The Complete Stories (44 page)

  "Allow me to present Engineer Garcia. He is an ardent lover of England."

  "Engineer Garcia," said the newcomer.

  "Scott-King," said Scott-King.

  "I have work seven years with the firm Green, Gorridge and Wright Limited at Salford. You know them well, no doubt?"

  "I am afraid not."

  "They are a very well-known firm, I think. Do you go often to Salford?"

  "I'm afraid I've never been there."

  "It is a very well-known town. What, please, is your town?"

  "I suppose, Granchester."

  "I am not knowing Granchester. It is a bigger town than Salford?"

  "No, much smaller."

  "Ah. In Salford is much industry."

  "So I believe."

  "How do you find our Neutralian champagne?"

  "Excellent."

  "It is sweet, eh? That is because of our Neutralian sun. You prefer it to the champagne of France?"

  "Well, it is quite different, isn't it?"

  "I see you are a connoisseur. In France is no sun. Do you know the Duke of Westminster?"

  "No."

  "I saw him once at Biarritz. A fine man. A man of great propriety."

  "Indeed?"

  "Indeed. London is his propriety. Have you a propriety?"

  "No."

  "My mother had a propriety but it is lost."

  The clamour in the hall was tremendous. Scott-King found himself the centre of an English-speaking group. Fresh faces, new voices crowded in on him. His glass was repeatedly filled; it was over-filled and boiled and cascaded on his cuff. Dr. Fe passed and re-passed. "Ah, you have soon made friends." He brought reinforcements; he brought more wine. "This is a special bottle," he whispered. "Special for you, Professor," and refilled Scott-King's glass with the same sugary froth as before. The din swelled. The tapestried walls, the painted ceiling, the chandeliers, the gilded architrave, danced and dazzled before his eyes.

  Scott-King became conscious that Engineer Garcia was seeking to draw him into a more confidential quarter.

  "How do you find our country, Professor?"

  "Very pleasant, I assure you."

  "Not how you expected it, eh? Your papers do not say it is pleasant. How is it allowed to scandalize our country? Your papers tell many lies about us."

  "They tell lies about everyone, you know."

  "Please?"

  "They tell lies about everyone," shouted Scott-King.

  "Yes, lies. You see for yourself it is perfectly quiet."

  "Perfectly quiet."

  "How, please?"

  "Quiet," yelled Scott-King.

  "You find it too quiet? It will become more gay soon. You are a writer?"

  "No, merely a poor scholar."

  "How, poor? In England you are rich, no? Here we must work very hard for we are a poor country. In Neutralia for a scholar of the first class the salary is 500 ducats a month. The rent of his apartment is perhaps 450 ducats. His taxes are 100. Oil is 30 ducats a litre. Meat is 45 ducats a kilo. So you see, we work.

  "Dr. Fe is a scholar. He is also a lawyer, a judge of the Lower Court. He edits the Historical Review. He has a high position in the Ministry of Rest and Culture, also at the Foreign Office and the Bureau of Enlightenment and Tourism. He speaks often on the radio about the international situation. He owns one-third share in the Sporting Club. In all the New Neutralia I do not think there is anyone works harder than Dr. Fe, yet he is not rich as Mr. Green, Mr. Gorridge and Mr. Wright were rich in Salford. And they scarcely worked at all. There are injustices in the world, Professor."

  "I think we must be quiet. The Lord Mayor wishes to make a speech."

  "He is a man of no cultivation. A politician. They say his mother ..."

  "Hush."

  "This speech will not be interesting, I believe."

  Something like silence fell on the central part of the hall. The Lord Mayor had his speech ready typed on a sheaf of papers. He squinnied at it with his single eye and began haltingly to read.

  Scott-King slipped away. As though at a great distance he descried Whitemaid, alone at the buffet, and unsteadily made his way towards him.

  "Are you drunk?" whispered Whitemaid.

  "I don't think so—just giddy. Exhaustion and the noise."

  "I am drunk."

  "Yes. I can see you are."

  "How drunk would you say I was?"

  "Just drunk."

  "My dear, my dear Scott-King, there if I may say so, you are wrong. In every degree and by every known standard I am very, very much more drunk than you give me credit for."

  "Very well. But let's not make a noise while the Mayor's speaking."

  "I do not profess to know very much Neutralian but it strikes me that the Mayor, as you call him, is talking the most consummate rot. What is more, I doubt very much that he is a mayor. Looks to me like a gangster."

  "Merely a politician, I believe."

  "That is worse."

  "The essential, the immediate need is somewhere to sit down."

  Though they were friends only of a day, Scott-King loved this man; they had suffered, were suffering, together; they spoke, preeminently, the same language; they were comrades in arms. He took Whitemaid by the arm and led him out of the hall to a cool and secluded landing where stood a little settee of gilt and plush, a thing not made for sitting on. Here they sat, the two dim men, while very faintly from behind them came the sound of oratory and applause.

  "They were putting it in their pockets," said Whitemaid.

  "Who? What?"

  "The servants. The food. In the pockets of those long braided coats they wear. They were taking it away for their families. I got four macaroons." And then swiftly veering he remarked: "She looks terrible."

  "Miss Sveningen?"

  "That glorious creature. It was a terrible shock to see her when she came down changed for the party. It killed something here," he said, touching his heart.

  "Don't cry."

  "I can't help crying. You've seen her brown dress? And the hair ribbon? And the handkerchief?"

  "Yes, yes, I saw it all. And the belt."

  "The belt," said Whitemaid, "was more than flesh and blood could bear. Something snapped, here," he said, touching his forehead. "You must remember how she looked in shorts? A Valkyrie. Something from the heroic age. Like some god-like, some unimaginably strict school prefect, a dormitory monitor," he said in a kind of ecstasy. "Think of her striding between the beds, a pigtail, bare feet, in her hand a threatening hairbrush. Oh, Scott-King, do you think she rides a bicycle?"

  "I'm sure of it."

  "In shorts?"

  "Certainly in shorts."

  "I can imagine a whole life lived riding tandem behind her, through endless forests of conifers, and at midday sitting down among the pine needles to eat hard-boiled eggs. Think of those strong fingers peeling an egg, Scott-King, the brown of it, the white of it, the shine. Think of her biting it."

  "Yes, it would be a splendid spectacle."

  "And then think of her now, in there, in that brown dress." "There are things not to be thought of, Whitemaid." And Scott-King, too, shed a few tears of sympathy, of common sorrow in the ineffable, the cosmic sadness of Miss Sveningen's party frock.

  "What is this?" said Dr. Fe, joining them some minutes later. "Tears? You are not enjoying it?"

  "It is only," said Scott-King, "Miss Sveningen's dress."

  "This is tragic, yes. But in Neutralia we take such things bravely, with a laugh. I came, not to intrude, simply to ask, Professor, you have your little speech ready for this evening? We count on you at the banquet to say a few words."

  For the banquet they returned to the Ritz. The foyer was empty save for Miss Bombaum who sat smoking a cigar with a man of repellent aspect. "I have had my dinner. I'm going out after a story," she explained.

  It was half past ten when they sat down at a table spread with arabesques of flower-heads, petals, moss, trailing racemes and sprays of foliage until it resembled a parterre by Le Nôtre. Scott-King counted six wineglasses of various shapes standing before him amid the vegetation. A menu of enormous length, printed in gold, lay on his plate beside a typewritten place-card "Dr. Scotch-Kink." Like many explorers before him, he found that prolonged absence from food destroyed the appetite. The waiters had already devoured the hors-d'oeuvre, but when at length the soup arrived, the first mouthful made him hiccup. This, too, he remembered, had befallen Captain Scott's doomed party in the Antarctic.

  "Comment dit-on en français ‘hiccup'?" he asked his neighbour.

  "Plaît-il, mon professeur?"

  Scott-King hiccuped. "Ça," he said.

  "Ça c'est le hoquet."

  "J'en ai affreusement."

  "Évidemment, mon professeur. Il faut du cognac."

  The waiters had drunk and were drinking profusely of brandy and there was a bottle at hand. Scott-King tossed off a glassful and his affliction was doubled. He hiccuped without intermission throughout the long dinner.

  This neighbour, who had so ill-advised him, was, Scott-King saw from the card, Dr. Bogdan Antonic, the International Secretary of the Association, a middle-aged, gentle man whose face was lined with settled distress and weariness. They conversed, as far as the hiccups permitted, in French.

  "You are not Neutralian?"

  "Not yet. I hope to be. Every week I make my application to the Foreign Office and always I am told it will be next week. It is not so much for myself I am anxious—though death is a fearful thing—as for my family. I have seven children, all born in Neutralia, all without nationality. If we are sent back to my unhappy country they would hang us all without doubt."

  "Yugoslavia?"

  "I am a Croat, born under the Hapsburg Empire. That was a true League of Nations. As a young man I studied in Zagreb, Budapest, Prague, Vienna—one was free, one moved where one would; one was a citizen of Europe. Then we were liberated and put under the Serbs. Now we are liberated again and put under the Russians. And always more police, more prisons, more hanging. My poor wife is Czech. Her nervous constitution is quite deranged by our troubles. She thinks all the time she is being watched."

  Scott-King essayed one of those little, inarticulate, noncommittal grunts of sympathy which come easily to the embarrassed Englishman; to an Englishman, that is, who is not troubled by the hiccups. The sound which in the event issued from him might have been taken as derisive by a less sensitive man than Dr. Antonic.

  "I think so, too," he said severely. "There are spies everywhere. You saw that man, as we came in, sitting with the woman with the cigar. He is one of them. I have been here ten years and know them all. I was second secretary to our Legation. It was a great thing, you must believe, for a Croat to enter our diplomatic service. All the appointments went to Serbs. Now there is no Legation. My salary has not been paid since 1940. I have a few friends at the Foreign Office. They are sometimes kind and give me employment, as at the present occasion. But at any moment they may make a trade agreement with the Russians and hand us over."

  Scott-King attempted to reply.

  "You must take some more brandy, Professor. It is the only thing. Often, I remember, in Ragusa I have had the hiccups from laughing..... Never again, I suppose."

  Though the company was smaller at the banquet than at the vin d'honneur, the noise was more oppressive. The private dining room of the Ritz, spacious as it was, had been built in a more trumpery style than the Hôtel de Ville. There the lofty roof had seemed to draw the discordant voices upwards into the cerulean perspective with which it was painted, and disperse them there amid the floating deities; the Flemish hunting scenes on the walls seemed to envelop and muffle them in their million stitches. But here the din banged back from gilding and mirrors; above the clatter and chatter of the dinner table and the altercations of the waiters, a mixed choir of young people sang folk songs, calculated to depress the most jovial village festival. It was not thus, in his classroom at Granchester, that Scott-King had imagined himself dining.

  "At my little house on the point at Lapad, we used to sit on the terrace laughing so loudly, sometimes, that the passing fishermen called up to us from their decks asking to share the joke. They sailed close inshore and one could follow their lights far out towards the islands. When we were silent, their laughter came to us across the water when they were out of sight."

  The neighbour on Scott-King's left did not speak until the dessert, except to the waiters; to them he spoke loudly and often, sometimes blustering, sometimes cajoling, and by this means got two helpings of nearly every course. His napkin was tucked into his collar. He ate intently with his head bowed over his plate so that the morsels which frequently fell from his lips were not permanently lost to him. He swigged his wine with relish, sighing after each draught and tapping the glass with his knife to call the waiter's attention to the need of refilling it. Often he jammed glasses on his nose and studied the menu, not so much, it seemed, for fear of missing anything, as to fix in his memory the fleeting delights of the moment. It is not entirely easy to achieve a Bohemian appearance in evening dress but this man did so with his shock of grizzled hair, the broad ribbon of his pince-nez, and a three days' growth of beard and whisker.

  With the arrival of the dessert, he raised his countenance, fixed on Scott-King his large and rather bloodshot eyes, belched mildly and then spoke. The words were English; the accent had been formed in many cities from Memphis (Mo.) to Smyrna. "Shakespeare, Dickens, Byron, Galsworthy," he seemed to say.

  This late birth of a troublesome gestation took Scott-King by surprise; he hiccuped noncommittally.

  "They are all great English writers."

  "Well, yes."

  "Your favourite, please?"

  "I suppose Shakespeare."

  "He is the more dramatic, the more poetic, no?"

  "Yes."

  "But Galsworthy is the more modern."

  "Very true."