Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (17 page)

When Divver took a stroll in the garden with Morgan he was greatly encouraged. The boy was polite, and obviously almost hysterically eager to say and do the right thing. At one time he blushed to the roots of his hair and said: “I can tell you, Mr. Divver …”

“Call me Max, Jimmy; for God’s sake, you make me feel like an old Republican.”

“Well,
Max
; I don’t know what my mother’s said about me, but …”

“Some very nice things, Jimmy; don’t you get your mother wrong.”

“Oh, anyway, you’ll not find me in the way, or a problem. I don’t want to raise hell or anything.”

“You ought to take along a tennis racket,” said Divver.

“I haven’t said this to my mother,” said Morgan suddenly,
his voice assuming such deadly seriousness that Divver jumped and glanced at his face. “But I hope very much that this trip may do some important things for me.”

“You mean you’re going to find yourself some Polish
dairy-maid
?” said Divver, smiling.

“How funny, Mr. Divver, that’s just what my grandfather said. No, I mean—I hope it’s going to change my health.” He turned red again.

“I sure hope so,” said Divver warmly.

“That’s a good reason to go, no?” said Morgan.

“It sure is. Do you think much about getting there?”

“All the time. You too?”

“Not this time, I don’t. I guess I’ve been too often.”

What Diver did dream of now, when his whole past weighed on him and his future looked simply shameful, was neither America nor Europe, but the high seas that run between—
no-man’s
-land turned into water. By the time he and Lily got into bed on the night before he left, they were both exhausted with last-minute matters; but Divver felt there was still one last-minute question to settle before they went to sleep: should he or should he not try to make love to his wife? She ought to have something to keep her going, its only fair, he thought—as though he were in duty bound to leave a deposit on a place he would want to take again some time. When Lily had put on her nightgown, he even felt that it would be nice for him too—but he was greatly relieved when she climbed into bed and managed to seem asleep before he had followed her in. He lay beside her and stared to the foot of the bed at the dim blocks which were his suitcases, neatly packed and labelled. He asked himself angrily: What am I so ashamed of? What am I doing that’s so wicked? What am I doing that I haven’t done ever since I began going abroad? Why should it be different this time?

He could find no answer to these questions; all that came
into his mind was pictures of his life during the last twenty years. He saw himself when he first came to New York, listening to the students who had expounded the revelations; he thought of his first wife, and her listening to him as he re-expounded those revelations; he thought of his return from Italy and that decisive moment in his editor’s room when he knew he would never have to become a school-teacher. He thought of the steady building-up of himself that had gone on in the next confident years—his firm tread as he had marched into his second state of matrimony; his balance and gravity at deciding with Lily to try and have a child. (“It’s much better if it’s done soon,” she had said); the serious way he had written editorials, arranged furniture, dressed himself, chosen friends, argued and thought. He could find no real fault in any of it; all he could find to account for the shame he felt was that he had no right to connect Europe with happiness. For a moment, as he lay in bed, he thought he might analyse this happiness, so as to find out what it was—but instead he found himself imagining where he would be this time tomorrow … at once darkness surrounded him and an exhilarating wind blew in his face; he stood at the ship’s-rail, the shaded deck-lights behind him, and heard the music of the ship’s orchestra faintly against the rushing of the sea—the endless water that upheld him in a boundless present, where friendship, loyalty, truth, love and courage were demanded and desired by none; the intermediate world of rootlessness. Alongside, a narrow, visible breadth of water was lit up by the ship’s lights; it careered toward the ship’s wake at such a speed that it was hard not to believe that the ship would reach its destination almost as soon as it had started. Then he remembered the incessant miles of breathing water that lay between him and his destination, and his thought now was that no ship, whatever its frantic speed, could ever reach port. Between these opposing conclusions, one warning of excess, the other
assuring
that no excess could be enough, Divver rested, safe in the temporary fluid where nothing mattered at all. It was not
complete
oblivion; in the middle of it all he could hear his heart thumping and his voice crying: “I must find dignity, or I shall die.”

I
N a blooming cathedral town, streets run like supply lines to the cathedral’s doors, taking their names naturally from bread, milk, brewers, vintners, rarely from bishops and landlords, whose vanity must rest content with memorable tombs. In time, these streets and their heart of piety form the centre of Old Town, on whose fringe, abruptly in a few decades, the chimneys and villas of industrial New Town spring up.

Mell had never grown into New Town. Its gold mines had been worked before Columbus, and had bought it influence and a bishop; but with the coming of gold from the New World, Mell had gone to sleep, and had been kissed awake, looking not a day older or younger, by an Englishman in knickerbockers on a bicycle, three hundred years later.

In his book
Wheeling
Round
the
Baltic
this Agent of the Forces (for that was his name) had given Mell a full chapter. The inhabitants, who had never seen an Englishman or a Force before, treated him with great friendliness: when he woke up on his first morning in Mell, he found that the cottager’s son had washed his bicycle, and the mother had brushed and ironed his dusty knickerbockers. He stayed a full week in Mell, instead of the one night he had planned, and wrote in his book of the extraordinary courtesy of these somnolent, semi-literate people, with their decaying cathedral and primitive gold-mines. He also remarked that during his stay
he
never
met
a
single
Englishman
—so striking a statement that a dozen Englishmen, after cunningly spreading false trails among their friends and relatives, sped surreptitiously to Mell the very next summer, and came home saying that it was indeed a lovely place, without even cesspools, but that
the 
English
were
already
beginning
to
spoil
it.
By 1912 the cottage selected by the Forces to house their bicycling Agent had been impelled to add on four rooms and to call itself the Hotel Bristol. Soon after it was found that more thorough gold-mining would be profitable if the product could be sold to tourists; and Mell began to be reputed as a curiosity—one of Europe’s few remaining gold areas.

New trade breeds old customs, and by 1925 the traditions of Mell had grown so vigorously that the townsfolk themselves wondered how they had ever done without them. “There is in Mell,” said one of the new guide-books, “a centuries-old pride in fine workmanship in gold, handed down from the Middle Ages in an unbroken line from father to son. The craft of ‘Mell Gold,’ known but to a few, is one of Tutin province’s most jealously guarded secrets, comparable to the Stradivarius tradition in violin-making, but considerably older.” Bread Street, the largest of the old cathedral alleys, became an avenue of goldsmiths; its owners had the sense to leave its outlines unspoiled, its corners blind to motorists. From June to September tourist brides bought the little nuggets named “Mell Dowries” (“for centuries the brides of Mell have pinned these in their hair”); others bought enamelled beauty-compacts, engine-turned in Tutin and Danzig, with a raw pea of Mell gold sunk in the cover; or gold cigarette boxes which played
Hark, hark, the lark!
; an occasional tiara was also sold. Golden weddings were a specialty; octogenarian couples hobbled thousands of miles to this one place in the world where they were in the swim.

The usual developments accompanied the revival of the town. Middle-class residences became
pensions
; go-ahead fathers compressed their children into backrooms, and made the front rooms a home for Kodak supplies, postcards, soft drinks, Tauchnitz books,
Uhu,
Camels and Players. American children, peeping into the mullioned store-windows of the Old
World, saw Beechnut, Klapp and Hemo. The cathedral was restored in the parts that no longer existed, and when someone thought he recalled, that in the sixteenth century the central dome had had a peculiar timepiece, in which God struck the hours by hitting the Devil with a club, this too was restored, by a firm of Swiss clockmakers. The inscrutable Force that had made Mell a rare combination of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Klondike, modified by Teutonic influences, was exploited in interlocking agreements too numerous and enclaused to describe: the signers included the Pilsudski Charabanc Company of Turin, the Gdynia Traction Co., the Hotel Poland, the Warsaw Railways, Katinka’s Fur Emporium, The Mell Association of Goldholders, The Ancient Bank of Danzig, The Amalgamation of Mell
Pensions,
and Mike’s Last Bid—a small gold-mine in the Union of South Africa, owned by an Irishman who had changed the name of his property to Mell and who supplied “Mell” nuggets when tourist demand was more than the mother-town could meet.

On the old site of the Bishop’s Palace stood the Hotel Poland, Mell’s largest, most expensive hotel. Here, at dawn on July 4, Morgan jumped out of bed, took one look out of the window, and dressed with the speed of a person who has not a moment to lose. The rest of the hotel was still asleep; in the room adjoining Morgan’s Divver lay asleep too, his fists clenched, gently gnashing his teeth.

Outside the two rooms a long corridor, carpeted in green, ran past numbered doors until it was halted at either end by a green shrub in a copper tub. Frosted lights hugged the ceiling; little squares of white cardboard hung by strings to the door handles, saying, “Do Not Disturb.”

Morgan moved down the corridor at a tripping step. He wore a brand-new summer suit; his hair, watered and combed, shone under the lights. In his pigskin wallet was a wad of pink and blue Polish banknotes of whose value he had not the
faintest idea. Smiling and bowing at the doors, the frosted lights, the warning notices and his polished shoes, he declaimed to himself:

Electric arrows on the passage walls indicated the direction of the elevators. With instant stubbornness he walked in the opposite direction, in search of a means of leaving and entering the hotel that would be exclusively his own.

At the end of the passage, on either side of the tall palm, was a door, one of metal, one of green baize.

He opened the baize door, and at first found it difficult to see anything in the dim world beyond. Then he saw that it was some special part of the hotel. The passage in which he stood continued through the doorway, but once across the threshold it doubled its width, and its trim green carpeting was displaced by a heavier, red, Oriental nap. The ceiling sprang ten feet higher, the ceiling lights collected and dropped into one huge chandelier, its long crystals attached to a rich gilt crown suspended from the ceiling by a chain. To the left was a short row of black-oak doors, their lintels carved inches deep with leaves and fruit. On the first door, under an elaborate heraldic shield, was painted in flowing script: “The Archduke Suite.”

Exactly at that moment this door opened and a portly, white-haired man stepped out, wearing, of all things, a common American worksuit of blue denim. He crossed the passage and stepped straight into what appeared to be a gold cage set in the opposite wall, where he remained motionless for a few seconds; all at once his legs disappeared, followed by his body and head, and there was a faint sucking noise of uncoiling greased steel rope.

Morgan closed the baize door and opened the metal one. Here, the trim corridor dropped sharply away into a flight of rough stone backstairs; the walls were stained and damp, a bare bulb hung over the stairwell from a length of flex. Morgan ran down at once—past floors littered with rusty buckets, dripping taps, mops, squeegees, corrugated drums of wax and oil —until he saw light at the end of a long passage, and emerged into the Hotel Poland’s backyard of broken, lumpy cobblestones. At his back the hotel’s six stories of grimy brickwork climbed to a summit of water tanks, swinging air-vents and bunches of stumpy chimneys. But without pausing Morgan rounded the side of the hotel, still at a half-run, holding his breath in anticipation—and in a flash the marvellous world he had seen from his window was in front of him again.

The morning sun was still so low that its white light disbursed not warmth but coolness. To Morgan’s right, the white facade of the hotel—its name printed in gilded capitals across the third storey, its entrance of broad marble steps flanked by flowering shrubs—looked out on a cobbled square as large as a playing-field. An immense lime tree, its foliage spreading shade to twenty houses, stood at one long end of the square; at the opposite end Mell Cathedral’s green, fluted dome, ringed at the base by a circlet of little domes and topped by a short spire with a gold cross at the tip, raised itself out of a crush of old houses which hid its lower half. The big dome and its little satellites were still dewey; they sparkled in the early sun, except where strips and patches had dried off into jagged patches of a deeper green.

The charm of the square was not in uniformity but in harmonious variety. Six streets, hardly wider than alleys, ran out of it at eccentric points and careless angles. The fronts of the little blocks emerged as architectural islands whose styles were not even distantly related. Most of the block directly opposite the Hotel Poland was made up simply of square, plain
pen
sions 
and cafés, limewashed in blues, greens, and yellows, and sporting their names in coloured script and block letters; metal tables, chairs and furled sunshades were folded to the walls, awaiting a sign from the sleeping tourists. Only an alley’s width from them stood a row of the strangest houses Morgan had ever seen: they began with a flat, withdrawn, ground floor and then proceeded to veer upwards and outwards into three-storey frontispieces of carved wooden balconies, thick with little struts and pillars, small windows in which the diamond panes were virtually crushed by elaborate frames, and so far withdrawn behind the balconies that they were scarcely visible from across the square. Their uniform gables ran upward at the edges in fat convolutions of dark wood, and were decorated in the angle of the peak with complicated allegorical carvings.

The next block was simply the town hall, police station, post office and mayoral headquarters, assembled in one sprawling, stone building. This architecture was simply that which is common to mayors, postage and criminals throughout Western Europe. Notices concerning postage, mobilization and crime were attached to one of the outer walls.

This block was divided from the Gothic houses that hid the lower part of the Byzantine cathedral by a sudden burst of Italian Renaissance, whose function was explained by a tall board at the entrance, bearing the words: S. LAUREL, O. HARDY.

Renaissance, Gothic, Byzantine, peasant and civil service were united at the base by the spread of the cobblestones, and gently linked at the top by telephone wires that zig-zagged lightly from epoch to epoch off pairs of ivory-white insulators.

Half the square was still black with the shadow of the houses on the east side. Morgan walked westward, hurrying over the cold dark stones, until he stepped over the dividing line and all at once stood in the sunlight, the only living object in sight. His heart raced, he was so confounded by his entrance into the
square’s spacious unblemished emptiness that he remained halted, turning his eyes dimly from side to side, staring with the vagueness of astonishment at the bright pattern of hundreds of stones spreading away from under his feet, the blue sky, the sleeping, lifeless buildings, the glittering golden cross on the green dome. He could not adjust himself to the dominating silence of the cool, white morning; he strained his ears but could not catch a breath of sound; his wandering eyes caught a flashing change of colour when a window-shade sprang suddenly up the pane in one of the
pensions,
but no sound of its whirring spring broke out into the square. He felt that if he stood any longer, so rigid in body and roving in vision, the scene around him would slowly begin to turn on his axis, the assorted houses in their varying architectures and disparity of colour spinning gently on a single rim, first to his right, in a half-circle, then, after a check, back again and round to his left. Shaking the dizziness out of his head, he began to walk again, too bemused to lift his legs into a stride. Through the soles of his shoes he could feel the polished curved surface of each stone.

When he looked up again the bulk of the cathedral was still hidden, but he could see clearly a balcony that ran around the base of the big dome. Now, a door flapped up at one end of this balcony, and the Devil emerged, askance and coated with verdigris, and began a bent and shaky progress round the edge of the dome. He was followed instantly by God, who was also oxidized but very grim, his bearded head bobbing as he tremulously struck the Devil between the shoulders with a club. At the first strike the Devil shuddered, and a clear, metallic clang rang over the square, quite breaking the silence and flinging a whistling flock of pigeons into the sky. After the seventh blow God desisted; and he and the Devil turned their backs on Morgan and jogged along with halting amiability until they disappeared into a hole. A door slammed down behind them,
the pigeons swept back to their perch behind the dome, and the air was again empty except for the fading sound waves of the seventh blow.

Morgan had breakfast in the only one of the cafés that was open. It was served by a sleepy, beefy girl whose eyelids were still half stuck together and who had put only just enough pins into her wads of flaxen hair to keep it out of the coffee. He thought she was the finest looking woman he had ever seen; he spent some minutes considering how passionately she would love him in their small Polish cottage. Then he took out his new billfold, and for the first time in his life he made a payment in foreign currency. Rising, he tipped the girl—so richly, that with the other hand she clutched her heart.

The square was filled with sunlight when he came out—walking in a trance, following his awed feet. Beside the arched entrance, blocked by a big metal door, of one of the old grey houses on the cathedral side, he saw two priests, one of them tall and dignified, wearing a biretta; the other, bareheaded, young, stout, and dowdy. A workman with heavy moustaches lowered his hand into a socket at the base of the metal door and threw it up into the arch with a roll and a crack. He exposed the familiar black depths of a garage, in the foreground of which stood a remarkable automobile.