She was stimulated, too, by the revelation of a mystical strain in this pleasure-loving people. It was easy to see how a visionary like Codreanu could excite half-starved and superstitious peasants, but one supposed that the townspeople would find the King, with his mistresses, his chicanery and his love of money, a more likely projection of themselves. Or were all people at variance with themselves? Anyway, it had been here in Bucharest, during the funeral of Guardists killed in Spain, that people had given Codreanu so frenzied a welcome that the King determined to kill his rival and stamp out the whole Guardist movement.
When Guy came in, Harriet was impatient to talk about Codreanu, but he showed no interest. He had heard all the stories before.
‘You must admit,’ she said, ‘that the Iron Guard concepts are not so very different from your own.’
Guy glanced up sharply and, with a gesture, indicated that here and now, in the absurdity of this statement, he could pin down the root trouble of the world. ‘Codreanu,’ he said, ‘was a murderer, a Jew-baiter and a thug. He had a following of nonentities who wanted only one thing – power at any price.’
‘But if, having power, they could remake the country …’
‘Do you imagine they could? The incompetence of Carol’s set would be as nothing compared with the incompetence of Codreanu’s bunch of thugs.’
‘Well, one could give them a chance.’
‘Before the war there were quite a lot of sentimentalists like you. They did not realise that while they were being mesmerised and misled by the romantic aspects of fascism, they were being made to sell their souls …’
Having used this phrase inadvertently, he paused, and Harriet, feeling ignorant and something of a fool, leapt in with: ‘If the fascists make you sell your soul, the communists make you deny it.’
Guy grunted and picked up a newspaper. She knew he had no use for religion, seeing it as part of the conspiracy to keep the rich powerful and the poor docile. He was prepared to discuss very little that did not contribute towards a practical improvement in mankind’s condition. Harriet’s own theories, of course, were too simple-minded to matter.
At the moment he held up the paper to screen him from any more of her nonsense. She said to provoke him: ‘Clarence says you’re merely the rebel son of a rebel father.’
‘Clarence is an ass,’ Guy said, but he put the paper down. ‘In fact I could say I reacted against my father. The poor old chap was a bit of a romantic. He imagined the moneyed classes were the repository of culture. He used to say: “That’s their function, isn’t it? If they don’t safeguard the arts, what the hell do they do?” When I began to meet rich people I was shocked by their ignorance and vulgarity.’
‘Where did you meet these rich people?’
‘At the University – the sons of local manufacturers. They weren’t aristocrats, it’s true, but they were rich. And not first-generation rich, either. They were the country-house-owning class of the Midlands. They were always talking about “parvenus”, but even the most intelligent of them preferred the fashionable to the good.’
She laughed. ‘They’re much like everyone else. How many people do love the highest when they see it? They just about tolerate it if they’re told often enough that it’s the right thing.’
He agreed and was about to go back to his paper when she said: ‘But did you know these people well? Did you go to their houses?’
‘Yes. I suppose I was taken up by them – in a way. At first they wouldn’t believe I was a genuine member of the proletariat. I was too big and untidy. According to them I should have been a bony little man in a dark suit, permanently soul-sick. When they found I was quite genuine, they adopted me as their favourite member of the working class.’
‘And you didn’t mind? You liked them? You liked the Druckers?’
He had to admit it was true. He could not help liking people who liked him. They became, and remained, his friends.
‘But,’ he said, ‘I know that humanity’s superiority depends on a few persons of intellectual and moral structure: people like my father, for instance, who almost never have money or power, and have no sense at all of their own importance.’
With that, Guy went back to his students; and Harriet, as soon as the heat began to relax, took herself up to the roof to talk to Sasha.
Guy had said once that, although she was nearly twenty-three, she still had the mentality of an adolescent. Perhaps her relationship with Sasha was a relationship of adolescents.
Guy’s all-knowingness, his lack of time for any sort of fantasy, was frustrating her. She felt gagged. Sasha, on the other hand, had unlimited time. He did not say much himself, but he listened to her with the intent interest of someone new in the world. He was delighted to be entertained, watching her with warm, attentive eyes that made her feel whatever she said was pertinent and exciting. He believed – or rather, his silent extrusion of sympathy led her to believe he believed – that he, as she did, related life to eternity rather than to time.
Now when Guy was out she had somewhere to go. During the day, she had occupation enough. It was in the evening, the time of relaxation, when the changing light, giving a new spaciousness to the city, induced a sense of solitude, that she thought of Sasha who was lonely, too.
That evening, when she went to see him after tea, she spoke of Codreanu, saying: ‘He loved the peasants. He gave them this idea of a nation united in brotherhood. Surely the important thing was that people believed in him?’
Sasha listened uneasily. ‘But he did terrible things,’ he said. ‘He started the pogroms. My cousin at the University was thrown out of a window. His spine was broken.’
That was the reality, of course. ‘But why did the reality have to be that?’ she said. The ideals had been fine enough. They had been formulated to combat a corrupt regime in which the idle, self-seeking and dishonest thrived. Why then, she wanted to know, must they degenerate into a reality of blackmail, persecution and murder? Were human beings so fallible and self-seeking that degeneration was inevitable?
Guy, who had dismissed pretty sharply any suggestion of a flirtation with the Legion of the Archangel Michael, knew the answer to human fallibility: it was a world united under left-wing socialism. Sasha did not know the answer.
To please her, he was trying to consider the problem with detachment, but as he looked at her his soft, vulnerable, loving gaze was troubled.
She remembered the moment at the Drucker table when one of his aunts had asked: ‘Why do they hate us?’ Drucker had sent the little girls out of the room, but he did not send Sasha. Sasha had to be prepared for reality. However much his wealth might protect him, he could not be protected from prejudice. But, of course, he had not been prepared. Enclosed and loved as he had been, he could not relate their stories of persecution to himself.
He said: ‘The peasants are very simple people. It wouldn’t be difficult to make them believe in Codreanu. They’d believe in anything,’ and he gazed appealingly at her as though to say: ‘Let that explain away the mysterious influence of Guardism and all that came of it.’ In short: ‘Let us talk of something else.’ He probably wanted to talk about the peasants who had shown him, at times, a rough kindness. They had respected him because he spoke English, though they could scarcely believe he had actually been to England. England they held to be a sort of paradise, the abode of titans.
He described how they stood, as patient as their own beasts, all day on guard in the midsummer heat, clad in winter clothing. Money was allotted for the purchase of cotton uniforms but it was misspent somewhere. Who were they to complain?