. Fortunately, he is now very much involved with the local functionaries and I am again able to return to my narrative. I don't think Butler has been sent here to assassinate me but, on the other hand, from certain things he has said and not said, I am by no means secure in his ignorance; however, one must go on. At best, it will be a race between him and those hardened arteries which span the lobes of my brain. My only curiosity concerns the arrival next week of his colleague who is, I gather, of the second generation and of a somewhat bookish turn according to Butler who would not, I fear, be much of a judge. Certain things, though, which I have learned during the last few days about Iris Mortimer make me more than ever wish to recall our common years as precisely as possible for what I feared might happen has indeed, if Butler is to be believed, come to pass, and it is now with a full burden of hindsight that I revisit the scenes of a half century ago.
2
I had got almost nowhere with my life of Julian. I had become discouraged with his personality though his actual writings continued to delight me. As it so often happens in history I had found it difficult really to get at him: the human attractive part of Julian was undone for me by those bleak errors in deed and in judgment which depressed me even though they derived most logically from the man and his time: that fatal wedding which finally walls off figures of earlier ages from the present, keeping them strange despite the most intense and imaginative recreation. They are not we. We are not they. And I refused to resort to the low trick of fashioning Julian in my own image of him. I respected his integrity in time and deplored the division of centuries. My work at last came to a halt and, somewhat relieved, I closed my house in the autumn of the year and traveled west to California.
I had a small income which made modest living and careful travel easy for me… a fortunate state of affairs since, in my youth, I was of an intense disposition, capable of the passions and violence of a Rimbaud without, fortunately, the will to translate them into reality; had I had more money, or none, I might have died young, leaving behind the brief memory of a minor romanticist. As it was, I had a different role to play in the comedy; one for which I was, after some years of reading beside my natal river, peculiarly fitted to play.
I journeyed to southern California where I had not been since my service in one of the wars. I had never really explored that exotic land and I was curious about it, more curious than I have ever been before or since about any single part of the world. Egypt one knows without visiting it, and China the same; but that one area of sandy beaches and orange groves which circles the city of Los Angeles, an artificial place created from desert and sure to lapse back again into dust the moment some national disaster breaks its line of life and the waters no longer flow, has always fascinated me. I was of course interested in the movies, though they no longer had the same hold over the public imagination that they had had in earlier decades when a process of film before light could project, larger than life, not only on vast screens but also upon the impressionable minds of an enormous audience made homogeneous by a common passion, shadowy figures which, like the filmy envelopes of the stoic deities, floated to earth in public dreams, suggesting a braver more perfect world where love reigned and only the wicked died. But then time passed and the new deities lost their worshipers: there were too many gods and the devotees got too used to them, realizing finally that they were only mortals, involved not in magical rites but in a sordid business. Television (the home altar) succeeded the movies and their once populous and ornate temples, modeled tastefully on baroque and Byzantine themes, fell empty, the old gods moving to join the new hierarchies, becoming the domesticated godlings of television which, although it held the attention of the majority of the population, did not enrapture, did not possess dreams or shape days with longing and with secret imaginings the way the classic figures of an earlier time had. Though I was of an age to recall the gallant days of the movies, the nearly mythical power which they had held for millions of people, not all simple, I was not really interested in that aspect of California. I was more intrigued by the manners, by the cults, by the works of this coastal people so unlike the older world of the East and so antipathetic to our race's first home in Europe. Needless to say, I found them much like everyone else, except for minor differences of no real consequence.
I stayed at a large hotel not too happily balanced in design between the marble-and-potted-palm decor of the Continental Hotel in Paris and the chrome and glass of an observation car on a newer train.
I unpacked, telephoned friends most of whom were not home. The one whom at last I found in was the one I knew the least, a minor film writer who had married money with great success and had, most altruistically, given up the composition of films for which the remaining movie-goers were no doubt thankful. He devoted his time to assisting his wife in becoming the first hostess of Beverly Hills. She had, I recalled from one earlier meeting, the mind of a child of twelve, but an extremely active child and a good one.
Hastings, such was the writer's name (her name was either Ethel or Valerie, two names which I always confuse due to a particularly revolutionary course I once took in mnemonics), invited me immediately to a party. I went.
It seemed like spring though it was autumn, and it seemed like an assortment of guests brought together in a ship's dining room to celebrate New Year's Eve though, in fact, the gathering was largely made up of close acquaintances. Since I knew almost no one, I had a splendid time.
My hostess, beyond a brilliant greeting, a gold figure all in green with gold dust in her hair, left me alone. Hastings was more solicitous, a nervous gray man with a speech impediment which took the form of a rather charming sigh before any word which began with an aspirate.
"We, ah, have a better place coming up. Farther up the mountains with a marvelous view of the, ah, whole city. You will love it, Gene. Ah, haven't signed a lease yet, but soon." While we talked he steered me through the crowds of handsome and bizarre people (none of them was from California I discovered: most were Central Europeans or British; those who were not pretended to be one or the other; some sounded like both). I was introduced to magnificent girls exactly like their movie selves but since they all tended to look a great deal alike, the effect was somehow spoiled. But I was a tourist and not critical. I told a striking blonde that she would indeed be excellent in a musical extravaganza based upon The Sea Gull. She thought so too and my host and I moved on to the patio.
Beside a jade-green pool illuminated from beneath (and a little dirty, I noticed, with leaves floating upon the water: the décor was becoming tarnished, the sets had been used too long and needed striking. Hollywood was becoming old without distinction), a few of the quieter guests sat in white iron chairs while paper lanterns glowed prettily on the palms and everywhere, untidily, grew roses, jasmine and lilac: it was a fantastic garden, all out of season and out of place. The guests beside the pool were much the same; except for one: Clarissa.