by Nigel Dennis
They entered Bread Street.
July 4th, joint day of St. Bertha and George Washington, was Mell’s biggest occasion of the year, combining foreign drunkenness and local confirmation (the Bishop preached this day in the cathedral) and such things as a procession of natives of Tutin Province in peasant costumes. Charabancs already were emptying new groups of tourists, complete with guides, every fifteen minutes, and then withdrawing in close formation to the shady side of the cathedral, where they lay, head to tail, a string of sleeping elephants. On Bread Street people were walking with one foot on the sidewalk and one in the gutter. Nearly every shop displayed a sign promising to stay open until 10 p.m.—and every single building, or half, or quarter of a building in Bread Street, was a shop. The smaller goldsmiths, father-and-son establishments, were wedged into little grey crevices that allowed no more than a table’s width of window-dressing; a space into which collections of second-rate goldware were packed so tightly that the window resembled some rich and vulgar woman’s jewelbox. These little holes-in-the-wall were dwarfed by the mullioned and bay windows of the famous emporiums, where a few exclusive samples of gold filigree and ornamental settings were displayed on swathes of black velvet. The doorways were blocked with chattering tourists; inside, the salesmen wore morning coats and high, stiff, white collars with the sharpest tie-knots; they took the items of goldwork out of massive mahogany drawers and laid them before the customers on counters spread with emerald and purple baize. Waiting clients sat, their ankles crossed, on plump leather seats, gossiping with enormous self-importance. From the sidewalk, each of these emporiums presented a similar dumbshow; the tolerant clerk, bland as a croupier, bending gracefully forward, his lips moving delicately, his head at a slight angle, his open, white hands laying out the desirable object; and the far more coarse-looking customer holding up the ornament to study it from a distance, turning with it slowly before a long mirror, pressing it against her breast with two curved fingers and pushing her chin down two or three layers to note the effect, regarding it with eyes so suspicious as to suggest fear that it might change into an asp.
The most exclusive shop of all possessed an interior in such good taste that the customers were visible from outside only as vague shapes, humming and hawing in semi-darkness. Its broad window displayed one object: on a raised square of velvet, resembling the headsman’s block that is brought out only for the neck of a member of the nobility, was an ear-ring of twenty pearl drops, each held in the mouth of a little, intricately-decorated, golden chalice. Underneath was written: “At the Request of H. E. The Maharanee of Purd.”
Divver and Morgan stared at this for some time.
“Of course, this isn’t the real Poland,” Divver said.
Only a few shops of this kind could afford not to advertise that Mell goldwork was a local craft. Most of the goldsmiths on Bread Street displayed evidence of this domesticity in a way that charmed the susceptible tourists; they put their craftsmen in a front window where they could be stared at all day. The bigger shops displayed four or five craftsmen in a row, each with a glass screwed into his eye, burnishing points on a little treadle-wheel, picking up nuggets with tweezers and clamping them with fine pincers into the teeth of pendants, bracelets, and clasps. These workmen might prefer newer machinery, large tables and artificial lights, in a big back room; but it was their duty to charm by being seen; the steep price of an ornament was not exorbitant if it included the privilege of participation in its old-world manufacturing: this made it like a baby, at once innocent and priceless. The appropriate mess of primitive creation was also visible: unlimited dust and filings, oily sharpening-stones, little racks for babyish hand-tools, spirit-burners whose flames were almost invisible in the sunshine, neat little aprons with rolled-leather waistcords, soft cloths: for their enduring of this litter the craftsmen were paid a small extra sum, under the Polish Miner’s Silicosis Ordinance. The workmen scarcely ever raised their eyes to the mobs that scrutinized them, but they could be seen talking to each other almost without pause, barely moving their lips and not looking at one another: they talked in strange languages, because, despite the claims of the guide-books, most of them were highly-paid professionals who came to Mell from Amsterdam and Antwerp in June and were shipped back there at the end of the season.
“Better take a good look at them,” Divver said. “A few more years and the type will be extinct.” He added at once: “Not that I’m the kind who moans about the passing of the dear old handloom. I’m just telling you.”
They stood still, with a few hundred other peering tourists, to see God and the Devil come out on their little balcony and ring the noon hour.
“Symbolism,” Divver explained. “Europe’s full of it. You divide life into good and evil, in a division that is advantageous to you, and then impress it on the masses in a dramatic picture. It’s an old Catholic trick—not that Protestants, and probably even Jews, don’t do it.”
He became livelier as they turned back towards the square, his eye catching objects that aroused memories of a happier past. “That brown pack of tobacco—no, just to the right of that; that’s right—that’s the favourite brand in these parts; tastes like all hell: once I had to smoke it for three weeks on end: that was something … fancy that’s being around still … There, see—they use the French method—see the waiter: he knows how much the check is because each saucer the glasses come in has the price stamped on it; he only has to count the saucers: I wonder why we don’t do it that way; it’s always impressed me as pretty smart … Well, well, they’ve actually got a pissoir here too—I never knew Poles went in for pissoirs—you’ve heard of them, no? Once, I remember,” said Divver, laughing, “I knew a girl from Ohio who was studying P.E., or was it the violin? never mind, at the Sorbonne, and she insisted on using a pissoir, as a sort of masculine protest, no doubt, and a few of us stood around as guards so that Frenchmen wouldn’t get in; it was the pissoir on the corner of something and the Rue Eduard Sept; I can see it now, by God! That sort of behaviour didn’t seem so bad in those days, though I remember even at the time I felt it was the kind of thing that makes Europeans call Americans irresponsible. Incidentally, don’t take anything you see here seriously: I mean, don’t go back home like most tourists with the idea that you’ve been seeing Europe …”
“At least I know I’ve not been seeing Pembroke County,” said Morgan.
They ate lunch at one of the open-air tables, under a huge, fringed parasol that rose into the air through the centre of the blue table. Afterwards, Morgan laid back his head until it almost touched the man’s behind him, and watched the white wisps of cloud as they passed the fringe of the sunshade. The hundreds of voices in their varying pitches and languages were music to him: he thought he had never known such contentment. When he looked at the assortment of faces at the neighbouring tables he didn’t see a single one that he disliked; warmth and honest friendliness were written all over them. This is what liberty does for one, he told himself—and, at the thought of liberty, pride and self-satisfaction overflowed in him: he could not conceal from himself the admiration he felt for his audacity; all that was lacking was someone to share it with. In his genial tolerance he considered sharing it with Divver; but Divver had returned abruptly to his lugubrious world. He had boldly started a postcard to his wife with the words: “Well, here we are!”; after which he had brooded for some minutes, set the card aside and was now finishing in block letters one addressed, in wit, to “Mr. Arthur Divver”:
“I BET YOU’D NEVER GUESS THE KIND OF PLACE YOUR OLD POPPA IS IN RIGHT NOW! I’M SITTING AT A BLUE TABLE WITH AN UMBRELLA ALL OVER IT, EATING SUCH FUNNY FOOD, AND MOST OF THE PEOPLE CAN’T EVEN TALK ENGLISH AS WELL AS YOU! ALL THE GROUND YOU WALK ON HERE IS MADE OF LITTLE STONES STUCK TOGETHER, AND THE WINDOWS OF ALL THE STORES ARE ‘FILLED WITH GOLD!’ I LIKE IT HERE, BUT IT’S NOT LIKE BEING AT HOME. LOOK AFTER YOUR MOTHER AND GIVE HER MY LOVE.”
“How about you?” said Divver, offering Morgan a postcard.
Morgan thanked him and took the card. Swiftly he began: “Dearest Mother …”; at which he was touched by fear. But when he looked challengingly at Divver, his lips framing an excuse, his fear receded, for his guardian had pushed aside his own postcards and had drifted far away in a hopeless torpor, his mouth wide open. Soon, embarrassed by his own sluggishness, he pulled himself together, leaned over the table, and said to Morgan:
“I suppose you’re surprised.”
“Well, it’s all new …”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean surprised by me.”
“Why no, Max.”
Divver looked at him closely. All at once he changed his expression to something that was half-furtive, half-curious, and asked Morgan in a studiedly-casual voice: “Do you often have very quiet, sadistic thoughts?”
“If I mean the kind you mean, I’m sure I do,” said Morgan, feeling rather proud of himself.
“I mean murderous ones,” said Divver. “When anything goes wrong, if someone puts me on a spot or contradicts me, I find myself very casually wishing that that person would die.”
“Oh, I know that feeling.”
“It doesn’t have to be a major difficulty or insult; it hardly ever is. Just the slightest provocation, enough to rouse just a shade of resentment in me—and at once I float off in a very easy day-dream, and see the man who has offended me passing out in a hospital bed, or hear the news of his sudden death, which I take very seriously and sadly. It’s not sadistic really, because I never think of her suffering … just disappearing forever. I mention it because a moment ago I thought in just that gentle, uncruel way how pleasant it would be if everyone in this town except myself just died off into thin air and left me on my own.”
“That happens to me every day,” said Morgan. “No pain: they just pop off.”
“That’s the idea,” said Divver, laughing. “You don’t wish them the slightest discomfort …”
“Not one bit,” said Morgan, laughing too. ‘“On the contrary …”
“On the contrary—you definitely specify that it must be a happy release.”
“You’d be disgusted if anyone made it unpleasant for them; you’d be furious, and want to kill the louse.”
“I see you’ve got the idea all right.”
They smiled at each other with friendly amusement. Divver asked:
“Does it bother you to be so murderous?”
“It makes me feel disloyal—if the corpse has been kind and good to me—and I hate that feeling worse than any.”
“But you’re not plagued by remorse?”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Morgan was feeling calm and elevated: this was the first time that Divver had addressed him with the assumption that he had grown-up traits of sadism and base instincts—and quick as a flash he stopped feeling ashamed of Divver and decided that his guardian’s boorishness had been merely a passing phase. Now that the sun, the clouds, the new town, himself, and Divver were all suddenly in harmony, he felt grateful to the happy notions of murder that had made his morning’s pleasure complete. He ran on: “If I have any thoughts of that kind, I always decide at once that every person in the world must have them too, so it can’t be very serious.”
“But don’t you feel sometimes that if other people could see a flash-by-flash record of the thoughts that pass through your mind during a mere fifteen seconds, say, that you wouldn’t have a friend in the world and no one would ever speak to you again?”
“I’ve thought something of the kind, I think,” Morgan said, knitting his brows and not wanting either to be dishonest or to have to step down from the pedestal of mature infamy.
“Murder’s nothing, when you come to think of it,” said Divver. “To wish a person a nice clean death from euthanasia—why, I reserve that for the most harmless people, and my closest friends (I suppose he means me, for one, thought Morgan; but I forgive him absolutely and unconditionally). Where I draw the line is when I reach those other thoughts—they’re very rare ones; at least compared with the murderous ones they’re rare: the thought of wanting to see the person really publicly humiliated, degraded: that’s a thought so full of spite and deliberate revenge that it makes me ashamed. It’s when you’re ashamed that it’s not easy to believe that everyone else is as despicable as you are, or that there’s a gap between what they think and dream of and what they actually say and do …” Divver pondered this for a moment, and seemed about to embark on quite a long talk when he snapped his lips together, frowned, and reached in his pocket for his address book. “To change the subject,” he said, opening the book: “I somehow don’t seem able to keep still today: too many people milling around, I guess. Did you know that old Melmoth Grieg lives in Mell?”
At the mention of this famous name, Morgan sat up excitedly. “Are you going to see him? Now? May I come too?”
“We’ll see.”
Divver went in to the telephone. When he reappeared, he said: “Very well. Straighten your tie. Do you want to wash? O.K. Let’s go.”
*
Melmoth Grieg was Mell’s only author and Nobel prize winner. He was eighty-eight: for forty years he had lived in one of the peculiar old wooden houses on the square, where he signed books for tourists at stated hours. His seventy-volume works ranged from a collection of poems, Resources, written when he was eighteen and dedicated to his young friend Maeterlinck, to a translation of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, completed when he was eighty-seven. In between these two ends were tucked, along with many other writings, numerous essays and stories about Mell, and one famous novel called The Wave of Pompey. As a young man, Mr. Grieg had been active in a radical movement known, and forgotten, as The New Spartacists: since then he had run through as many periods as an important painter: Pacifism, Militant Democracy, Agricultural Radicalism, Beneficent Agnosticism, Douglas Credit, Futurism, New Catholicism, Christian Democracy, and others; enough for him to have been referred to in the New York Times Sunday “Books” as “the last of the humanists.” He was used to being dressed by a man-servant (his second wife had been dead for twenty years) and led into his study to meet visitors: his blue eyes, his politeness and gentleness, as well as his closeness to death, made him look more religious than he felt. He had no autobiography to write because he had written it prematurely when he was only sixty, in two volumes, called, in Germany, Morgenrot and Abendrot. Ten years ago he had begun, for the third time in his life, an intensive re-reading of his favourite books: he had begun with Goethe, and then moved steadily backwards, reaching, after a long stay with Shakespeare, the Greek drama. Then he had weeded out these Greek plays one by one, section by section, so that now he only read a favourite passage in Agamemmnon and two chapters in the Bible. When tourists asked him for reassurance about war and politics (which was their favourite pretext for coming to see him these days), he gave answers that were pertinent to the history of Man rather than to the moment, and few tourists left Poland after hearing him without feeling heartened, though they couldn’t explain why. He was helped by a secretary, an intellectual greenhorn from the provinces who had been overcome with pride on getting the job, but who had since felt duped because he found that the rising young writers with whom he hoped to associate believed that his employer had been dead for years.
The secretary showed Divver and Morgan into the study; it was sunny, and some of the pictures on the walls were ones that Mr. Grieg had first put up in a lodging-house bedroom in the days when he wore a student’s cap and sang drinking-songs. The visitors sat opposite the famous writing-desk: there were two students from Rumania, and a Norwegian disciple of Knut Hamsun with stubble on his chin and a wheaty growth springing out of his ears. The old man came in, helped by the secretary: he was smartly dressed in a blue suit with a fresh white handkerchief, and he got into his big chair by bending, and warping himself around the edge of the desk on his knuckles. Seated, he smiled amiably, and let his fingers play with the drawer in which were the sticks of crystallized ginger he sucke
d when he was supposed to be writing.
One of the Rumanians opened the conversation by asking what Mr. Grieg was reading these days. This was too easy a question to bother the old man with, and the secretary, proud as a mother, answered it.
“Mr. Grieg now reads Aeschylus.”
The old man tossed his head and muttered something, and the secretary smilingly corrected himself:
“Mr. Grieg is reading only a translation of Aeschylus.”
Mr. Grieg muttered again.
“Mr. Grieg says that to read Aeschylus in the original is very exhausting, though he used to do so in days gone by. He also calls Aeschylus the father of the Greek drama.”
Mr. Grieg spoke again.
“Mr. Grieg,” said the secretary, looking at Divver and Morgan with a smile, “has great admiration for Ernest Hemingway. He calls him the father of the to-morrow-novel.”
Divver nodded his gratitude. It was the first acceptable remark of the day, and he made haste to follow it up. “Does Mr. Grieg,” he asked, opening his notebook, “think that there is any way in which the coming holocaust can be avoided?”
The interpreter was puzzled. “I am sorry; you will have to repeat that word.”
“Holocaust,” said Divver, flushing. “That is to say, hostilities; to stave them off.”
“Be so good to omit those questions,” said the secretary in a whisper. “Mr. Grieg is these last days gravely upset.”
