Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [138]
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,