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XXIX
LATE THAT SUMMER,
Tom and I were chosen to be members of
the party of five or six who were to accompany Mr. Gurdjieff
on his next trip away from the Prieure. We were among the
first children to be selected for this honour and I looked forward
to the day of our departure with anticipation and enthusiasm.
It was not until we were actually on the road that Gurdjieff
informed us that our destination was Vichy, where he planned
to stay for several days and write. Within the first hour or two,
I learned quickly enough that travelling with Gurdjieff was
not an ordinary experience. Although we were not, as far as
I knew, in any hurry to reach our destination, he drove his
car as if possessed. We would tear along the roads at a high
rate of speed for a few hours, then he would stop abruptly to
spend two or three hours at a cafe in a small town, where he
would write incessantly; or we might stop somewhere in the
country, along the side of the road, and unload great hampers
of food and drink, blankets and pillows, and have a leisurely
picnic after which everyone would take a nap.
Short of any actual mechanical breakdown, we seemed to
have an unusual number of unnecessary experiences on the
road. Someone -- it might be me, or anyone of the party --
would be delegated to sit next to Gurdjieff with an open map
with which to guide him. He would start off, having told the
map reader which road he wished to take, and would then
rapidly accelerate to top speed. The map reader's job was to
watch the road signs and tell him when to turn off and other --
wise give him directions. Invariably, he would manage to
speed up before reaching any intersection, and almost equally
invariably would fail to make a proper turn. Since he refused
to go back, it was then necessary to guide him on whatever
road we had happened on in the general direction of our
destination. Inevitably, there would be long arguments,
usually beginning with his cursing of whoever happened to be
reading the map at the time, and finally joined in by everyone.
There seemed to be a purpose in this, since it happened
regularly no matter who was seated next to him as guide,
and I could only ascribe it to his desire to keep everyone
stirred up and alert.
Although we carried two spare wheels and tyres
with us --
one on each running board -- we could have used several more.
Even in those days, changing a wheel after a flat tyre was not
a very complicated operation. With Gurdjieff, however, it
seemed to become an engineering problem. When a tyre did
go flat, and this happened often, everyone would descend from
the car, different jobs would be assigned to the various members
of the group -- one would be in charge of the jack, another in
charge of the removal of the spare tyre, another to remove the
wheel that had to be changed. All of these jobs were then
supervised by Gurdjieff personally, usually in conference with
everyone who was not actually doing something. All work
would stop from time to time and we would have long confer-
ences about whether the jack would support the car at that
particular angle on the road, which was the best way to remove
the lugs from the wheel, and so on. Since Gurdjieff would never
take time to have a tyre repaired at a gas station, once the two
good spares had been used up, it became a question of not
merely changing a wheel, but actually removing the tyre, re-
pairing it, and replacing it on the wheel. On this particular
trip, we had enough men to do this, but what with the argu-
ments and conferences and a good deal of recrimination about
why the tyres had not been repaired, this process took hours,
and most of this time the entire group, with the women
appropriately dressed in long dresses, would stand around the
car in a huddle, advising and instructing. These groups of
people gave passing motorists the impression that some great
misfortune had overtaken us and they would frequently stop
their cars to offer help, so that sometimes we would be joined
by another large group which would also contribute advice,
consolation, and sometimes even physical help.
In addition to the hazards of tyre repairs and finding our-
selves almost constantly on the wrong road, there was no way
that Gurdjieff could be induced to stop for gasoline. Whatever
the gas gauge might read, he would insist that we could not
possibly be out of gas until the inevitable moment when the
motor would begin to cough and splutter and, although he
would curse it loudly, the car would stop. Since he was rarely
on the proper side of the road, it would then be necessary for
everyone to get out of the car and push it to one side of the
road while some individual would be selected to either walk or
hitch-hike to the nearest gas station and bring back a mechanic.
Gurdjieff insisted on the mechanic because he was positive that
there was something wrong with the car; he could not have
done anything so simple as run out of gas. These delays were a
great annoyance to everyone except Mr. Gurdjieff who, once
someone had gone in search of help, would settle himself
comfortably at the side of the road, or perhaps remain in the
car, depending upon how he felt at the moment, and write
furiously in his notebooks, muttering to himself and licking the
point of one of his many pencils.
Gurdjieff also seemed to attract obstacles. If we were not
out of gas or on the wrong road, we would manage to run into
a herd of cows or a flock of sheep or goats. Gurdjieff would
follow such animals along the road, sometimes nudging them
with the bumper of the car, and always leaning out of the
driver's side hurling imprecations at them. We ran into a herd
of cattle during one of my tours of duty as map reader, and this
time, to my surprise and great pleasure, as he cursed at and
nudged one of the slower cows in the herd, the cow stopped
dead in front of the car, stared at him balefully, raised her tail
and showered the hood of the car with a stream of liquid
manure. Gurdjieff also seemed to think of this as being espe-
cially hilarious and we promptly stopped to rest at the side of
the road so that he could do some more writing while the rest
of us did what we could to clean up the automobile.
Another habit of Gurdjieff's which complicated these
voyages was that, having made numerous stops to eat, rest,
write, and so forth, during the day, he would never stop driving
at night until so late that most of the inns or hotels would be
closed by the time he decided that he needed to eat and sleep.
This always meant that one of the group -- we all loathed this
duty -- would have to get out of the car, and beat on the door
of some country inn until we could raise the proprietor, and,
frequently, the entire town. Presumably for the sole purpose of
creating additional confusion, once the owner of some inn or
hotel had been awakened, Gurdjieff would lean out from the
parked car, shouting instructions -- usually in Russian -- about
the number of rooms and meals that would be necessary and
any other instructions that might come to his mind. Then,
while his companions unloaded mountains of luggage, he would
usually engage in long, complicated excuses to whoever had
been awakened, deploring, in execrable French, the necessity
of having awakened them and the inefficiency of his travelling
companions, and so forth, with the result that the proprietress
-- it was nearly always a woman on such occasions -- was com-
pletely charmed with him and would look at the rest of us with
loathing as she served an excellent meal. The meal, of course,
would go on interminably with long toasts to everyone present,
especially the owners of the inn, plus additional toasts to the
quality of the food, the magnificence of the location, or anything
else that struck his fancy.
Although I thought the journey would never come to an end,
we did manage to reach Vichy after a few days of this unusual
manner of travelling. We did not arrive, of course, until very
late at night, and again had to awaken a great many of the
personnel at one of the big resort hotels, who, at first, informed
us that they had no room. Gurdjieff intervened in these
arrangements, however, and convinced the manager that his
visit was of extreme importance. One of the reasons he gave was
that he was the Headmaster of a very special school for wealthy
Americans, and he produced Tom and myself, both very sleepy,
as proof. With a perfectly straight face, I was introduced as Mr .
Ford, the son of the famous Henry Ford, and Tom was intro-
duced as Mr. Rockefeller, the son of the equally famous John
D. Rockefeller. As I looked at the manager, I did not feel that
he was swallowing this tale completely, but he managed (he
was obviously tired, too) to smile and look at the two of us with
deference. The one problem that remained to be settled was
that there were not, in spite of Mr. Gurdjieff's possible impor-
tance, enough rooms for all of us. Gurdjieff considered this
information seriously and finally devised some way in which we
could all be accommodated without any improper mingling of
the sexes, into the rooms that were available. Mr. Ford, or not,
I ended up sleeping in his bathroom, in the bathtub. I had only
just climbed into the tub, exhausted, with a blanket, when
someone appeared with a cot that was squeezed into a narrow
space in the bathroom. I then moved into the cot, whereupon
Mr. Gurdjieff, greatly exhilarated by all these complications,
proceeded to take a very hot and long-lasting bath.
The stay at Vichy was very peaceful as compared to our trip.
We did not see Gurdjieff except at meals, and our only duty
during our stay there was that we were under orders to drink
certain specific waters which were, according to him, very
beneficial. He gave orders about this water-drinking in the
dining-room, which was full, much to our embarrassment and
to the great enjoyment of the other guests in the hotel. The
particular water that I was to drink was from a spring called
"Pour les Femmes" and was a water whose properties were con-
sidered extremely beneficial for women, especially if they
desired to become pregnant. Fortunately for me at the time -- I
was in an extremely good humour and enjoying the general
spectacle he was making in the hotel -- I thought that it was an
extremely funny idea for me to drink waters which might induce
pregnancy and enjoyed regaling him at meals with an account
of the large number of glasses I had managed to drink since I
had last seen him. He was very pleased with this and would pat
my stomach reassuringly and then tell me how proud he was of
me. He continued to refer to Tom and myself in a loud voice as
Messrs. Rockefeller and Ford, and would explain to the
maitre-d'hotel, the waiters, or even the guests at nearby tables,
about his school, and his remarkable pupils -- indicating his
young American millionaires-to-be -- making learned remarks
on the "real properties" of the waters of Vichy which were
actually known only to himself.
To add to the general uproar of our stay at Vichy, Gurdjieff
met a family of three Russians: a husband and wife and their
daughter who must have been in her early twenties. He per-
suaded the hotel staff to rearrange the dining-room in order that
this Russian family should be able to take their meals with us,
and we became even more the centre of attraction of the hotel,
what with the enormous quantities of Armagnac consumed at
each meal, usually complete with toasts to all of the guests
individually as well as to everyone at our table. It seems to me
now that I only had time to eat tremendous, never-ending
meals (I was not required to drink toasts, however), leave the
table and race to the "Pour les Femmes" spring and consume
large quantities of spring water and then rush back to the hotel
in time for another meal.
The Russian family were very much taken with, and im-
pressed by, Gurdjieff and after a day or so he had completely
revised their water-drinking schedule, insisting that their
regimes were completely wrong, so that the daughter ended up
drinking, regularly, a water known, naturally, as "Pour les
Hommes". She did not, however, find this particularly odd or
funny, and listened very seriously to Mr. Gurdjieff's long,
scientific analysis of the properties of this particular water and
why it was the proper water for her to drink. When I asked him
about this one night while he was taking a bath next to my cot
in the bathroom, he said that -- as he would prove to me some-
time in the near future -- this particular girl was very suitable
for experiments in hypnosis.
We did not stay in Vichy for more than a week, and when we
reached the Prieure, late at night, after an equally harrowing
return trip, we were all exhausted. Mr. Gurdjieff's only com-
ment to me after the trip was that it had been a fine trip for all
of us, and that it was an excellent way to "changer les idees".
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