‘You cats have this boy Clive all wrong. He shared my flat during one trip, and he had so many girls running in and out that the Guardia Civil came around to see if we were running a whorehouse. When they saw Clive, a skinny hundred and forty pounds, one of the Guardia asked me, “What’s his secret?” ’
The soldier was right. With Gretchen sleeping indoors, Clive and Yigal had the pop-top to themselves, and they arranged the bunks so that four could sleep conveniently and from their pillows survey the sea. It was thus an ideal spot for entertaining young ladies, who later drifted indoors for coffee and bathroom facilities. Whenever I visited the apartment it was populated by girls who seemed prettier than the ones I had seen before. Clive was favorably known along the coast, and some of his guests drove long distances to talk with him about music and to share the bed they had enjoyed on his previous visits. He was a pied piper, attracting the best youth in Hamelin, but before long I saw that whereas he might be sleeping with various young ladies who sought him out, he was interested primarily in Gretchen.
I was present when the infatuation started. (Don’t ask me how a young man could entertain four different girls in a pop-top during one week and at the same time be infatuated with the owner of the bed he was using; the young people didn’t think it strange.) It was on the third day of his stand in Torremolinos and we were all in the Alamo, where he was playing his records: ‘I have one just over from the States that’s absolutely delicious,’ he shouted. ‘You’ll love it, and you’ll be astonished when I tell you who’s done it. Johnny Cash. Yes, the hillbilly. Listen!’ It was a rollicking song about a southern gambler who had named his son Sue and then abandoned him. Father and son meet in a Gatlinburg saloon, where all hell breaks loose. It was, as Clive had said, a song everyone would like, and as he replayed it, I kept thinking that in America the new music was discovering what the automobile makers and the cigarette companies already knew: that in the modern world, with its crowded and dirty mechanical cities, romance can live only in the open spaces of the south and west. Sue meets his baleful old man in Gatlinburg; the soldier dreams of his girl in Galveston; the lineman comes from Wichita and the absconding guitar player is on his way to Phoenix. You can look at a dozen automobile advertisements on television, and you’ll get the idea that every American car is driven on dirt roads in the far west. Same with cigarette smokers. You never see them in a city, always beside some cool stream or herding white-faced Herefords beyond the mesa. The open spaces, the goodness of rural life represented what was desirable in American culture; the cities were abominations to be forgotten.
I was contemplating all this when a group of Americans and Swedes entered the bar, listened for a while to Clive’s records, then told Joe, ‘We thought the girl was to sing at five.’ When they looked at Clive accusingly, Joe said, ‘She’s gonna sing,’ and he explained to Clive that in recent weeks Gretchen had been playing the guitar and singing ballads.
‘Marvelous!’ Clive shouted above the music. ‘Simply ripping.’ He lifted the needle and gently returned the record to its cover, then sought out Gretchen and said, ‘I hadn’t a clue, old dear, not a clue.’
‘I like your music better,’ she said, but after a chair was produced and she had tuned her guitar, I could see Clive widen his eyes when she struck the first professional notes. He looked at me and nodded vigorously, as if to say, ‘This one knows.’
‘Child 81,’ she announced, and soon she was singing the saucy account of how high-born Lady Barnard met Little Musgrave in church one Sunday morning and propositioned him with blandishments that even a young man intent on worship could not withstand:
‘ “I have a hall in Mulberry,
It stands baith strong and tight;
If you will go to there with me,
I’ll lye with you all night.” ’
Little Musgrave went home with the lady and was caught in bed by her husband, Lord Barnard, who preceeded to hack him to pieces.
Gretchen sang the ballad with a bewitching charm, and Clive, who knew a good singer when he heard one, said, when the applause had died down, ‘Most elegant. You sing like a Scottish girl … with real boggy coloring.’
I suggested that she sing ‘Mary Hamilton,’ at which the Swedes clapped loudly, for the song was well known in their country. Clive, surprisingly, did not know this famous ballad, but even on first hearing he appreciated the unusual beauty of the opening and closing stanzas. ‘Exquisite!’ he cried, and for the rest of his stay it was he who saw to it that Gretchen was called to the high chair at intervals to sing, and it was he who led the applause when she did.
He borrowed the Child volumes and studied them, asking Gretchen her opinion on which the good numbers were. Like her, he found the lament for the Bonny Earl of Murray among the finest, but it was ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie’ that showed him how delicate an interpreter she could be.
‘You must come to England!’ he cried. ‘The record companies would flip over what you’re doing … absolutely flip.’
Gretchen had no ambition to make recordings, professionalism of that sort had never appealed to her and she would have been embarrassed to find her photograph on the jacket of a record, but she did enjoy talking music with Clive and they were together a good deal in those sun-filled days of mid-spring, but more than talk she did not care to do.
One day Clive asked me, ‘What’s wrong with Gret?’ and I said, ‘Maybe she finds it distasteful that you keep the pop-top filled with other young ladies … her pop-top, that is.’
‘Oh!’ With his autonomic charm, he laughed at me and said, ‘Really, girls these days aren’t put off by that. Those kids in the car … who worries about them, truthfully?’
‘I mean …’ I tried to say something relevant about love’s being a permanent thing that did not fluctuate too much with contemporary style, that any self-respecting girl would object to being courted by a man who was living with another girl—with a string of them, to be exact—but my words sounded so old-fashioned that when Clive poked me and said, ‘Really, old chap …’ I shut my mouth.
‘Fact is,’ he said, ‘it’s not me at all that puts her off. Something quite ugly disturbs her. When she sings she’s a different girl—all poetry and zest for horses riding over the moor. She’d be great as one of the Brontë sisters. But when she puts down the guitar the dream evaporates. You can see it vanish in the last three chords.’
Clive’s presence in Torremolinos had a consequence of which he remained unaware. He and Monica had been talking about old acquaintances in England for the better part of an afternoon, when Yigal came to my table and said, ‘I left Canterbury much impressed with England. I liked those girls at the English hotel and was beginning to think I might become an Englishman. Now I’m beginning to have doubts.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve been watching Clive and Monica. What I mean is, I’ve been listening. They use such an exaggerated vocabulary … such an inflated one. Everything’s hideous or excruciating or delicious or simply awful.’
‘Don’t get put off by style,’ I said. ‘American vocabulary is just as bad in its way.’
‘I don’t mean anything trivial,’ Yigal said. ‘Fundamentally, I’m a Russian Jew. When I look at the sun, I want to see the sun as big as it is, and no bigger. I want to live in a prosaic world of known causes and effects. Great Britain is excellent if you’re Clive or Monica, if you can construct your own fairy-tale world, but it would be hell for an ordinary Russian Jew who doesn’t see things as horrible or devastating or simply gorgeous.’
‘Your reaction surprises me,’ I protested. ‘You’re making a serious judgment on irrelevant grounds.’
‘They may be fundamental,’ he said. ‘Israel and America are pragmatic … we see things as they are … grapple with them as best we can. I’m that kind of person.’
‘What did you think of Churchill?’ I asked.
‘Very inflated, from what I read. The theatrics weren’t necessary, not really. He had to use them because
he was speaking to Clive and Monica. It’s their world, not mine,’ and in the days that followed, I could see that he was evaluating his three passports.
Clive exerted other influences on all of us who came in contact with him. For example, he was addicted to picnics, but only in the French style. ‘We’re going up into the mountains tomorrow,’ he would announce, and Joe would arrange for one of the soldiers to mind the bar till dusk.
Clive’s picnics were an artful combination of the crudest country food plus whatever haute cuisine he could obtain by cajolery rather than a large outlay of money, and when he opened the baskets in some mountain glen, with Spanish mountains looking down upon us with their faces crisscrossed by the trails that smugglers had been using for the past five hundred years, we were never sure what we would find inside, but of one thing we were certain: each participant would receive his own small ramekin containing some delicious concoction. ‘I abhor picnics that consist of sandwiches,’ he said, and would allow none to be made while he was in charge.
One afternoon, as we sat on a hill overlooking Gibraltar, with the shores of Africa outlined in the distance and shepherds gathering their flocks ahead of us, he suddenly cried, ‘Tomorrow let the bombs fall on Gibraltar. Today, by God, we had a feast.’
At his picnics he always invited Gretchen to sing, and he would sit near her and whisper the words to himself, and it would be spring and the sea would be gray-blue and hawks would wheel overhead and we could hear the bleating of newborn lambs above the soft words that Gretchen sang:
‘O hooly, hooly rose she up,
To the place where he was lying,
And when she drew the curtain by,
“Young man, I think you’re dying.” ’
One day, because of an especially long session with the Greeks, I did not reach the Alamo until mid-afternoon, and I found an unusual woman waiting for me. Why do I term her unusual? For one thing, she did not seem excited about having made it to Torremolinos, and for a good-looking young woman of twenty-six, that was exceptional. She was a spare, intense person with sharp eyes and a dedicated manner of speech, as if she had only a few days in which to accomplish a mission of some magnitude. But what alerted me most was a silly thing—her insistence upon using her full name, something rarely done in Torremolinos where I never did learn Joe’s last name, or Clive’s, or the names of any of the pretty girls who climbed in and out of the pop-top.
‘I am Susan Eltregon,’ she said, shaking hands with me in a businesslike manner. ‘I was told I might find Cato Jackson here.’ When I nodded, she said, ‘And Gretchen Cole.’
‘She sings here at five.’
‘Is there any way I could see them now?’
‘They come and go. They’re in town, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen them today.’
‘And who are you?’
‘George Fairbanks. World Mutual.’
At my mention of the Geneva firm, she tensed. I was sure she had heard of us and that what she had heard was unpleasant to her, but she betrayed nothing except this intuitive loathing. ‘Can I wait?’ she asked.
‘It’s a bar,’ I said. I didn’t like her and I suspected she knew it, but she sat down at my table. When I asked, ‘What brings you to Torremolinos?’ she reflected on the question for some time, then decided that I would probably ask around till I found out. ‘Haymakers,’ she said.
I had heard of this group only from stories which had appeared in the Paris Herald Tribune, but my frown must have told her that I had read some such material, for before I could respond, she said, ‘We are everything the stories say.’ She clipped her words, giving them emphasis, and for some reason I could not have explained I said, ‘That’s an expensive outfit you’re wearing,’ and she snapped, ‘Revolutionaries do not have to be paupers,’ and I growled, ‘They rarely are.’
For some moments she looked at me coldly, then said, ‘I have no quarrel with you, Mr. Fairbanks … except that when reason rules, outfits like yours will be liquidated first. You are a group of international bloodsuckers and you must go.’
‘Right now I’m engaged in a deal in which we’re trying to suck some blood, and I’m getting nowhere. Would you care to help me?’
‘I am here to see Cato Jackson and Gretchen Cole.’
‘How could you possibly be interested in them?’
‘You mean how could Haymakers be interested? Jackson and Cole are Haymakers. They do not realize it yet, but they are Haymakers.’
‘They will be surprised when you tell them.’
‘Their experiences have made it inevitable. All they need is the awakening.’
‘They’re a pair of born daydreamers, eh? And you’re here to awaken them?’
‘Events awaken them. I am here to point out the events.’
‘Are you an officer in Haymakers?’ I asked.
‘We don’t bother with such frivolity,’ she snapped.
The Haymakers had taken their unusual name for three reasons. It carried the image of a roundhouse blow that would knock out the Establishment. It also had the connotation of clever people taking advantage of the current situation—making hay while the sun shone. And, finally, it bespoke rural life and avoided the stigma of being a city movement, which it was.
The Haymakers, most of them under thirty, were committed to the total destruction of American society, nothing less. Their program was simple: move into every disturbed situation, exacerbate it, allow it no time to stabilize, sponsor anarchy, and rely upon the resulting turmoil to radicalize the young people. When a sufficient cadre of able young people had been converted into dedicated revolutionaries, large mass movements would be initiated to tear down the social structure: banks would be discredited, the National Guard immobilized, universities destroyed, and the usefulness of social agencies like newspapers and television stations neutralized.
When total disruption had been achieved, the Haymakers planned to move into the chaos and—with their directed cadres—immobilize the police, the army, the school systems and the municipal governments. If at that late and disorganized date resistance was met, there would have to be fighting in the streets, but even if such fighting did not develop, the old-fashioned holders of power would still have to be liquidated. One of the recurring phrases used by the Haymakers was, ‘He’s a Kerensky and he must go.’
If such a program were to succeed, potentially disaffected persons of ability—like Gretchen Cole, who had tangled with the police, and Cato Jackson, who had lugged guns into a white church—had to be conscripted; Cato was doubly inviting as a target since he was also a Negro, and one of the basic tenets of the Haymakers was that Negro dissent must be converted into revolution.
In order to enlist Gretchen and Cato in this revolution, Susan Eltregon had been dispatched from St. Louis, where the Haymakers were currently headquartering. She was the daughter of a druggist in Denver; she used the phrase, ‘I used to be the daughter of a pair of reactionaries in Colorado,’ as if she had, by an act of will, dissociated herself from them shortly after the moment of birth. Her parents had saved money to send her to college in Montana, but that experience had been a shattering one; she found the college unbelievably dull and the professors pathetic. With a group of students from states like California and Massachusetts, she had started a committee for the overhaul of the curriculum, the method of choosing the faculty and all systems of grading and discipline. This placed her athwart the purposes of the school, which longed for peace and the opportunity to graduate students who would become teachers and bookkeepers, so at the end of her freshman year Susan was asked not to return.
She ignored the suggestion, moved into a rooming house at the edge of the campus, drew about her a group of similarly inclined drop-outs and began a program of harassment that ended with a campus-wide rebellion against the athletic coach and the burning of a science hall. Montana police invaded the rooming house, but Susan and her friends were gone, leaving behind what luggage they had. ‘The pigs drove us out,’ they reported in
New York.
Prior to Susan’s arrival in New York, the Haymakers had established a precarious foothold in that city. Their organizing leader was an assistant professor at one of the local colleges; because of his irritating attempts to improve the curriculum of his institution and to force the admission of blacks and Puerto Ricans, regardless of high school grades, he had been denied a permanent appointment to the faculty. He then launched a wild series of confrontations to protect his employment, and although he failed, he did radicalize seven undergraduates, who dropped out of college to work with him, and this formed the nucleus of the movement. But its real force—its tremendous capacity for capitalizing on disturbances and enlisting young people who were offended by them—developed only with the arrival of a group of former students from the midwest.
These were tough, hard-nosed revolutionaries who had matured in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Terre Haute and Gary. They found no hope for the United States as it now existed and were determined to tear it down. Susan Eltregon found a place in this leadership group, for she understood their derivations and approved their commitments. One of the midwest leaders had proposed as the rallying cry of the movement, ‘Everyone in authority must go,’ and it was the latter concept that now motivated the group.
The Haymakers enrolled many brilliant young people, and in the St. Louis office these plotters and planners kept track of any incident across the nation calculated to produce disaffected students or workmen who could be approached. It was a girl drop-out from Smith College who in the course of clipping newspapers for the Haymakers spotted the names of Cato Jackson and Gretchen Cole. Operatives in the Philadelphia and Boston areas were asked to track them down, and first reports were disappointing: ‘Gretchen Cole has disappeared from the University of Besançon. Whereabouts unknown.’—‘Jackson flew the coop. Believed to be in Detroit.’
But after further investigation, the Boston people found that Gretchen had sent a postcard to a girl at Radcliffe, telling her, ‘You ought to come over here.’ And a Mr. Wister of Philadelphia, who was supplying Cato Jackson with funds, disclosed that the young man had asked that his check be sent to Torremolinos.