by Paul Ableman
“We never allude to personal matters here. Come on. Come in to my office.”
And he leads the way into his adjoining office. It is a large room with colored panels. Arthur immediately goes to his desk and frowns at some messages. After a few moments, he strides over to me and seizes my hand.
“Well, I was confident that you would come,” he begins. “I was so sure—and in this business you don’t take high-level decisions unless you are sure—that I’ve summoned, or at least requested, the directors to put in an appearance so that we can decide what to do with you.” He looks at his watch. “They’re bad about time, they have numbers of interests, their own developments, clubs and so forth, to detain them, but they should all be here before long. How does that strike you?”
“Well, I’m really overwhelmed, Arthur,” I confess. “I sensed that you were feeling well-disposed towards me when you left this morning, but I’d no idea that you’d go to these lengths. What are the directors like?”
“Asses,” laughs Arthur. “Good fellows all. Some of them are keen—Godfrey, for example, not a keener man in the business—but an awful ass about women. Sir George—awful old ass, but drives a hard bargain. However, his real strength is, he knows how to keep the men happy. And do you know why that is? He likes the blighters, yes: dominos and a pint to drown his ulcers and he’s perfectly content for the evening. He spends two or three evenings a year like that. You see, Sir George came up through the shops. He knows the men. He can enter into their problems, keen on football, calls them by their first names just as they do him. When he walks through the plant, the three or four who happen to know who he is sing out, ‘All right, George?’ before stooping to their machines again. And if he’s not too preoccupied with expansion or reducing waste or some other matter of policy, for he’s devilish shrewd is Sir George, he’ll chant back ‘Splendid thanks. How’s yourself, Harry?’ or Bill, or whatever the particular worker’s name is. I admire him, I tell you, I admire him for it, though I make no attempt to emulate him. That sort of thing has to come naturally or not at all and when all’s said and done there has to be the head as well as the arms and perhaps it’s not the most convincing thing in the world, or the most seemly, for the head to go around slapping backs. What do you think?”
“Well, of course, I agree with you, Arthur, that the head shouldn’t be unseemly, but you must remember that I don’t know much about it. I mean, I haven’t had your experience. When I was going to be a plumber—”
“Tsk!” cries Arthur. “Don’t speak of it. We’ve come a long way since then. Plumber—dear, dear, that was years ago. You must realize, old son, that I’m well on the way to being head of this great development. It wouldn’t do—it’s not the thing—”
“No, of course not, Arthur,” I agree, ashamed of my slip, “that’s just the sort of thing I’ll have to learn. I mean it all comes so easily to you. You’ve grown into it. If someone makes a certain sort of joke or a certain sort of comment on some matter, say in the newspaper, you know just the right way to nod or to laugh, how to hold your body, how to wrinkle your forehead, how to murmur appreciative sounds and even what sounds to murmur, not necessarily words. I don’t mean you know these things the way you know perhaps the current price of some materials or dates in history, I mean you live them, you are them: you express, in your being, that area of potential. Well, of course, it’s too soon for me to possess this quality but I’m sure that by steady application, constant practice and so forth, I’ll soon be able to give a pretty convincing impression of having it. For example, I saw the way you came in just now, I noticed the way you flung a greeting at your secretary, loud, amiable, superficially intimate and yet expressing your unquestioned right to make her the recipient of your momentary exuberance and implying your right to change, virtually instantaneously, to a quite different attitude. Well, I think I could probably do that now, not as well as you of course, but with some approach to the orthodox manner. I just want you to realize that I’m determined to work hard and do my very best.”
When I have finished this speech, which flowed from me with a strange, disconcerting momentum, I look hopefully at Arthur to see if I can detect any signs of having pleased him. As a matter of fact, I am aware of an uncomfortable conviction that this will not be the case, that, for reasons which I dare not, in the light of the course of action to which I seem to be committed, admit to myself, the speech was a mistake.
“I mean,’ I append weakly, “I don’t want to give the impression that I think it will be easy, or that I’m in any way well-qualified, but just that —”
“When the directors arrive,” Arthur interrupts, clearly making an effort to be judicious, “I wouldn’t be quite so—so articulate. One doesn’t say everything one perceives. There are lots of things in life that one comprehends or understands but which the accepted forms of social commerce don’t require to be expressed. It’s not a question of hypocrisy. It’s simply that all these things have no conceivable practical relevance to—well, to the work in hand. They don’t help, if you see what I mean.”
“Yes, of course, Arthur. I’ll remember that—I’ll—”
“What do you think of the office?” Arthur asks quickly.
“The office?” I repeat, glancing quickly around the chamber. “I think it’s very well planned. I can see why you put that cabinet there. That’s the best place for it. And the desk is just the right size. Yes, it all seems to be very—very satisfactory.”
“The latest machines,” begins Arthur, but his eyes have a troubled look and I feel that a sudden burst of doubts and misgivings is preventing him from organizing his thoughts properly. “Machines—we have lots of machines.”
“So I see, Arthur,” I enthuse. “There are even some on your desk there, little machines for manipulating documents. And there are probably big machines all around us.”
“Look, you are going to be all right?” asks Arthur.
“All right?”
“Yes, I mean—Sir George, Godfrey and the rest—well, they’re hard-headed men, you know. I mean, naturally I want to help you, old son, but you’re not going to say a lot of funny things to them, are you?”
I can not help feeling saddened that Arthur still distrusts me so.
“I’ll try not to, Arthur,” I assure him. ‘I’ll try not to say anything more than is suggested by the course of the conversation.”
“You won’t say what’s in your mind?” he demands, and then when I simply look at him with a pained and questioning expression, he continues, “you won’t say the sort of weird things that—well, that you sometimes do say?”
“I’ll try not to say anything weird, Arthur,” I promise. “But I don’t see how I can help saying what’s in my mind. Naturally, anything I say must be in my mind.”
“Yes, but,” cries Arthur, “you won’t say just anything that comes into your mind—I mean, not just the first thing you happen to think of. For example, what are you thinking of now?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“I don’t think so.”
Arthur looks at me doubtfully, but he is unable to challenge this assertion. For a while we look at each other. Every time a thought comes into my mind I try to dismiss it. Arthur begins to grow restless.
“Are you still not thinking of anything?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” I reply candidly. “Thoughts seem to be echoing in the background, like subdued voices in a huge cavern, and then there are sights and sounds that I’m aware of. But they’re not thoughts are they?”
“I’m not sure,” grumbles Arthur, peering a little uncertainly around his familiar office. “What are they like?”
“Like crackling sounds, like roaring sounds and buzzing sounds.”
“Just traffic,” comments Arthur, and in his voice I seem to detect a note of relief. “And the sights? What are they like?”
“Like orchards, like shipwrecks. One is like an old stone tower, a ruin and another—”
&nb
sp; “You can’t really see those,” protests Arthur, getting to his feet and glowering at me. “There are no shipwrecks or orchards in my office What do you take me for? You’ve behaved in this way before. I try to help you. I do the best I can for you—we all do—poor Maria whom you’ve treated so abominably, Cousin Susan who guards you as tenderly as a mother, more tenderly than your natural mother, depraved woman, ever did, little Jane for whom, believe me, it is no blessing to have someone like you about—I don’t mention myself because it would be unseemly but I feel sure that whatever impression you have of my conduct, it can’t be one of total neglect. And then when we patiently exert ourselves—in ways that involve the most vital aspects of our lives too—the organization of our business arrangements—you start raving about orchards and trying to upset us. It’s most—most—most unsatisfactory.”
“I—I’m sorry, Arthur,” I stammer, feeling at once the complete validity, the inexorable justice, of his indictment. “I know I do nothing, nothing except tear my trousers and babble about shipwrecks. And where are the shipwrecks? There are none. It’s quite plain to me now.”
“Is it?” asks Arthur, with a note of rekindled hope in his voice. “You’re quite sure you don’t see any shipwrecks?”
“None,” I affirm. “Nor any tonsures, nor all those men clambering on the crags.”
But this fails to reassure Arthur and he hastily gets in touch with all the directors and tells them not to come, murmuring, as he does so, “I’ll have to reconsider this matter. I’ve been too hasty. I seem to have made a mistake or rather, as I sometimes feel is closer to the truth, a mistake seems to have encircled me. It seems to be about to close in on me.”
He is very considerate and tells me that he must extend my period of preliminary instruction, but he gets rather ill-tempered and reproachful when part of the mistake matures.
“Rotten luck,” he snarls, and then rushes out into the anteroom, crying: “Didn’t you get my message?”
One of the directors has arrived. He is visibly put out by Arthur’s wild demeanor and withdraws haughtily into himself. Arthur snarls and snaps round him like an impertinent dog.
“I’ve been inspecting grain,” protests the director, with obvious reserve. “All day, in fact for several days, I’ve been inspecting our holdings. I’ve been through it all, the dirty estuary, the blind sea and the fields of grain—bound whither? I had to inquire. The pulverizing machines? I had to order them. Freights? Weights? All those and more—vessels and vassals. The hotels were bad—one was particularly bad. The girls were bad to me, and whiffs of my dry home kept breathing through. I’ve had the worst of times—a dry time—and I really—”
“Freights?” mutters Arthur, and a host of considerations descends upon him. He immediately draws the returned director away into his office, forgetting all about me and the problem I have created. A little later I hear him interspersing the director’s report with calm or anxious proposals.
“Quite,” I hear him say. “Exactly. We’ll send so and so. We’ll get in touch with so and so. Quite.”
“I suppose you don’t need me anymore,” I ask, interrupting them as circumspectly as I can.
“No,” replies Arthur, merely glancing at me. “We’ll postpone it for now. Mustn’t lose a moment. We’ll discuss it again later. Possibly.”
And so once more I leave Arthur’s office. The secretary says ‘Good-bye’ and looks after me with what may be a sympathetic glance, but I can not be sure. When I reach the stairs, however, I can not repress a smile for crisp and confused voices reach me from below and I surmise that no fewer than the majority of the directors have failed to receive Arthur’s cancellation and are hurrying up for the meeting. Most of them pass me with little more than an impersonal nod, or nothing at all, but one, a rather red and tipsy-looking director, accosts me.
“I can probably guess why you’re smiling,” he begins. “It’s all over, is it? You’re well out of it, my boy. How the devil do you think I keep going, year after year? I keep going by drinking, every free moment. Not only am I inside the doors of those pleasant, reeking establishments as the dire barriers open but I keep a liberal supply of the necessary fluids about me at all times. I’ve got a flask in my pocket here,” and he tips his head sideways to indicate the decanter peeping out. “I’ve got bottles at home, bottles in the office, bottles in the car. I never get caught out, never, and I’m never drunk, not what you’d call drunk, if never sober. Yes, you’re well out of it. If you hadn’t been, you’d have got like me before long. We’re similar in some ways.”
He looks at me thoughtfully, if somewhat blearily, and absently unstoppers the decanter.
“Oh, I know, you don’t believe that. You think I’m one of Arthur’s crowd. No, I thought so too once and didn’t discover any different until too late. By that time I’d learned their protocol and that’s all I ever did learn. Well, I’ve been doing it ever since, signing the dry papers, grunting and scrutinizing and carrying on, but it’s all been a dream really. Have a drink?”
He hands me a little cup of whiskey and sits down on the stone steps. I drink the whiskey, aware that I do believe him, that I am quite sympathetic to what he is saying.
“All a dream,” he goes on, but not in a dreamy way, rather in a bluff, practical way as if he were calculating profits. “There’s a street corner mixed up in it, not one that I ever saw or stood on but a street corner somewhere.”
He pours himself a second whiskey and consumes it and the fiery veins burn more brightly on his cheeks.
“What street corner do you mean?” I ask him, and I purposely look away at a dusty grille.
“Well, I’ll tell you, as far as I can. I won’t say I’ve never told anyone before for I have brought the thing up sometimes, you know, when a bit warm around ten and someone standing near seems suddenly to be less than a total ass, but I’ve never really made much sense of it or felt that it made much sense to anybody else, sometimes not even to me.”
He pours himself yet another tot and then continues:
“It’s an ordinary street corner, in a suburb possibly, with some little neat bungalow type houses near it and a brick wall beyond which there are trees. Now I’m not saying that it isn’t really some place we lived in when I was a boy. Perhaps it is, but we didn’t move around much and I think I’d be able to place it if it were. And I can’t. More likely, the original, if there is one, is just some street corner I passed once and which got stuck in my mind in some way. But that’s not important. The thing about this street corner is that it doesn’t know anything about other street corners. It seems to be on its own. Do you see what I mean?”
“I’m in that area,” I say, and, as I say it, a shiver of recollection and bondage passes over me which I can not help welcoming for it seems appropriate to what the director is saying.
“Now, wait a minute,” he pleads. He presses his hand to his forehead and leans forward struggling with the elusiveness of his idea. “I’m not putting it right. It’s nothing that can be said directly. Because that could be contradicted. It’s something I know—the people in those idiotic bungalows are happy there. They have what they need, and they don’t need much and what they have, they don’t take from anybody else. There doesn’t seem to be anybody else. The children are allowed into the orchard—it’s really a sort of park for them, and they enjoy themselves there, romp if you see, during the warm days and on the other days, they go into the bungalows and enjoy themselves there. There are no newspapers—”
But here he suddenly shakes his head vigorously and waves his stick.
“No,” he admits, smiling a rather bitter, defeated smile, “I haven’t told you. I haven’t made it clear. Probably there’s nothing to tell, nothing that couldn’t be quite simply explained. But wait a minute. Wait a minute,” he urges although I have neither displayed, nor feel, any impatience, “I’ll tell you something. I’ll die soon—Oh, that’s all right. My heart’s doddering, my lungs are clogged—the doctor’s wa
rned me—each bottle I kill has a stab at me and who knows when I’ll meet my match? It might be this meek-looking fellow here. No, that’s all right. I don’t mind that, although I’ve got a wife, but she’ll be all right—we’ve got a decent house in a decent neighborhood and she’ll have enough. She won’t miss me really—she’s not very affectionate at best and women don’t mourn a drunken husband—not that we haven’t been quite comfortable together in some ways—but still, as I was saying, it’s not that— dying; no, it’s more like this—I’ll have another shot if you can put up with me?”
He darts me a glance of rather heavy irony but also, I feel, of friendship, and then, not having really sought my permission, resumes:
“I’ve always thought about things, which means I’ve never felt that I understood them. Why do the papers say what they say? Why do we troop off and lead men against other batches of men? Why do we come home and sign papers and set up factories and so on? Well, I dare say a lot of people have thought similar things and some have gone on thinking them and some have given up. I’ve never given up, but whenever I think them and I seem to be reaching above them towards some sort of understanding that will make them seem more—reasonable if you understand me—bang, I think of that street corner. I’ve never got beyond it. My whole life’s been a sort of fumbling under that roof. And now I’m going to die and I wouldn’t be surprised, no I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, as the pains begin to tear at my throat and I begin to dip down into the darkness, the last thought or picture I have of all the life I’ve lived is of that idiotic street corner that I can’t even place.”
He resettles his decanter in his pocket and we stand up. It is rather cool on the stone stairway and rather gloomy.
“Dreary place,” he remarks. “I think I’ll propose, now that you’re off the agenda, that we move to one of these new, cheerful places. I never do, you know, I never propose anything, though I stamp and murmur ‘hear, hear’ sometimes. Well, I must be getting up to the meeting. I don’t suppose you’ve got any comments on what I’ve been saying, have you?”
