Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  “So did I,” said Lily, a warm lilt in her voice.

  “Mind you; Henry is an intelligent man. On subjects he really knows, I’d rate Henry higher than anyone.”

  “I know what you mean, but even when he’s talking about something he knows I always have a sort of a strange feeling that I can’t really put into words that there’s something about him that’s not, well, how can I say it; sort of not, no, it’s not that, sort of a, well, I don’t know….”

  “Lack of real good hard knowledge.”

  “That, yes, but not just that: a feeling, well, that if he can’t make everyone agree with him he’s going to feel excluded, shut off.”

  “You know his mother was put in an insane asylum.”

  “Henry’s mother? No, I never knew that.”

  “Sure. He was raised by an Irish uncle and aunt.”

  “Didn’t he have a father?”

  “I never did hear what happened to the father.”

  “Anyway, you’d think he’d have got over that by now.”

  “I’m not so sure. Those things hang on, you know. For Henry, I’m sure they’re still fundamental.”

  “I wonder if he ever gives men the same sort of feeling he gives a woman—a sort of shrinking-away feeling, not wanting to get too close: I don’t know, something almost wormy.” Lily shivered and rubbed the ends of her fingers together.

  “Well, of course, he’s an intellectual pure and simple.”

  “But so is Mort.”

  “Mort’s different, though. There’s a whole lot underneath you don’t see. Mort’s only an intellectual because that seems to him to be the one dependable way. Under the surface he’s an intuitive type. Cigarette, honey?”

  “Yes, I think I will. How’s the boil coming?”

  “I can feel it working up.”

  “I’ll warm up that bag for you in a minute or two. My God, Artie’s being an angel. It’s like Heaven. But you think apart from Henry everything went all right?”

  “Apart from Henry, yes. Mind you, I’m not knocking Henry. It’s not his fault that he’s got no you-know-what.”

  “Did I ever tell you what Miriam said about Henry? I shouldn’t tell you, actually, but it was before they were married.” Lily turned her head and murmured.

  An astonished grin spread over Divver’s face; the upper half, however, retained, and even struggled to intensify, its look of unshakeable loyalty to the soul of man. “Good God!” whispered Divver. “That’s terrible; that’s really terrible. I laugh, but I think it’s terrible. Then, why ever did Miriam marry him?”

  Lily shrugged.

  “I should think,” said Divver, shaking his head slowly, “that to marry a man when you know … After all.”

  “Well, don’t ask me,” said Lily. “Maybe Henry changed. Or maybe Miriam needed a rest anyway.”

  “But even so. How any woman in her right mind …” He stared earnestly in front of him. and at that moment became conscious of a sudden rise in self-respect. Despite the pain of his boil, Divver began to feel that he was a man after all; an assuring sense of portliness entered his limbs, and again he believed himself well fitted to his profession and to life. “My, my,” he said to Lily, still shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have repeated it, really, even to you,” said Lily. “It will help me to understand Henry,” said Divver. He had the impulse to slide down from the pillows and take Lily in his arms, even though he didn’t really approve of her cruelty in repeating confidences.

  The door opened and Art stood on the threshold, his face rosy, a smile of sweet gentleness on his lips. “It’th time, Mom,” he said. “Come right here, my treasure.” cried Lily, pulling him on to the bed. “You have been a good boy. Artie, I never knew you could be so sweet. If you only knew what a difference it makes, sweetie-pie. Give your Mommy a big kiss, because she loves you, Artie. And now one for Max. Want to lie down too? O.K. You snuggle right down here against Mommy.” She wound her arms around him, and Art, his head nestled between her breasts, looked up at his father with glazed, seraphic eyes. “That’s the way, boy,” said Divver, putting out his hand and giving Artie two or three little pats. “Don’t,” said Artie, suddenly becoming aggrieved. “Why, go on!” exclaimed Divver gruffly, patting him again, “I just did it to tell you you were a swell boy.” “I don’t like it,” said Artie, turning his face caressingly from side to side on his mother’s bosom. “You don’t want men around when you just woke up, do you, honey?” murmured Lily, making gurgling noises with her lips to Artie’s ear: “No, you don’t, do you?” Art shook his head, and buried it deeper than ever. “I don’t love Max,” he mumbled. “Oh, you don’t, eh? Little son-of-a-gun,” cried Divver, slapping his son on the behind rather peevishly. “Don’t!” howled Art. “Don’t, dear,” said Lily, giving her husband a look that was at once pained and smug. “You just want to lie and be Mommy’s chocolate cookie, don’t you?” she said, stroking back her son’s hair with both hands. “Mom’s cookie,” muttered Art. Divver lay and stared glumly at the wall: suddenly he exclaimed: “By God, Lily, it’s time I really got down to work again. For the last eighteen months I’ve just been messing around doing damn all.” “You hear what your daddy says?” said Lily, heaving Art over the side of the bed and getting up herself. “We’ll go in the kitchen and you have your milk and cookie.”

  As they went out she stopped and turned to her husband with an unpleasant smile. “I suppose you mean you plan to go to Europe again,” she said.

  Divver jumped. “What a crazy thing to say,” he answered.

  “What’s so incredible about it?”

  “Well, since it’s the last thing that ever entered my mind …”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  “Once and for all, categorically,” said Divver, raising himself on the pillows and surveying his wife with extraordinary dignity, “I state that I have no intention whatsoever of making any trip to Europe.” Lily turned on him in the doorway, holding Art by the hand, and Divver was shocked to see that her face was filled with desperate anger and she was about to burst into tears. “Do you think I care what you do?” she said. “You’ll always manage to sneak out some way. Go ahead, do anything you damn well like; it’s all the same to me.”

  *

  Divver’s broad back passed away down the corridor, his shoulders still shaking as he chuckled to himself. Morgan stood stock-still and stared until Divver had turned into the dining-room; then he raced to the library door, flung it open, and caught his mother in the act of leaving. The heaviness had gone from his eyes; he snatched his mother’s wrist and exclaimed: “Mom, Max Divver wants me to go to Poland with him!”

  His mother started; her eyes opened wide and she drew back her head to examine this absurd statement from a more proper distance. “My dear boy,” she said, “whatever are you talking about?”

  “I’m telling you; he asked me if I’d like to go. Can I go? I can, can’t I? Max asked me to.”

  His mother recovered her balance. In a moment Morgan knew that she was tightly attached to the brisk, efficient machinery through which she disposed of anything trying. “Jimmy dear,” she said, looking past his head and peering vaguely, “the second bell’s rung. Do go in and help seat the people. And don’t talk rubbish. You know quite well Max was joking.”

  “How, joking? He asked me to go, I tell you.”

  “To go to Poland, at a time like this—of all times?” said Mrs. Morgan, smiling in spite of her annoyance and patting her son on the arm. “Why, Jimmy, people would think I’d gone out of my mind if I let you go. Now, come along in, and for Heaven’s sake don’t look so hurt and furious; you know as well as I do the idea’s ridiculous. Please, now, not another word; if you insist on talking we can do it later; not that there’s the slightest point. Fancy springing such a thing on me! I can’t imagine where you dug up such an idea. Really, you should at least read the newspapers and get some idea of what’s happening. This sort of talk ought to make you ashamed.” With that she moved p
ast her son and entered the dining-room, adopting at once the peculiar stance and manner that so exactly expressed her character as a hostess—somewhat bent forward from the waist, her face crossed by a smile that suggested nervousness rather than pleasure (she was an ugly woman) and one hand held vaguely forward, drooping from the wrist, indicating that it had no real desire to be taken at its word and shaken. The guests were already around the table, tucking away their pipes, wiping their palms lightly on their trousers, peering at the little cards and discovering their places with the pleased surprise of successful explorers. Those who had already found their places stood with a self-congratutory air behind their chairs, with their hands, and even elbows, resting on the high backs. “I think we were very lucky to have such a beautiful day for our first luncheon of the year,” said Mrs. Morgan, seating herself at the head of the table—at which there were gruff murmurs of assent from the guests, scraping of chairs, a general settling back into easy positions; and after only a slight pause the table hummed like an orchestra.

  But in that short time Morgan had collected his scattered wits into the hard round ball of a solitary obsession. His mind was made up, his every faculty was already at work with passionate concentration. Ignoring the rest of the guests, he fixed his eyes on Divver, and stared at him so intensely that Mrs. Morgan was exceedingly embarrassed. But her son, having focussed irrevocably on the bull’s-eye, began feverishly to work his emotions towards the same single point, so that in no time at all he had transformed his wild desire into an undebatable fact. He wondered how it was possible that he had never before had the slightest suspicion of Divver’s extraordinary personality—which was now plainly revealed to anyone who was not blind. Divver sat almost opposite to Morgan, wearing a new heather-mixture suit with a herringbone pattern. He had opened his napkin and flung it over his knees with an incomparable gesture; then he had torn open his bread roll with his immense hands and had almost instantly reduced it to small sections which he flipped strongly hither and thither with his middle fingers. When the maid laid his soup in front of him, Divver plunged a spoon into it and, although it steamed with heat, voraciously engorged it, crouching over it like a king of the beasts, and still managing to cock his ears at what his neighbours were saying, to flash glances at them even at the moment of thrusting the spoon between his jaws, even to speak himself, in a rich voice that throbbed with driving good-sense and controlled power. “But not in any specific category,” Morgan heard him say, and the words were the trade-mark of a man who devours obstacles for breakfast. Having cleared his plate utterly of soup, Divver raised the whole upper half of his body and leaned back in his chair, presenting to Morgan his impressive, swarthy face, furrowed here and there by the plough of experience, the skin ripe with the dull, battered look that only maturity can bestow. It was at this moment that Morgan felt fully for the first time in his life the human craving for absolute subjugation, a craving in which the desire for total surrender to another’s strength instantly inspires in him who desires it an intense magnification of his own strength, as though through the act of prostration he has at last been enabled to express his will more furiously than was ever possible when he stood erect. I will do exactly what he tells me to do, Morgan said to himself, and I will kill anybody who tries to stop me. At this instant he caught his mother’s cold eye, and with a burst of shame looked back at her with a murderous glare. He was now revolted by the idea of politeness; the mere presence on either side of him of his mother’s guests—who were talking to each other across him in an uncomfortable, self-conscious way—was provocative and insolent. Exhausted by his own emotion he let his jaw drop and climbed away into a cloud of visions: there appeared around him a Polish town, modelled on the innumerable pictures, photographs and engravings of European settings that he had seen at one time or another—a Polish town in which French porters stood beside the Ponte Veccio and a London policeman spoke to him in the shadow of Big Ben, while the Cathedral of Notre Dame rose out of the heart of the Lake District and men in leather breeches carried alpenstocks and rucksacks through the palm trees of the French Riviera. An exotic woman, murmuring “Cheri,” pressed a fine bust against his chest and wound long white arms around his neck. Superimposed on most of this panorama were the dignified figures of himself and Divver, smoking cigarettes and already on the terms of easy comradeship that exist when each has acted well in an emergency. The whole atmosphere was elevated by an extraordinary sense of grandeur….

  When the main dish had been cleared away, Mrs. Morgan introduced the principal guest.

  Willi Morgenstern, who now blinked politely to the table from his place beside the hostess, was descended from a long line of German monotheists. Life had one door, one key, for Willi; the door was not spiritual but material, the key he had found only after frenziedly turning out his pockets for many years; since then it had never left his hand. Briefly, his aim in life was to lay his finger inexorably on the indispensable factors in the strength of nations, to discover what it was that a particular country could not survive without. Others whose minds were bent like Willi’s might choose to absorb themselves in the decisive influence on history of the brown rat, influenza, nicotine, rubber, etc.; but for many years Willi himself had sought to show Hitler’s total dependence on the German potato crop (Ausweisung der Nationalische-ekonomie Deutschlands vom Standpunkt seiner Kartoffelnzonen). He had no patience with people who mourned the fact that if such-and-such a person had not gone to the ’phone at a certain split second on the afternoon of April 15, a historical catastrophe would have been avoided. A logician to the bone, he had never actually touched a potato except on a plate, at which time he never regarded it as more than one of the sources of energy essential to him in his work on potatoes. Soon after Hitler’s establishment, Willi, then a refugee in France, had first propounded his thesis, which was that the new regime would be unable to survive the season’s potato shortage. Conservative French editors showed no interest in the idea, which they found vulgar; the more radical ones hesitated, torn as usual between fear of being charged with lack of perspicacity, and fear of looking silly. The outcome was that one of them printed Willi’s articles, but added a footnote which said more or less that the editors would gladly share the credit with Willi if Willi proved right, but that only Willi could be blamed if Willi proved wrong. Willi was an honest and fair-minded man, as well as a tireless researcher; he had spent a year only studying the weathers that affected potatoes; and in marshalling his intensely complicated calculations in these articles, he took chance and circumstances into account in a way that he had scorned to take them when he was searching for a key to human destiny. He also, again and again, give Hitler the benefit of the doubt, and granted him hectograms of potatoes that democracy might fairly have kept.

  When the next German harvest was come and gone, Willi’s calculations turned out to have been right. He had predicted the size of the harvest with unbelievable accuracy; in one region of East Prussia there was actually less than a cartload of difference between his and nature’s figures. Willi was proud and pleased; he was exalted; so it was a blow when the editor who had published the articles looked at him malignantly and threw at his head a small press-clipping, which reported that a protest meeting of German potato farmers whose niggardly crop had been confiscated by the government, had been dispersed by ten soldiers and a machine-gun. The economy of the Third Reich proceeded without a pause; Germans who objected to starving were shot.

  For a few months Willi felt that he would never know reality again; he came close to a nervous breakdown. Then, he learned that extensive plans were being carried through in Germany to make next year’s potato crop at least double the previous year’s—and in a flash Willi’s mind somersaulted back into its old sanity, with the difference that whereas he had formerly been inspired by evidence of Nazi weakness in the matter of potatoes, he was now obsessed by their potential strength. His new conclusion was confirmed by the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia; at which poi
nt Willi moved on to the United States.

  The custom of having a guest of honour, “who has some most interesting things to tell us all,” was always observed at Mrs. Morgan’s luncheons. When Willi’s head rose over the table and he gave his sharp little nod to the company, his new friends and liberals ceased to speak of the year’s first peonies, bowed back courteously to Willi and settled back as does a rural congregation that best loves to share in singing the familiar hymns but admits the moral necessity of a solo from the pulpit. Though they might love the old ways best, they recognized the preacher’s duty to speak of the present; though they had heard one Willi or another—and sometimes had themselves been Willi—exhort them at least once a week for many years, still they tolerated the right of the zealot to pour out his heart in a provincial or Central European accent. Mrs. Morgan’s editor took out his little notebook, and a silver pencil with leads in three colours. Morgan noticed that Divver leaned his elbow well onto the table, laid his strong jaw in his hand and fixed Willi with a furrowed look. Morgan at once did the same.

  No one was on guard against the fire that Willi put into his American debut. Having reached into his inside pocket and found a pencil but no paper, he thrust away from him impatiently some bread, a knife, and a glass of water, and brusquely drew an outline map of Germany on the tablecloth. A start ran around the table, drowsy faces marked with summer’s first warmth awoke instantly to a man who was prepared not merely to talk but to demonstrate. Without a pause, Willi harshly split Germany into twelve equal parts (his famous “zones”), numbered each part, and placed below each number, in decimal units to the scale of one per thousand, its zone’s approximate harvest for the normal year. He then raised his head to declaim—and saw to his pleasure that every eye in the room was centred on his little drawing, and that those who could not see it from where they sat were standing up and peering over their neighbour’s heads. Nothing like this had happened to Willi before; and so his monologue that day, though similar in the main to all its predecessors, was so impassioned as to be thrilling. In a few brilliant paragraphs, which amounted to an overture, Willi scornfully swept from the mind’s eye of his audience any cluttered vision they had brought with them of brown-shirted marchers, the steel industry, and Wagnerian heroics, and instead unrolled before them field upon field of leafy potatoes, a tuberous carpet of flowery greenery spreading from the Baltic to the Tyrol and trod by millions of male and female peasants with smocks and hoes. On this premise he then went to work creating his massive statistical romance; he summoned the wind and the rain in their probable quantities; he made the sun to shine according to the hours for which it was liable to serve the respective zones; he infested provinces with weevils, beetles, rot and wilt, and then sped to their aid with giant sprays and destructive powders; with ruthless slashes of his pencil he rejected areas which were sure to succumb, discounted with a calm shrug those which hovered between life and death, and then swept the vast remainder into fruition. As fast as these crops could be gathered in, Willi apportioned them to their various duties—with such confidence and verve that markets, bakeries, giant alcohol-distilling factories and a host of contraptions devoted twenty-four hours a day to the liquifying, solidifying and plasticizing of root, leaf and tuber dominated the landscape not merely materially but with a richly emotional quality and a Machiavellian combination of variety of method and excruciating singleness of purpose. The picture Willi was painting was no different in its ultimate effects from any other painting of the Third Reich; it was a picture of doom for Europe, but created so splendidly that once Willi’s audience had swallowed the potato as a prime mover they were only too happy to chase it down with its heady, thrilling by-products; Divver even recognized in Willi’s oratory the great poetic twang of the bass-string of statistical science. As Willi built toward his conclusion, a new tension was added: Willi appeared all at once to be opening a loop-hole of escape; he seemed to suggest that despite all the gigantic efforts he had described, still there would not be enough potatoes to ensure the Reich’s march to victory. At this point heavy breathing was audible at the table: Willi was imposing on his listeners a dramatic moment of uncertainty; he was appearing to be about to demolish his own tremendous conception. It was with relief that the guests fell back in their seats as Willi dramatically introduced the potatoes of Poland as the means of filling the gap between shortage and sufficiency. From there on the excitement of his narrative decreased; there remained merely the pleasure of watching a thrilling story turned on the last pages into the sentimental finale of reconciliation: the bride at the altar, a charming hint at little children not far in the future: in short, Willi said that by conquering Poland this fall the Nazis would obtain all the potatoes they wanted.