21 Stories

by Graham Greene

  "I knew you'd be in trouble sooner or later."

  "That's the sort of damn fool comfortless thing a girl would say."

  "It just needs brain."

  Mr. Fennick picked up a brass ash-tray—and then put it down again carefully.

  "It's quite simple as soon as you begin to think."

  "Think."

  Mr. Priskett scraped a chair-leg.

  "I'll meet him at the station with a taxi, and take him to, say, Balliol. Lead him straight through into the inner quad, and there you'll be, just looking as if you'd come out of the Master's lodging."

  "He'll know it's Balliol."

  "He won't. Anybody who knew Oxford couldn't be sap enough to send his son to St. Ambrose's."

  "Of course it's true. These military families are a bit crass."

  "You'll be in an enormous hurry. Consecration or something. Whip him round the Hall, the Chapel, the Library, and hand him back to me outside the Master's. I'll take him out to lunch and see him into his train. It's simple."

  Mr. Fennick said broodingly, "Sometimes I think you're a terrible girl, terrible. Is there nothing you wouldn't think up?"

  "I believe," Elisabeth said, "that if you're going to play your own game in a world like this, you've got to play it properly. Of course," she said, "if you are going to play a different game you go to a nunnery or to the wall and like it. But I've only got one game to play."

  4

  It really went off very smoothly. Driver found Elisabeth at the barrier: she didn't find him because she was expecting something different. Something about him worried her: it wasn't his clothes or the monocle he never seemed to use—it was something subtler than that. It was almost as though he were afraid of her, he was so ready to fall in with her plans. "I don't want to be any trouble, my dear, any trouble at all. I know how busy the President must be." When she explained that they would be lunching together in town, he even seemed relieved. "It's just the bricks of the dear old place," he said. "You mustn't mind my being a sentimentalist, my dear."

  "Were you at Oxford?"

  "No, no. The Drivers, I'm afraid, have neglected the things of the mind."

  "Well, I suppose a soldier needs brains?"

  He took a sharp look at her, and then answered in quite a different sort of voice, "We believed so in the Lancers." Then he strolled beside her to the taxi, twirling his monocle, and all the way up from the station he was silent, taking little quiet sideways peeks at her, appraising, approving.

  "So this is St. Ambrose's," he said in a hearty voice just beside the porter's lodge and she pushed him quickly by, through the first quad towards the Master's house, where on the doorstep with a B. A. gown over his arm stood Mr. Fennick permanently posed like a piece of garden statuary. "My uncle, the President," Elisabeth said.

  "A charming girl, your niece," Driver said as soon as they were alone together: he had really only meant to make conversation, but as soon as he had spoken the two old crooked minds began to move in harmony.

  "She's very home-loving," Mr. Fennick said. "Our famous elms," he went on, waving his hand skywards. "St. Ambrose's rooks."

  "Crooks?" Driver said with astonishment.

  "Rooks. In the elms. One of our great modern poets wrote about them. 'St. Ambrose elms, oh St. Ambrose elms,' and about 'St. Ambrose rooks calling in wind and rain.'"

  "Pretty. Very pretty."

  "Nicely turned, I think."

  "I meant your niece."

  "Ah, yes. This way to the Hall. Up these steps. So often trodden, you know, by Tom Brown."

  "Who was Tom Brown?"

  "The great Tom Brown—one of Rugby's famous sons." He added thoughtfully, "She'll make a fine wife -and mother."

  "Young men are beginning to realize that the flighty ones are not what they want for a lifetime."

  They stopped by mutual consent on the top step: they nosed towards each other like two old blind sharks who each believes that what stirs the water close to him is tasty meat.

  "Whoever wins her," Mr. Fennick said, "can feel proud. She'll make a fine hostess...." as the future Lady Driver, he thought.

  "I and my son," Driver said, "have talked seriously about marriage. He takes rather an old-fashioned view. He'll make a good husband...."

  They walked into the hall, and Mr. Fennick led the way round the portraits. "Our founder," he said, pointing at a full-bottomed wig. He chose it deliberately: he felt it smacked a little of himself. Before Swinburne's portrait he hesitated: then pride in St. Ambrose's conquered caution. "The great poet Swinburne," he said. "We sent him down."

  "Expelled him?"

  "Yes. Bad morals."

  "I'm glad you are strict about those."

  "Ah, your son is in safe hands at St. Ambrose's."

  "It makes me very happy," Driver said. He began to scrutinize the portrait of a nineteenth-century divine. "Fine brushwork," he said. "Now religion—I believe in religion. Basis of the family." He said with a burst of confidence, "You know our young people ought to meet."

  Mr. Fennick gleamed happily. "I agree."

  "If he passes..."

  "Oh, he'll certainly pass," Mr. Fennick said.

  "He'll be on leave in a week or two. Why shouldn't he take his degree in person?"

  "Well, there'd be difficulties."

  "Isn't it the custom?"

  "Not for postal graduates. The Vice-Chancellor likes to make a small distinction. But, Lord Driver, in the case of so distinguished an alumnus I suggest that I should be deputed to present the degree to your son in London."

  "I'd like him to see his college."

  "And so he shall in happier days. So much of the college is shut now. I would like him to visit it for the first time when its glory is restored. Allow me and my niece to call on you."

  "We are living very quietly."

  "Not serious financial trouble, I hope?"

  "Oh, no, no."

  "I'm so glad. And now let us rejoin the dear girl."

  5

  It always seemed to be more convenient to meet at railway stations. The coincidence didn't strike Mr. Fennick who had fortified himself for the journey with a good deal of audit ale, but it struck Elisabeth. The college lately had not been fulfilling expectations, and that was partly due to the laziness of Mr. Fennick: from his conversation lately it almost seemed as though he had begun to regard the college as only a step to something else—what, she couldn't quite make out. He was always talking about Lord Driver and his son Frederick and the responsibilities of the peerage. His republican tendencies had quite lapsed. "That dear boy," was the way he referred to Frederick, and he marked him 100% for Classics. "It's not often Latin and Greek go with military genius," he said. "A remarkable boy."

  "He's not so hot on economics," Elisabeth said.

  "We mustn't demand too much book-learning from a soldier."

  At Paddington Lord Driver waved anxiously to them through the crowd: he wore a very new suit—one shudders to think how many coupons had been gambled away for the occasion. A little behind him was a very young man with a sullen mouth and a scar on his cheek. Mr. Fennick bustled forward: he wore a black raincoat over his shoulders like a cape and carrying his hat in his hand he disclosed his white hair venerably among the porters.

  "My son—Frederick," Lord Driver said. The boy sullenly took off his hat and put it on again quickly: they wore their hair in the army very short.

  "St. Ambrose's welcomes her new graduate," Mr. Fennick said.

  Frederick grunted.

  The presentation of the degree was made in a private room at Mount Royal. Lord Driver explained that his house had been bombed—a time bomb, he added, a rather necessary explanation since there had been no raids recently. Mr. Fennick was satisfied if Lord Driver was: he had brought up a B. A. gown, a mortar-board and a Bible in his suitcase, and he made quite an imposing little ceremony between the book-table, the sofa and the radiator, reading out a Latin oration and tapping Frederick lightly on the head with the Bible. Th
e degreediploma had been expensively printed in two colours by an Anglo-Catholic firm. Elisabeth was the only uneasy person there. Could the world, she wondered, really contain two such saps? What was this painful feeling growing up in her that perhaps it contained four?

  After a little light lunch with bottled brown beer -"almost as good, if I may say so, as our audit ale," Mr. Fennick beamed—the President and Lord Driver made elaborate moves to drive the two young people out together. "We've got to talk a little business," Mr. Fennick said, and Lord Driver hinted, "You've not been to the flickers for a year, Frederick." They were driven out together into bombed shabby Oxford Street while the old men rang cheerfully down for whisky.

  "What's the idea?" Elisabeth said.

  He was good-looking: she liked his scar and his sullenness; there was almost too much intelligence and purpose in his eyes. Once he took off his hat and scratched his head: Elisabeth again noticed his short hair. He certainly didn't look a military type. And his suit, like his father's, looked new and ready made. Hadn't he had any clothes to wear when he came on leave?

  "I suppose," she said, "they are planning a wedding."

  His eyes lit gleefully up. "I wouldn't mind," he said.

  "You'd have to get leave from your C. O., wouldn't you?"

  "C. O.?" he asked in astonishment, flinching a little like a boy who has been caught out, who hasn't been prepared beforehand with that question. She watched him carefully, remembering all the things that had seemed to her since the beginning odd.

  "So you haven't been to the movies for a year?" she said.

  "I've been on service."

  "Not even an Ensa show?"

  "Oh, I don't count those."

  "It must be awfully like being in prison."

  He grinned weakly, walking faster all the time, so that she might really have been pursuing him through the Hyde Park gates.

  "Come clean," she said. "Your father's not Lord Driver."

  "Oh, yes he is."

  "Any more than my uncle's President of a College."

  "What?" He began to laugh—it was an agreeable laugh, a laugh you couldn't trust but a laugh which made you laugh back and agree that in a crazy world like this all sorts of things didn't matter a hang. "I'm just out of Borstal," he said. "What's yours?"

  "Oh, I haven't been in prison yet."

  He said, "You'll never believe me, but all that ceremony—it looked phoney to me. Of course the Dad swallowed it."

  "And my uncle swallowed you. I couldn't quite."

  "Well, the wedding's off. In a way I'm sorry."

  "I'm still free."

  "Well," he said, "we might discuss it," and there in the pale autumn sunlight of the park they did discuss it -from all sorts of angles. There were bigger frauds all round them; officials of the Ministries passed carrying little portfolios: controllers of this and that purred by in motor-cars, and men with the big blank faces of advertisement hoardings strode purposefully in khaki with scarlet tabs down Park Lane from the Dorchester. Their fraud was a small one by the world's standard, and a harmless one: the boy from Borstal and the girl from nowhere at all—from the draper's counter and the semi-detached villa. "He's got a few hundred stowed away, I'm sure of that," said Fred. "He'd make a settlement if he thought he could get the President's niece."

  "I wouldn't be surprised if Uncle had five hundred. He'd put it all down for Lord Driver's son."

  "We'd take over this college business. With a bit of capital we could really make it go. It's just chicken feed now."

  They fell in love for no reason at all, in the park, on a bench to save twopences, planning their fraud on the old frauds they knew they could outdo. Then they went back, and Elisabeth declared herself before she'd got properly inside the door. " Frederick and I want to get married." She almost felt sorry for the old fools as their faces lit suddenly simultaneously up because everything had been so easy, and then darkened with caution as they squinted at each other. "This is very surprising," Lord Driver said, and the President said, "My goodness, young people work fast."

  All night the two old men planned their settlements, and the two young ones sat happily back in a corner, watching the elaborate fence, with the secret knowledge that the world is always open to the young.

  Men at Work

  Richard Skate had taken a couple of hours away from the Ministry to see whether his house was still standing after the previous night's raid. He was a thin, pale, hungry-looking man of early middle age. All his life had been spent in keeping his nose above water, lecturing at night-schools and acting as temporary English master at some of the smaller public schools, and in the process he had acquired a small house, a wife and one child—a rather precocious girl with a talent for painting who despised him. They lived in the country, his house was cut off from him by the immeasurable distances of bombed London—he visited it hurriedly twice a week, and his whole world was now the Ministry, the high heartless building with complicated lifts and long passages like those of a liner and lavatories where the water never ran hot and the nail-brushes were chained like Bibles. Central heating gave it the stuffy smell of mid-Atlantic except in the passages where the windows were always open for fear of blast and the cold winds whistled in. One ex pected to see people wrapped in rugs lying in deck-chairs and the messengers carried round minutes like soup. Skate slept downstairs in the basement on a camp-bed, emerging at about ten o'clock for breakfast, and these imprisoned weeks were beginning to give him the appearance of a pit-pony—a purblind air as of something that lived underground. The Establishments branch of the Ministry of Propaganda thought it wise to send a minute to the staff advising them to spend an hour or two a day in the open air, and some members did indeed reach the King's Arms at the corner. But Skate didn't drink.

  And yet in spite of everything he was happy. Showing his pass at the outer gate, nodding to the Home Guard who was a specialist in early Icelandic customs, he was happy. For his nose was now well above water: he had a permanent job, he was a Civil Servant. His ambition had been to be a playwright (one Sunday performance in St. John's Wood had enabled him to register as dramatist in the Central Register), and now that the London theatres were most of them closed, he was no longer taunted by the sight of other men's success.

  He opened the door of his little dark room. It had been built of plywood in a passage, for as the huge staff of the Ministry accumulated like a kind of fungoid life—old divisions sprouting daily new sections which then broke away and became divisions and spawned in turn—the five hundred rooms of the great university block became inadequate: corners of passages were turned into rooms, and corridors disappeared overnight.

  "All well?" his assistant asked: the large-breasted young woman who mothered him, bringing him cups of coffee when he looked peaky and guarding the telephone.

  "Oh, yes, thanks. It's still there. A pane of glass gone, that's all."

  "A Mr. Savage rang up."

  "Oh, did he? What did he want?"

  "He said he'd joined the Air Force and wanted to show you his uniform."

  "Old Savage," Skate said. "He always was a bit wild."

  The telephone rang, and Miss Manners grasped it like an enemy.

  "Yes," she said, "yes, R. S. is back. It's H. G.," she explained to Skate. All the junior staff called people by initials: it was a sort of social compromise, between a Christian name and a Mr. It made telephone conversations as obscure as a cable in code.

  "Hello, Graves. Yes, it's still standing. Will you be at the Book Committee? I simply haven't got any agenda. Can't you invent something?" He said to Miss Manners, "Graves wants to know who'll be at the committee."

  Miss Manners recited quickly down the phone, "R. K., D. H., F. L., and B. L. says he'll be late. All right, I'll tell R. S. Good-bye. " She said to Skate, "H. G. asks why you don't just put Report on Progress down on the agenda."

  "He will have his joke," Skate said miserably. "As if there ever is any progress."

  "You want your tea,"
Miss Manners said. She unlocked a drawer and took out Skate's teaspoon. No teaspoons had been supplied in the Ministry after the initial loss of six thousand in the opening months of the war, and indeed it was becoming more and more necessary to lock everything portable up. Even the blankets disappeared from the A. R. P. shelters. Like the wreck of a German plane the place seemed to be the prey of relic- hunters, so that one could foresee the day when only the heavy Portland stone structure would remain, stripped bare, scorched by incendiaries and pitted with bulletholes where the Home Guard unloaded their rifles.

  "Oh dear, oh dear," Skate said, "I must get this agenda done." His worry was only skin deep: it was all a game played in a corner under the gigantic shadow. Propaganda was a means of passing the time: work was not done for its usefulness but for its own sake—simply as an occupation. He wrote wearily down "The Problem of India" on the agenda.

  Leaving his room Skate stood aside for an odd little procession of old men in robes, led by a mace-bearer. They passed—one of them sneezing—towards the Chancellor's Hall, like humble ghosts still carrying out the ritual of another age. They had once been kings in this place, the gigantic building had been built to house them, and now the civil servants passed up and down through their procession as though it had no more consistency than smoke. Long before he reached the room where the Book Committee sat he heard a familiar voice saying, "What we want is a really colossal campaign..." It was King, of course, putting his shoulder to the war effort: these outbreaks occurred periodically like desire. King had been an advertising man, and the need to sell something would regularly overcome him. Memories of Ovaltine and Halitosis and the Mustard Club sought an outlet all the time, until suddenly, overwhelmingly, he would begin to sell the war. The Treasury and the Stationery Office always saw to it that his great schemes came to nothing: only once, because somebody was on holiday, a King campaign had really got under way. It was when the meat ration went down to a shilling; the hoardings all over London carried a curt King message: "DON'T GROUSE ABOUT MUTTON. WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR GREENS?" A ribald Labour member asked a question in Parliament, the posters were withdrawn at a cost of twenty thousand pounds, the Permanent Secretary resigned, the Prime Minister stood by the Minister who stood by his staff ("I consider we are one of the fighting services"), and King, after being asked to resign, was instead put in charge of the Books Division of the Ministry at a higher salary. Here it was felt he could do no harm. Skate slid in and handed round copies of the agenda unobtrusively, like a maid laying napkins. He didn't bother to listen to King: something about a series of pamphlets to be distributed free to six million people really explaining what we were fighting for. "Tell 'em what freedom means," King said. "Democracy. Don't use long words."Hill said, "I don't think the Stationery Office..." Hill's thin voice was always the voice of reason. He was said to be the author of the official explanation and defence of the Ministry's existence: "A negative action may have positive results."On Skate's agenda was written: