‘Quick,’ Krogh said, ‘before they see us.’ He led the way; he saw an avenue of astonished faces open and close again; he remembered that he was in evening-dress and hatless, but a curious irresponsibility touched his brain; he thought of Hall sitting in his false nose while the festa churned around them saying: ‘But what about the friction?’ He said, suddenly out of breath, pausing behind a shooting booth: ‘What would poor Hall think of this.’ Poor faithful Hall. He could trust Hall to do anything, but not for Hall this sudden absence of reserve, this laughter. One kept that for someone who could not even tell a convincing lie. He said gently, panting between the words: ‘It was not the Indian Ocean.’
Anthony said, ‘Damn’; he smiled anxiously, blinked in the glare of the flood lamps; ‘I’ve never tried that story before. It’s generally a bomb.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you. Only Kate knows. I was skinning a rabbit and the knife slipped.’
‘Pihlström,’ Krogh said. Cautiously, round the corner from the main avenue, came the man in the grey suit, treading softly like a cat circumnavigating a dustbin. Krogh said wearily, ‘The game’s over.’ He added with the same qualm of conscience he might have felt if he were betraying someone dear to him, selling him stock which he knew not only to be worthless in the long run, but worthless now, immediately, indisposable: ‘We’ve been silly.’
‘Leave him to me,’ Anthony said.
He advanced on Pihlström, seized an arm, turned him round and pushed him round the corner of the booth. Pihlström made a succession of quick yapping cries: ‘Hammarsten. Hammarsten.’ Professor Hammarsten was standing with two or three other men in front of a betting booth lined with little brass handles. ‘Hammarsten.’ There seemed to be an argument going on about a coin which Hammarsten had presented. ‘Hammarsten.’ He turned round quickly and his spectacles fell off. ‘Pihlström.’ He groped blindly on the gravel with his foot, drawing an irregular circle round the spectacles. ‘Pihlström,’ he called appealingly. Anthony ran Pihlström forward. ‘Hammarsten.’ Professor Hammarsten began to stoop for his spectacles, then leapt straight again with a cry of anguish, his hand on the small of his back. ‘Pihlström.’ Three men began to explain to him something about a coin which the booth-keeper held. Anthony let go of Pihlström and pushed him into the Professor’s arms. ‘Hammarsten.’ They held each other for a moment; then Pihlström stooped and picked up Hammarsten’s glasses; Anthony and Krogh watched them from a distance. Presently they divided: one walked one way, one the other, and disappeared. They were not hurrying; there was a lack of enthusiasm in their movements.
‘Have you ever been a chucker-out?’ Krogh said. Anthony sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not in the mood for stories; not after that mistake of mine. I could have sworn it was the Indian Ocean.’
‘It was,’ Krogh said.
‘My God,’ Anthony said. ‘You mean there was nothing wrong? Never ask me to play poker with you; it’ll have to be rummy; something where it’s just honest luck and there’s no room for bluff. What a poker face!’
‘Can you really shoot?’
‘Can I shoot?’ Anthony said. He put his arm in Krogh’s and hurried him down two avenues. Occasionally they stopped at a booth, but ‘too easy’, Anthony said. At last he found what he wanted. The prizes were numbered. ‘Would you like a cigarette-case?’ Anthony said.
‘I have this one.’ Krogh took from his pocket a case of thin inlaid wood. It had been designed by the same sculptor as the statue, as the ash-trays; it bore the monogram E.K. He was proud of it. He said: ‘There’s no other like it in the world.’ It lay, almost as light as a powder-puff, in his palm.
‘Yes, it’s pretty,’ Anthony said, ‘but you want something for formal occasions, something in pig-skin. That one there: it would look well with a gold monogram. I’ll get it for you.’
Afterwards he said, ‘We’ll have a drink.’
He didn’t know a word of Swedish, but he had taken control. They had their beers. ‘Weak stuff,’ Anthony said, ‘you come to England and I’ll show you. Could I put down a Younger now? I’d say I could. Or a couple of Stone’s special. You don’t need more than a couple.’
He held Krogh entranced with his ease of manner, his air of knowing a thing or two of the very things which Krogh knew least. He watched Anthony as a middle-aged woman who had been brought up under another dispensation might watch a young girl who knew all the right cosmetics, the best ingredients for cocktails, the right doctor to go to if one started something one didn’t want to finish. He felt a little envy, a little affection, even a little amusement, but chiefly a sense of how quickly time had passed for him and how slowly it must have passed for the other who knew so much, so early.
‘What about shaking a leg?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Dancing a bit.’
The loudspeaker played what were probably the latest tunes, a ring of arc lamps flooded the wooden boards; the small fair faces followed the intricate music with pinched attention, the girls stepping slowly on their delicate small feet, solemn, receiving like a sacrament the communication from their partners of a foot to the side, a foot between, a foot backward, thinking of the shop, of the office, of the dress they couldn’t afford – ‘in the silence of my lonely room’ – of summer over – ‘day and night’ – of the winter fashions.
‘No. I won’t dance. But you go and dance. I’ll watch you.’ No good to assure himself, I am Krogh, to remember his initials in electric lamps, the factories working day and night; one shift going off at seven; the next at three in the morning; he was afraid to ask one of the girls who stood around the floor to dance with him. He saw Anthony tour the floor, taking a look at a girl here and a girl there; he did not speak a word of the language, but he was no more of an expatriate than Krogh, the Swede, born in the hut on Vätten, who learned arithmetic at the village school. Perhaps, he thought, I have unlearned too much, seeing Anthony take a girl by the arm and lead her on to the floor; when I was young –
But he would not deceive himself; the quality of truth was in the air of Tivoli; one could not be a hypocrite in a place where no one was present for mixed motives, where pleasure was the only, the undisguised inducement. Even when I was young, he thought, I was the same. They told stories in Stockholm of his schooldays, his early proficiency as a business man and as an inventor; how he had constructed a periscope which could be used through the window to disclose when the master was coming round the corner of the building, of how he had traded postage stamps for fruit and held them, packed in straw, till the height of the summer when his fellows would give all the stamps they possessed for a bite of something juicy. He knew the stories; he knew they were untrue, he knew the dullness of the truth – the plodding industry, the certificates gained one by one; he had hardly begun to live with any vividness before the idea of the new cutter had come to him one day of a Chicago spring. He could remember the exact pattern which the great dredger had made, swinging across the sky; he had seen it through the window of the foreman’s hut; he had leant out and called to the driver: ‘Five feet more to the left’; the long hard North American winter was over, he had smelt spring through the liquid asphalt, the smoke, the rain-wet metal; the macadamized roadways were splitting under the gentle persistent pressure of the grasses. But he had no love for nature, he remembered that spring day not because it was more beautiful than others, but because, looking down at the plan of the bridge pinned out on the drawing board, while the dredger swayed and flopped and sank through the pale-blue air, he thought: if I arranged the knife just so, the sliding tray, the brake detaching the cog, would the friction be too great? He had never been aware of having thought deeply on the subject of those small, absurdly cheap, absurdly necessary goods, which were now known as Krogh’s. Once he was a boy his father had said that So-and-So must be worth a million; for a week he had worked in the shops at Nyköping and seen the old type of cutter in action and given notice because he saw no future in so old-fashioned a firm for even t
he most stubborn diligence. Now, suddenly, the idea for a new cutter had come with no apparent effort and impressed on his mind for ever the spring day, the smell of shrubs and asphalt, the dredger dipping and swaying.
Something in the new ease he felt with Anthony recalled that period. It was no coincidence that he had remembered the names of Murphy, O’Connor, Williamson and Aronstein (O’Connor had been killed in Panama, buried under forty tons of mud when a dredger broke; Aronstein had gone into oil; Williamson and Murphy were probably dead in France). He had never known them well, though he had worked with them for eighteen months, but he had not been shy with them, as he had been shy with Andersson, as he was shy of the sunburned shopgirls solemnly dancing. Deliberately he made an effort to go back, to peel off the years and their inhumanities as one peels the leaves of a neglected calendar, glancing at the mottoes, the verses, the trite sayings of dead rhetoricians, occasionally pausing at some unexpectedly vivid line: 1912 when he went into partnership, 1915 when he bought out his partner, 1920 when he first began to aim at the world monopoly, 1927 the peak year when he bought the German interests, made his loan to the French Government, established himself in Italy; but it only brought him to the present, the short-term loans, the threatened strike, Laurin’s silly voice from the microphone advising caution.
He thought: what am I doing here? This is absurd. The gentle creaking of the wooden boards under the dancers’ feet; the orderly crowd moving in two lines up the shooting booths, down past the fortune-tellers, the switchback, the scenic railways; the sudden cool courts at either end with the coloured fountains rustling between the black sky and the white concrete; the seats by the lake side; the light of a ferry boat moving away like a bicycle lamp over the dark polished lake: these were Sweden as much as the silver birch woods round Vätten, the brightly-painted wooden hut, the duck staggering in mid-air, his mother waiting on the tiny quay; but the images had no longer any meaning for him, he was like a man without a passport, without a nationality; like a man who could only speak Esperanto.
The table rocked and righted itself; he looked round to see tall weedy old Hammarsten pull up a chair. ‘Good evening, Herr Krogh.’ He rubbed his finger across the white bristles on his chin, and leaning closer confided to Krogh: ‘I’ve sent Pihlström home.’ He said: ‘I could see at once that you didn’t want to be bothered by a man like Pihlström. I told him I’d seen you leave in a taxi.’
‘And he believed you?’
‘Oh, but Herr Krogh, I put it rather more subtly. I asked him to lend me a taxi fare to follow you.’
‘Very clever, Professor, but really –’
‘Of course he got into the taxi and drove away.’
The old man made a sound as if he were drinking hot tea. He said with immense satisfaction: ‘He’ll be on the other side of the lake by now.’
‘How are your language classes, Professor?’
‘Not too good, not too good, Herr Krogh. One is compelled to drive the quill. It leads one into strange company. Pihlström, the Englishman Minty, Beyer – do you know Beyer?’
‘I haven’t that honour,’ Krogh said.
‘It is quite impossible to trust Beyer,’ Hammarsten said. ‘He was responsible for that article the other day on your career.’
‘It was complimentary.’
‘But so inaccurate. It is only we older men who pursue Truth amid the distractions – I confess it, Herr Krogh – of a not very distingué profession.’ He said with extraordinary venom, under his breath, as if he were talking to himself: ‘Mud-slingers.’
‘It seemed reasonably accurate.’
‘But 1911, Herr Krogh, for the date when you went into partnership. 1912 you must confess would have been – let me say, nearer to the truth.’
‘Yes, it was 1912.’
‘I know it. I know it. I have followed year by year, driving the industrious if humble quill, the career of Sweden’s greatest –’ The old man was horribly sincere. His steel glasses were misted with emotion. He was rapidly becoming inarticulate. ‘I picture the day when beside Gustavus Adolphus –’
‘A glass of beer, Professor?’ Krogh said with a weariness and an impatience he took no trouble to conceal. He thought of all the interviews he had been forced through the years to give to this decayed teacher of languages, not from pity but from necessity, because he represented the most respected of Swedish papers, because there was some justification in his boast: he did at least try to be accurate. He repeated sharply when Hammarsten failed to answer: ‘A glass of beer?’
‘Thank you, Herr Krogh,’ Hammarsten said sadly (as if he had been woken from some dramatic dream to the thirsts of the body). He fell silent nursing the glass with his palm, watching with complete inattention the dancers.
‘You wanted to speak to me?’ Krogh said.
‘I only thought,’ the old man said, ‘that you might wish to make some statement. Your leaving the opera after the first act will have been noticed. There will be rumours.’ He paused and said into his beer which he lifted as far as his chin: ‘Believe me, Herr Krogh, I know what you think of us. We pester you; you cannot get away from us.’ His steel glasses slipped a little way down the bridge of his nose: ‘You must remember, it is our living.’
‘I have no statement to make,’ Krogh said. ‘Is it impossible sometimes to do what I want to do, spontaneously, without being questioned afterwards?’
‘Quite impossible,’ the Professor said.
‘How one ought to envy you others.’
‘It’s just as impossible for us,’ Hammarsten said, ‘but we haven’t your compensations.’ He dipped into his beer and withdrew with some white foam on his nose. He had mislaid his handkerchief. He used the corner of his sleeve, blushing and looking this way and that way to see whether he had been observed. ‘For example, Herr Krogh, it has always been my ambition – you will laugh at me – to have a little, just a little and in the purest sense, “flutter” with the theatre. I should like – but what an inadequate word “like” is – to produce in Stockholm –’ he hesitated.
‘Well?’
‘The great Pericles.’
‘What is that?’
‘Shakespeare’s Pericles. In my own translation.’
‘Is it a good play?’
‘Oh, Herr Krogh, it is a great, a daring play. It anticipated Mrs Warren’s Profession. For years I have urged my pupils if they wished to understand the very spirit . . . It is Shakespeare’s finest, most poetic . . . Of course it has difficulties. There’s the question of Gower. Who is Gower?’
‘You must ask my English friend. Here he is. Who is Gower, Farrant?’
‘You don’t mind if this girl joins us, do you, Mr Krogh? She’s thirsty: you can see that: but she doesn’t understand a word I say.’
The dark sunburn beneath the ash blonde hair was beautiful: a few drops of sweat lay on her upper lip; she watched the men with a complete lack of intelligence; she sat down, she took her drink, she said nothing; she was perfectly willing to be ignored. Krogh had quite forgotten that such women existed. He said: ‘Professor Hammarsten talks English, Farrant.’
‘In William Shakespeare’s Pericles, the old man Gower. Who is the old man Gower, Mr Fecund?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve never read the play, Professor.’
‘No, no. But you must have seen the play acted often in London. The old man Gower. “From ashes ancient Gower is come.”’
‘I’ve seen Hamlet and Macbeth.’
‘No, no, they do not interest me. Pericles, that is the greatest play. I have a theory about it. “From ashes”: that is not from burnt coal but from trees. From ash trees. Ash, oak, and thorn, the sacred trees. Ancient Gower is a British Druid, he is an ancient in the sense of Methuselah, a priest and king. That is how I have translated it. “From ashes ancient Gower is come.” Literally, it is “from the sacred ash trees the Druidic priest, Gower, has arrived” – not old man Gower. Do you agree?’
‘It sounds good.’
Perhaps the girl realized Krogh’s lack of interest in the conversation. Without a word she took his right hand and spread it palm upwards on the table in front of her; there was no coquetry in the act; she was just ‘doing her piece’. Men liked to have their hands held and studied; it gave them a sense of importance; they liked to hear a girl saying ‘you’re going a long journey’, they liked the touch of hands, as legitimate as in a dance, they liked to be warned, ‘be careful of two women, one dark and one fair’, they felt no end of dogs.
‘Of course you will make this objection. The scenes are Tyre, Antioch, Ephesus. You will say – why a British Druid?’
‘Yes, I quite see that, Professor. It does seem odd.’
‘But that is an objection I reply to in the following manner. Shakespeare is your national poet. He lived in the high old times of good Queen Bess, at a period of nationalistic expansion.’
‘You are very successful,’ the girl said. ‘You ought to stick to the work you are doing now.’
‘Where do you come from?’ Krogh asked, astonished that she didn’t know his face.
‘From Lund,’ she said, and ran her finger down the line of life. ‘You are very healthy: you have a long life.’
He could not help listening with satisfaction. ‘No break in it?’
‘No break.’
She said: ‘You don’t make friends easily. You should beware of a man and a woman. You are very generous.’
The Professor said: ‘I shall dress Gower in a symbolistic costume representing imperialism or nationalistic expansion.’
‘You don’t care much for girls. You like work best.’
‘What is my work?’
‘Something with your head.’ She let his hand go and immediately seemed to lose all interest in him; she drank her beer and stared at the dance floor through large pale marble eyes. Presently a young man passed and bowed and she left the table and walked with him to the floor and danced with him. She was quite uninterested and very pretty and completely stupid; she left behind her in Krogh’s brain a sense of ease and happiness which vanished almost as soon as it became conscious. It was like an unexpected scent in a mean street, a breath of mint between the tenements: one turns back, one picks one’s way across the pavement, old fag packets and potato peelings and the runnings of a conduit (she didn’t know me . . . a long life . . . generous), but the smell has gone. The music had stopped, at another table the girl was laying the boy’s hand palm upwards on the table.
England Made Me Page 12
