Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  “Is that all he’s done in a week, Mr. Hovich? We’re going to have to move faster than that. Sometimes I think I’m the only person who knows that this country needs gold in a hurry.”

  “He says that the old diggings are full of water, sir, and overgrown; the work proceeds slowly.”

  “He strikes me as the kind of man who doesn’t like to get his feet wet. We’ll take him out of the shafts, Mr. Hovich, and put him on the road staff. Tell him that, and tell him if he wants to be on our team, he’s got to speed up.”

  On being told this, the surveyor stiffened: humiliated, he ran his palms down his trousers, moistened his lips and rose from the table. From his pocket he abstracted a little leather hood, which he fastened, his long fingers trembling, over the head of his precious intrument.

  “One of your city men, no?” said the engineer, watching the thin figure walk out into the rain.

  “Tutin Department of Public Works,” admitted Mr. Hovich.

  “I don’t have to look twice to see that. I’ll take the real peasant any day. He may be short on intellect, but he does his job even if he has to stand in water up to his neck.” He turned suddenly. “That’s something for you to note, Divver. Watch these men and you’ll learn the facts of life; no textbook theories.”

  “I guess that’s so,” said Divver, rather nervously.

  “No guess about it, sir; just plain is. All right, let’s have the next.”

  The next was a miner shaped like a blacksmith. His voice was gruff and resonant, he seemed to speak a thick dialect so disjointedly that the representative was obliged to pull him up short from time to time and make him repeat. But the engineer suddenly appeared very pleased; he leant back and smiled benignly. A few other people quickly assumed vague smiles too; and at once the engineer looked stern again.

  “Take it easy, Mr. Hovich,” he said. “Give the man time. This isn’t a bicycle race.”

  The miner mouthed ahead stubbornly, splaying large, meaty hands over the table. He said that the shaft in question had been opened by the late owner’s mother’s cousin, and no good too, all said no good, but late owner’s mother’s cousin wouldn’t hear, not a word, would go on, threw his zlotys away all for a freak panning; five men at good pay opened a hole round it, cousin bought pumps even, drained it like a field; but not a speck of gold anyone ever saw out of that hole. And just a child’s-walk distance away, the old hole, with no more than windlass and bucket, twenty feet down, enough to give a plate of mercury three fat feeds every day, like a fine cow. Just the same, he could be all wrong about the other shaft; you never know; gentleman from America can do things because he has the education, and drills to work deep down, not just hammer and hand-bit like we silly fellows, so don’t take his word; just a simple fellow without a head, doing his best.

  “Ask him where he’s from,” said Streeter, beaming.

  “He, too, is a Tutin man, sir.”

  “Nonsense! A good, rugged countryman, if ever I saw one. And don’t I know that dialect?”

  “He has a disease of the mouth, sir,” said the representative.

  Morgan giggled.

  “He may have at that,” said the engineer firmly, “but the old stock’s written all over him. Next!”

  A very young man came to the table. In age and looks he was enough like Morgan for Morgan to feel sure that he was a decent, high-minded, courageous young man. He was also exceedingly nervous; any fool could see that; but the engineer fixed him with a close stare that instantly made him speechless.

  The stare, and the silence, went on for a considerable time.

  Why, you cheap so-and-so! thought Morgan. He gave Streeter a deadly look.

  At last the engineer spoke. “What’s he been doing, Mr. Hovich?”

  “He is a Ministry employee, I regret to say, sir. He was thought fit to report on the condition of all stamps in Section A.”

  “A qualified engineer, eh?”

  “He was so credited.”

  “Why the indignation, Mr. Hovich?”

  “He seems to be an imbecile.”

  “Now, now, now! What kind of a snap-judgement is that? Do you think that kind of talk will get dollars for your country?”

  The representative flushed. The engineer assumed a warm, amiable manner, and asked the young man: “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes, sir,” whispered the young man.

  “Excellent! Just what I want around here. Did you know he spoke English, Mr. Hovich?”

  “I had not thought of it.”

  “In my opinion, and in all politeness, it’s just those things you should think about…. Will you tell me your name, please?”

  “Klaus Foreddi, Mister-Director.”

  “O.K., Klaus. I’ve known some fine engineers named Klaus.”

  The young man smiled feebly—and at once Morgan began to despise him.

  “Now, Klaus, how long have you been an engineer?”

  “In March I was first.”

  “April, May, June, July—only four months to get used to the idea. Makes you frightened, eh? Now, first thing I want you to know, Klaus, is that here we’re all friends. Freunde, amis, mitarbeiter, see?”

  “Thank you, Mister-Director.”

  “Second thing is—well, I’m not sure myself what the second thing is, so you see you’re not the only one who can’t always find the right word. Now, Klaus …”

  Morgan got up and started for the door.

  “Who are you?” asked the engineer.

  “I’m Max’s friend.”

  “Whose friend?”

  Divver said: “The boy I mentioned at lunch.” He looked angrily at Morgan.

  “Oh, of course. What did you say your name was?”

  “Jimmy Morgan.”

  “Well, Jimmy Morgan, I’m very pleased to meet you.” He put his hand over the table with undeniable firmness.

  Morgan shook it.

  “If you’re in no great hurry, why not wait a few more minutes and we can get acquainted?”

  Morgan nodded. He even managed to smile, like Klaus. He returned to his chair, utterly crushed.

  “Now, Klaus,” said the engineer vigorously, “as one mitarbeiter to another, I want you to tell me in your own words what you found in your section….”

  By the time the young man was through with his report his voice was firm, even a little irritating in its self-confidence. Streeter dismissed him with a friendly nod, and the young man turned on his way to the door and gave a cocky order to three of the mechanics, who followed him out obediently.

  “He’ll be a good man, Mr. Hovich,” said the engineer, with much pomposity. “Long on brain, short on confidence—that’s something a little tact can always remedy.”

  From far away came a high cry, monotonously repeated, and the clanging of a bell. The engineer looked at his watch, and went back to his papers. The old silence returned. The same melancholy cry now began to come from half-a-dozen points, and soon the thuds of exploding dynamite joined in, sending little tremors through the villa. Miners on bicycles pedalled past, with here and there a foreman, sitting in motionless dignity on his saddle, a tiny engine driving his back wheel. Each of the cyclists threw a glance at the villa as he passed, seeing through the open door to the figure at the table.

  The engineer rose and clapped his hands. Everyone stood up. He collected his papers into a brief-case and said to Mr. Hovich: “Enough for today.” Then he turned to Morgan and Divver and said: “I would be pleased if you two gentlemen would do me the honour of joining my good wife and my humble self for dinner.”

  *

  “He strikes me as a formal old bird,” said Divver, “so maybe we’d better wear tuxedos, much as we may despise the idea.”

  By the time Morgan had buttoned himself up with guilty fingers he had lost the edges of both his thumb-nails.

  Divver was in fine humour. He whistled in his bath, and cracked his wet towel at a fly. Going through the lobby, he made sarcastic remarks about the mana
ger, and when they stepped into the gold elevator he whistled and said it made him feel like a rich canary.

  Ahead of them in the dusky passage of the suites walked old Simon, the attendant, carrying a cocktail-tray. He stood back at the door of the Archduke Suite to let them pass. He looked at Morgan with blue eyes that were moist and weary, but perfectly clear.

  Nosey old devil! Will she scream when she sees me?

  “Entrez!” cried the engineer: “Awn-tray, mess-yer!”

  His face was ruddy from his bath, his hair beautifully white and neat. He wore a tuxedo with a red ribbon in one buttonhole, a civil award from the Rumanian Government. “Chérie,” he said, “let me present, on my left, Mr. Max Divver; on my right, Mr. James Morgan. My wife, Harriet.”

  She was as fresh and nifty as a lambkin. She looked so pretty in her dirndl that he forgot her scurrilous hair and saw nothing but her eyes, her white teeth and her soft neck. She showed no wish to scream. “We see so few Americans,” she said, pressing their hands.

  “We see them but we don’t know them,” said her husband.

  “I hardly know why. It’s always such a pleasure.”

  “It takes a man back to the Old Country.”

  “It’s a relief from broken English, too.”

  Their words were the echoes of mates, the unison of the paired on the entry of strangers; so evocative of harmony grown out of two bodies incessantly passing and repassing, avoiding collisions, furthering tact, as to convince even one who knows better that here at last is an example of the supreme human achievement, the true marital jointure that should be revered and idolized—even though, with the strangers gone or become such close friends as to make a show of unity unnecessary, revenge and mutual cruelty spring into use again, and show most of the harmony to have been an illusion of etiquette. Morgan felt this sense of union and believed at once that it would be too strong for him: Harriet, coolly pressing his hand, was as far away from him as any other woman. But in the middle of his depression and jealousy he found himself thinking that their echoing words had been true, and accurately expressed their loneliness: pity had not been in his thoughts when he thought of them before, and he was upset by its intrusion. The autocratic, pompous figure, seated in his headquarters imposing whatever mood appealed to him at the moment; the childish, curly specimen skipping down Bread Street—apart, each was despicable; together, both were elevated. As he took his cocktail from Simon’s silver tray he felt thoroughly ashamed of his intrusion into their united unhappiness.

  But the engineer lost no time in making this sense of pity seem ridiculous. His hands in his pockets, he planted himself square in front of the young man and asked him with a rather amused smile: “How old are you, James?”

  “Eighteen, Mr. Streeter.”

  Both Divver and Harriet now turned to look at Morgan, and smiled at him gently, as though they had never seen him before but trusted in his being a good-hearted boy—one so innocent of the world that neither would dream of disillusioning him.

  “Eighteen? Now, let me see. What was I up to when I was eighteen?”

  His wife smiled again, suggesting how absurd but charming it was to think of her husband having been an adolescent. All three of them now smiled again at Morgan, affectionately and nostalgically.

  “Eighteen.” The engineer crossed to a cabinet and opened the glass door. “Do you like snapshots, James?” he asked, pulling out an old-fashioned black album.

  Morgan loathed other people’s photographs. “Why, yes I do, Mr. Streeter,” he said.

  “I’m not sure they start at eighteen,” said the engineer, looking worried, “but no matter, there are plenty of them. Soon after, I went to engineering college—happiest days of a man’s life, college days.”

  “Indeed, they should be,” said Divver.

  “Indeed, they are,” said the engineer; “and anyone who doesn’t think so has never had to face up to the shocks of maturity. Now, sit down here,” he told Morgan, pointing to a corner of the couch, “and I think you’ll have time to skim through before we eat.”

  He gave Morgan a fatherly pat and went back to the two adults. “I guess you and I are not likely to agree politically, Mr. Divver,” he said, “but at least we may see eye to eye on the seriousness of today’s news.” “Terrible, terrible,” said Divver.

  Morgan sat alone in his corner, a small boy dismissed to play, with the engineer’s youth open on his knees.

  He saw a land of fading sepia, peopled with sturdy white men in khaki shorts and open shirts, and hot Kaffirs simpering on their fingers, half-naked. The bare ground was spotted with tents, thatched round huts and tin bungalows; in the background were mountains of slag, and an occasional big wheel perched in the gallows over a pit-head. Off the dulled old surfaces of the prints came thinly the dry heat of South Africa and the sting of blown ore-dust.

  “No man who has not been in a mine and not known miners knows what the world is all about,” the engineer was telling Divver. “I trust you are not one of those well-meaning humanitarians who are such an obstruction to real scientific progress?”

  “I think I can say frankly,” Divver replied, “that our magazine is pretty good about keeping out earnest crackpots and dreamers.”

  “I am very glad to hear it. I don’t think I have ever had the pleasure of reading your good magazine, but I should be very happy to do so.”

  “Larry does so love writing and people that really face up to hard facts,” said Harriet, with a rather timid laugh.

  “You’re still a young man, Mr. Divver,” said the engineer very firmly, “and the lesson of hard facts is best learnt young.”

  Having made Divver feel like a small boy too, the engineer came over to the back of the couch. Over Morgan’s shoulder he turned a page of the album, and pointed his cigarette at a row of stern colonials, some with massive moustaches. “I was a Rough Rider in the days of my youth,” he said.

  Morgan laughed politely.

  “Do you think I am joking? Nothing of the sort. Rough Riders is what a group of us called ourselves in those days. Come over here, Divver…. You would have been interested to know the Americans who were with Cecil Rhodes, and who survived him. We built Johannesburg: people don’t seem to create cities any more. We got around, too. We were vigorous, and ready to take risks. We never stayed long in one place; I knew men who couldn’t work on one mine longer than a year. Some of my friends made fortunes. We used to pair off and buy-out some farmer and work the ground with the very same dolly stamps we’re using on the Mell mines now. We kept greyhounds too; you should have seen them run. We used to ride horseback forty miles, and back, just to see something at the theatre. I consider that a long way to go for culture; a hard, instructive way.”

  He turned the pages as he spoke, and the miner of his youth passed in review, sometimes in a group, sometimes alone, legs wide apart, slim and well-built, always smiling: Streeter at the opening of a bell-tent, Streeter talking with friends, Streeter on a porch, on horseback, on trek in a Scotchcart with six oxen, in an orchard of apricots. Under each of these photographs was a comment in Chinese-white ink. Some of the comments were ordinary: “Self and Manager at the Old Celebration Concession (10-11-03)”; others were full of the jocularity with which a young man both adorns and hides his egotism. “Shakespeare on the Mine!” was written under a group of young miners, miming horribly, grimacing and falling on their knees: “Hammondstein, Jacksonberg and Streeterwitz” was under a trio whose noses had been extended by shadow. It seemed that in later years the engineer had felt uncomfortable, and had tried to erase some of this vulgarity. But the ink of the original inscriptions was the indelible fluid of a young man’s conviction that his most ordinary acts must be permanently recorded: erasing the record when the ink had grown stiff and its words shameful, had meant rubbing away as well most of the paper on which it was written; and where a new caption had been inked in (the mere tart date of self-confident maturity) it had seeped away on all sides like swamp water
, or softened the paper into a hole through which one might see a caption of the previous page. The engineer had neatly trimmed these holes with his wife’s manicure scissors.

  “Not boring you, I hope?” he said.

  “Oh, no,” said Morgan, feeling the weight of two bodies on his neck, and wondering if the bones would crack.

  The engineer at once brought out a second volume.

  Snow was falling; the engineer was clean-shaven and heavier. The captions were uncorrected. With Morgan bent in half and crushed, the trio marched through Norway and Sweden, Italy and the Riviera, Jugoslavia (“Austria in those days, of course,” said the engineer), Greece, Spain, and Finland.

  “There’s the first asbestos mill with modern driers,” said the engineer, pointing.

  “I’ve always regretted not keeping a camera,” said Divver.

  “It’s interesting,” said the engineer.

  In every foreground stood the same figure, always a little stouter, a little whiter, more manly, more distinguished. Here, was Streeter, out-smiled at last, beside Herbert Hoover in Belgium (“Rehabilitation Commission, ’19”); there, in a fur coat, he was exchanging jokes with Colonel Cooper (“Dnieperpetrovsk, ’26”), and chatting with fezzed dignitaries (“Assuan, ’30”). 1935 was the last date. “I’ve got at least a hundred more to go in,” said Streeter. “You care to do it for me, James?”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Morgan.

  The door opened and Simon came in, pushing a wheeled vehicle piled with snow-white linen and silver. He was followed by a larger vehicle, divided in tiers, with bottles, tureens and hot dishes, pushed by two very young waiters with moustaches as fine as knife blades.

  “Aha! Vittles!” said the engineer.

  Simon gave him an old man’s humble smile, and then turned on the two assistants, muttering short orders under his breath, correcting them with pettish taps on the wrist. When the big table by the window was perfectly laid, the crested napkins shaped into admirals’ hats, the two young waiters stepped back and stood side by side at attention.