Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (19 page)

“Well, and where have you been?” he asked, the long ash dropping off the cigarette. His voice was friendly, but he showed no real interest.

But the question instantly tore away Morgan’s disguise, and
his eyes began to shine. “I just don’t know where to begin …” he said, and began to pant, as the story of his miraculous morning flew to his lips in a frantic muddle.

Looking away, as if he had not heard anything, Divver said (still in the same resigned and empty voice): “It might be as well for you to let me know before you go off anywhere on your own. Just so I’ll know where you are.”

It was an unexalted, disappointing response, but Morgan replied politely: “Yes, certainly, Max.”

“After all, though I don’t like to say it …” Divver continued in the same monotone, looking drearily at the bedclothes.

“Yes, I understand.”

“… I am sort of responsible for you….”

“Why, of course.”

“… and just so I can at least feel I’m doing what I promised I’ll do….”

“I’ll push a note under your door the next time.”

“Just a few words, nothing complicated. Believe me: I’m no dictator.”

Divver took the cigarette out of his mouth, drew a heavy breath, and with what seemed to require great resolution from him, sat up and heaved the breakfast tray on to the bedside-table. In doing so he gave Morgan a quick glance, taking in the bright new suit and fresh shirt and tie, after which he slowly laid himself back on the pillows and lit a new cigarette. He appeared to have no more to say.

After a pause Morgan said rather timidly: “Aren’t you well, Max?”

Divver again drew a heavy breath, moistened his lips and answered: “Something went wrong. I didn’t get to sleep until 4 o’clock. Then I woke up at seven-thirty. I’d slept well enough on the ship: I don’t know why, suddenly …” All at once he made an effort to be energetic, and said briskly: “Well, let’s
hear what you were up to this morning.” Then the dull expression instantly settled over his face again, and Morgan knew that it would be a generous act if he spared Divver the privilege of sharing his enthusiasm. Nonetheless, the words began to bubble out—all except the secret plot against the pills and Morgan’s other reflections in the grove….

“Well,” Divver said, fifteen minutes later, “I’m glad you got a kick out of your first morning.” He looked at Morgan in a strange way, as though the boy were a creature from another world.

“I assure you, it was more than just a kick. I had the feeling: I don’t know how to say it: I had …”

“I guess I’ve arrived on this continent once too often,” Divver said. “The way I feel now I’d just as soon stay right here in bed.”

“You mean, that’s what you’re going to do?” cried Morgan.

Divver gave a short, contemptuous laugh. “It so happens it’s not what I’m going to do; but I’d have a perfect right to, if I wanted, wouldn’t I?” He looked full at Morgan, a most obvious sneer over his face.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“What’s the time?” Divver asked suddenly.

“It was nearly eleven when I came in.”

“Is all that banging I’ve been hearing all night that clock you are so excited about?”

“I guess so,” said Morgan, looking at Divver uneasily. It struck him that in seeing this new Divver he was already losing sight of the impressive figure that had appeared like a redeemer in his mother’s home; he was faintly shocked at the ease and speed of his disenchantment.

“You’d better write your mother,” said Divver. “Just a card, following last night’s cable, to say you’re up and around.”

“I guess so,” said Morgan, showing a sudden interest in one shoe and swinging it to and fro.

“I shall send one to Lily. It’s completely formal. One doesn’t have to
say
anything; it’s just to reassure the loved ones that manhood’s still in flower.” He gave a quite cynical wink. “What’s it like outside?”

“A terrific day! The sun’s shining; all the people are out now; they’ve got the tables set up in the square….”

“O.K., O.K., don’t overwhelm me; I’ll get up.”

“Are you going to Tutin?”

“I guess the peace of the world can manage without me for a day or so longer.”

Divver swung out of bed, and sat on the edge for a moment, his swarthy legs searching for his red Turkish slippers, his eyes dim and tired, the dropped ash tumbling down to his stomach and knees. He passed into the shiny, sunny bathroom like an old tramp-steamer into a tropical anchorage and closed the door.

Morgan began to pace the floor, back and forth between the window and Divver’s open trunk. The top layer of the trunk had been untidied during the week of travel, but the lower layers still expressed the irreproachable services of a neat wife. Several pairs of shoes in brown-paper scabbards were arranged around two square mounds of books:
The Oxford History of Poland, Elements in the Slavic Genius, Europe in Ferment, Death Walks on Stilts, Laugh and Grow Fat: An Anthology of Comedy from Aristophanes to P. G. Wodehouse,
etc., etc. Two of Divver’s suits still lay with folded arms under the cleaner’s shroud; fresh shirts bore around their chests the familiar blue stripe of a New York laundry, and the words, “Well, sir! I’m waiting!”

Fifteen feet from the trunk Divver’s window looked out on to the Hotel Poland’s back-courtyard. Two horse-drawn drays stood by the baggage entrance, unloading a heap of tourists’ trunks and suitcases, mostly slicked up from edge to edge with hotel and steamer stickers. Outside a row of garages, two
chauffeurs with rolled sleeves and rubber boots were washing down their limousines. Behind the garages the grounds were split by a high wall; on the left stretched the rows of the hotel vegetable garden; on the right were six tennis courts, with white figurines bobbing over them, and a swimming pool ringed with spots of colour from bathing-suits and umbrellas, and sending up to the window the faint cries and splashes of the bathers. In a dream of contentment Morgan stared at the scene of colour and indolence until he was glutted, and wandered back from the window to stare at his reflection in Divver’s full-length mirror. I am certainly no ordinary person he said to his image, looking it up and down with considerable pride. Someday I shall certainly astonish somebody by doing something. The average Pole, he thought—passing again in front of the mirror at full height and vaguely wondering just what an average Pole might be—would certainly not dismiss me as a nobody. Perhaps, after all, one travels to a foreign country not to see it, but to be seen by it.

Divver opened the bathroom door: Morgan swiftly turned his back on the mirror and greeted him with a boyish smile. I shall remind myself not to judge him too hastily, he thought. I owe him everything—all this—he went on to think; and the thought seemed more and more incredible, as he watched Divver slowly putting on his clothes, and looking at himself in the mirror as he tied his tie, without the faintest trace of interest.

“Well,” said Divver, “all dressed for the funeral. The way I feel, Mell isn’t going to bowl me over.”

“Wait till you see it.”

Hundreds of tourists might have stayed away from Mell this year through fear, but as many hundreds seemed to have come precisely because they feared that they might never be able to come again. When Divver and Morgan entered the square it was bordered by innumerable little round tables, each painted
in the colour of its particular café and forming a distinct bunch of painted circles—yellow began where blue ended, leaving only a few inches of cobblestones between; blue ran into red, red into tricolour stripes, tricolour into the dignified cream of the most expensive restaurant: over the tasselled awnings and the stiff umbrellas flapped the flags and streamers of all the nations. Tourist-girls ambled over the square, looking like sun-drunk, painted Indians seeing the world suddenly through the civilized, half-imbecile stare of sun-glasses. The men were walking cut-outs of the most varied international summer dandyism—in pale grey flannels with dazzling silk handkerchiefs in the cuffs and the breast-pockets; lemon shantungs; white and striped seersuckers; olive gabardines; stiff, yellowish-white cricketing flannels below navy blue jackets and emblazoned blazers; brogues parti-coloured in black, brown and blanco; crêpe-soled yellow doe and buckskins; high ambers and suedes; a sea of light hats bobbing on top. There was a steady rattle of high heels on the cobbles, and more voices and languages crossing in the air than there was room for; the women’s voices ringing out clear and hard over everything—so much so that an old, square-built Anglo-Indian, in pure white from head to foot, wearing a solar topee and carrying a stout stick on one elbow and a thin wife on the other, paused from time to time and made weighty half-turns, like a locomotive on a turntable, bending his head incredulously toward some shrill sound.

“What the hell do you plan to do with yourself all day?” Divver asked, stopping suddenly in the middle of the square and looking Morgan up and down sharply. “I’ll be in Tutin mostly; you realize that, don’t you?”

“I just can’t imagine how I’ll have time for all I want to do.”

“But
what
? Just wandering around in circles, like these people?”

“Sure. I could just wander here for ever.”

“You’d better start making a few friends: take my advice. I’ll look out for some for you, too; then you can fill each day with a proper schedule.”

Morgan looked away at the other tourists. Deep in his heart, and guiltily, he was astonished to find that he was already beginning to be ashamed of Divver. Divver was clean and respectable, but among the tourists he looked neither. His suit belonged to that hey-day of inverted intellectual pride which bought its clothes at Barney’s. He walked with a deliberate, resentful slouch, studying the crowd as if he were ashamed of it, and more ashamed of being with it. When he bumped into someone he didn’t simply apologize or just walk on; he turned grimly and stared after the person, muttering, as though something extraordinary had happened.

They entered Bread Street.

July 4th, joint day of St. Bertha and George Washington, was Mell’s biggest occasion of the year, combining foreign drunkenness and local confirmation (the Bishop preached this day in the cathedral) and such things as a procession of natives of Tutin Province in peasant costumes. Charabancs already were emptying new groups of tourists, complete with guides, every fifteen minutes, and then withdrawing in close formation to the shady side of the cathedral, where they lay, head to tail, a string of sleeping elephants. On Bread Street people were walking with one foot on the sidewalk and one in the gutter. Nearly every shop displayed a sign promising to stay open until 10 p.m.—and every single building, or half, or quarter of a building in Bread Street, was a shop. The smaller goldsmiths, father-and-son establishments, were wedged into little grey crevices that allowed no more than a table’s width of window-dressing; a space into which collections of second-rate goldware were packed so tightly that the window resembled some rich and vulgar woman’s jewelbox. These little holes-in-the-wall were dwarfed by the mullioned and bay windows of
the famous emporiums, where a few exclusive samples of gold filigree and ornamental settings were displayed on swathes of black velvet. The doorways were blocked with chattering tourists; inside, the salesmen wore morning coats and high, stiff, white collars with the sharpest tie-knots; they took the items of goldwork out of massive mahogany drawers and laid them before the customers on counters spread with emerald and purple baize. Waiting clients sat, their ankles crossed, on plump leather seats, gossiping with enormous self-importance. From the sidewalk, each of these emporiums presented a similar dumbshow; the tolerant clerk, bland as a croupier, bending gracefully forward, his lips moving delicately, his head at a slight angle, his open, white hands laying out the desirable object; and the far more coarse-looking customer holding up the ornament to study it from a distance, turning with it slowly before a long mirror, pressing it against her breast with two curved fingers and pushing her chin down two or three layers to note the effect, regarding it with eyes so suspicious as to suggest fear that it might change into an asp.

The most exclusive shop of all possessed an interior in such good taste that the customers were visible from outside only as vague shapes, humming and hawing in semi-darkness. Its broad window displayed one object: on a raised square of velvet, resembling the headsman’s block that is brought out only for the neck of a member of the nobility, was an ear-ring of twenty pearl drops, each held in the mouth of a little, intricately-decorated, golden chalice. Underneath was written: “At the Request of H. E. The Maharanee of Purd.”

Divver and Morgan stared at this for some time.

“Of course, this isn’t the
real
Poland,” Divver said.

Only a few shops of this kind could afford not to advertise that Mell goldwork was a local craft. Most of the goldsmiths on Bread Street displayed evidence of this domesticity in a way that charmed the susceptible tourists; they put their craftsmen
in a front window where they could be stared at all day. The bigger shops displayed four or five craftsmen in a row, each with a glass screwed into his eye, burnishing points on a little treadle-wheel, picking up nuggets with tweezers and clamping them with fine pincers into the teeth of pendants, bracelets, and clasps. These workmen might prefer newer machinery, large tables and artificial lights, in a big back room; but it was their duty to charm by being seen; the steep price of an ornament was not exorbitant if it included the privilege of participation in its old-world manufacturing: this made it like a baby, at once innocent and priceless. The appropriate mess of primitive creation was also visible: unlimited dust and filings, oily sharpening-stones, little racks for babyish hand-tools, spirit-burners whose flames were almost invisible in the sunshine, neat little aprons with rolled-leather waistcords, soft cloths: for their enduring of this litter the craftsmen were paid a small extra sum, under the Polish Miner’s Silicosis Ordinance. The workmen scarcely ever raised their eyes to the mobs that scrutinized them, but they could be seen talking to each other almost without pause, barely moving their lips and not looking at one another: they talked in strange languages, because, despite the claims of the guide-books, most of them were highly-paid professionals who came to Mell from Amsterdam and Antwerp in June and were shipped back there at the end of the season.