I'll Never Be Young Again (17 page)

‘What’s wrong with that chap?’ I said to Jake;‘have you noticed his hands and his eyes?’

‘Yes,’ said Jake, ‘I’ve been keeping a watch on him for a quarter of an hour. He’s scared stiff. Don’t say anything, but keep your eye on that door.’

I did not answer, but I shifted in my chair so that I could now see the man and the room, and the swing doors of the café without turning my head. My eyes dropped again on to the table, I began to lose myself in a train of thought, picturing the island where we had bathed that afternoon, and the white sails of the little boats dancing against the sun, and how it was that Stockholm should hold this café and that island, the two merging, making an impossible pattern, when Jake spoke again, his voice low, just in my ear.

‘Did you see that?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Did you see how one by one they disappeared, with a glance at the clock, and now there remains no one but this fellow at the next table, the barman and ourselves.’ I looked up and saw that in five minutes, whilst I had been dreaming, the café had emptied, the room was silent and the smoke hung heavy in the air.

‘They’ve only cleared,’ I said, ‘it’s five to one. Maybe this place shuts at one.’

‘No,’ said Jake, ‘these places don’t shut.’

‘Well - what is it then?’

‘Wait - there’s something wrong.’

I glanced at him and his head was thrown back, and he was smiling.

‘While you’ve been dreaming I’ve been looking at things,’ he said; ‘the barman went round to all the tables and cleared the glasses away. On each table he left a slip of white paper. When the crowd saw that, they laughed, or shrugged their shoulders, or didn’t say a word. But they all glanced at the clock, and they went - every one of ’em. Look here.’

I saw that on our table too there was a slip of blank paper, which the man must have left when he cleared our glasses.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

Jake laughed softly. ‘It’s the notice to quit,’ he said.

I looked towards the bar, and I saw the man gazing at us curiously, his arms folded, and then next us the scared fellow watching us too, his fingers tapping upon the table.

‘Do you want to go?’ said Jake.

I listened to the silence, and the sound of my heart beating, and I knew I was excited, excited enough to be afraid.

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head,‘no, let’s stay and see this through.’ There was no sound, nobody spoke, and we went on sitting at the table.

‘Jake,’ I said softly, ‘try English on this fellow - ask him what’s going to happen.’

Jake moved ever so slightly in his chair, his shoulder turned towards the man, yet keeping his eye on the door all the while. ‘You seem in trouble about something,’ he said; ‘can we do anything to help?’

The man made no movement to show that he had heard. He did not turn at the sound of Jake’s voice. We knew then that he could not understand, that he had not even realized we were speaking to him, he thought we were talking amongst ourselves.

The few words of Norwegian and Danish were no good to us, and Swedish was an unknown language. This fellow was a Swede.

Jake got up, and taking the slip of white paper between his fingers he went to the next table and held it before the man’s eyes, pointing to the clock and to the door.

The man shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, and then he began to speak very rapidly in a low hurried voice, spreading out his hands on the table, passing his tongue over his lips, and it seemed to me that he was in mortal terror of something, and he was trying to explain.

He spoke in Swedish, and we did not understand.

‘What is it, Jake?’ I said.

He made no answer, but he crossed the café to the bar and held the slip of paper before the fellow who waited there. This man did not speak, he only stared at Jake, and then quietly, as though Jake was not there, he went on polishing the dirty glasses. Jake came back to the table once more and sat down beside me.

‘Dick,’ he said, ‘I’ve an idea this place is a hang-out for settling a quarrel. See how close we are to the water? It would be easy enough after you’ve laid out a fellow - to drop him in there. It would look like a drunk - having tripped over his feet on the cobbled stones - and finding the river instead. The crowd who were here tonight knew the meaning of the slip of paper. They got it at a quarter to one - it’s now two minutes to. Whatever’s going to happen, Dick, is going to happen at one.’

According to his theory, then, we had only two minutes longer. And still the barman polished his glasses, and still the other fellow tapped his fingers on the table.

It was sinister, queer.

‘Why did the crowd clear?’ I asked.

‘It wasn’t their affair,’ said Jake; ‘they don’t want a mix-up. They’ll all be dumb, they won’t say anything. Besides, there’s the police to reckon with.’

‘Police?’

‘Yes. This sort of thing’s against the law, Dick. The bar-tender knows it, that’s why he didn’t take any notice of us. He’s not sure who we are. He’s not going to give the show away.’

‘What do we do, Jake?’

‘We sit here - and wait.’

I did not see how anything could happen at a water-side café in Stockholm. There was no darkness here, no little mean streets and squalor; this was a cold white city, infinitely remote, there could not be hatred and murder under this light. Scarcely two hours ago we had been in a theatre, listening to a girl singing Swedish words to an American song, and we had come out and stood upon a bridge, and had heard a dance band playing from an hotel.

I looked up and saw the hands of the clock pointed to one. Then the door of the café swung open, and four men came into the room, and walked, without looking to right or left of them, straight to the table next us, where the pale scared Swede was waiting.

I felt my heart beating, loudly it seemed, like the ticking of a clock, and the palms of my hands were wet. I fumbled for a packet of cigarettes. The four men sat down at the table, and in the midst of them our first fellow looked like a fly in a web, a poor frightened thing overshadowed by his companions. He sat huddled in his seat, limp and unprotesting; he would make no effort to stand for himself, but would be blown swiftly - suddenly, as a flickering flame of a candle.

The four men pressed closer to him, their faces near to his, and one of them began to speak in a quiet, monotonous voice, and it seemed as though his tones were persuasive, as though he were suggesting that our fellow must see reason, and he smiled ever and again, showing a row of gold teeth, and a slow, false smile.

The scared fellow shook his head, he uttered one or two words, broken they sounded, and unfinished, and then he gazed up at these men who surrounded him to watch for the expressions in their eyes, and his face was grey like one who expects sentence of death. For perhaps two minutes there was silence and no movement, and then with one accord they all turned in their seats and looked at us.

I felt the question in their eyes, the wonder and the doubt, the mute wave of antagonism borne towards us. We went on smoking our cigarettes and the man with the gold teeth and the false smile spoke to us, but it was in Swedish, and we did not understand. He called out to the bar-tender, hovering behind his glasses, and the fellow shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. Once more the man with the gold teeth spoke, an order this time, for it was sharp and decisive, and the bar-tender crossed the café and shot the bolt into the door, and then turned without a word and climbed the rickety staircase to the landing overhead. We heard him open the door of some room, and then he must have gone inside, for he closed it, and there was no sound from him again. We were alone now, with the four men and the little scared fellow huddled in his chair, he glancing towards us like an animal in pain, showing the whites of his eyes.

The man with gold teeth spoke to Jake, no longer smiling, pointing to the bolted door, and Jake shook his head.

They all rose slowly from the table, forming themselves in a group, one of them laying his hand on the shoulder of the frightened Swede.

I looked at Jake, and he looked at me, and I saw him smile and straighten himself in his chair. And it seemed to me that the walls of the café dropped away and the grey light was changed, and we were standing in a circus tent with the hot sun streaming through a slit in the tent. There was a ring, and a crowd of men pushing their way up to the ropes, shouting and laughing, and Jake stood stripped with his arms folded, and this same smile upon his lips.

The air was hot, and there was a smell of sawdust, and trampled grass, worn leather gloves, and the warm hungry flesh of animals in a close cage.

A bell rang, and Jake moved across the ring towards me . . .

But in that flash we were back in the café again, and Jake was at my side, and the four men stood around their table staring at us.

Then I knew that there was going to be a fight, and I was glad, and I was not afraid.

The four men spread a little distance from one another, and came closer, and hemmed us in.

Suddenly the one with gold teeth pressed forward, but Jake was waiting for him, and I heard the crack of his naked fist on the man’s jaw, and his head swing back. Then there was a shout, and a cry of pain and a table fell over, and I saw one of the men coming towards me, and I hit him, but he caught me somewhere above my eye and I went crashing down on to the floor, dragging a leg of a chair with my hands. I felt the blood run down into my mouth, and the pain of the blow throbbed like the crack of a whip and I remember thinking to myself: ‘I must not give in - I must not give in,’ so I rose unsteadily from the ground, where I had fallen, the hatred strong in my soul for the man who had hit me, and I saw him reaching for a chair to swing above his head, but I ducked and threw myself against him, my head in his stomach, and we went down again - this time he was beneath me, his fingers fumbling for my throat. I hit him again and again, smashing into his face, and I heard him whimper, and he struggled under me.

I lifted my head and saw two fellows trying to get Jake, but he shook himself clear of them, and knocked one backwards across a table, and he called out to me: ‘You all right, Dick?’ and he was still smiling, and his hair was falling over his face.

The chap with the gold teeth was crouching with his back to me, and swiftly his hand went to his pocket, and there was a flash of steel and ‘Look out, Jake,’ I cried, and Jake leapt aside, his arm over his face, while the knife whistled through the air and quivered against the wall behind him, two inches above his head.

I rose to my feet and swung into this man who had thrown the knife and missed, and he was taken unawares, and dropped like a stone, both of my fists smashing into his two eyes. And it was good to know that he was hurt, it was good to feel his mouth soft and bleeding under my hands, and I heard myself laughing, with the breath shaken from me in sobs, while a pain hammered under my ribs, and this is all right, I thought, this is all right.

Someone came up at me, and I did not care, I hit him and he went down, and then he came again, and this time I fell, but not before Jake had seen, and in a stroke he had sent my fellow crashing against the window, and there was a splintering crack of breaking glass. Now the lamps had shuddered in their brackets, and two were smashed by a chair thrown into the air, so that we moved about in the dim white light as shadowy figures, scarcely discernible, and I, struggling against the bar with some fellow, his hot breath on my face, saw someone run like a little beetle to the door, and struggle with the heavy bolt. I heard Jake’s warning shout, for once more there was a whistle in the air, and the little beetle was none other than the frightened Swede, whose life we would have saved, but he threw out his hands as though to grapple with an unseen danger, and I heard his last scream of terror, his choke and his cry, and he went down on to the floor with a knife in his back.

I broke away from my man; I must have winded him somehow, for he fell loosely with a grunt of pain, and I ran to the door and stood above the wounded Swede, and tried to pull the knife out from between his shoulder-blades, but it would not come, and the blood splashed over me, and anyway he was dead. Near me men were fighting, I heard the scuffle of their feet and I saw Jake’s face, white against a beam of light from the window, and his smile as he struck the jaw of a fellow who rose up towards him, and then I opened the heavy door and the white light streamed into the café, breaking the shadows into clarity. One of my eyes now was closed, the blood from it dry on my cheek, and my body might have been beaten all over; but none of this mattered and I was happy in a silly drunken fashion, not even sick at the poor dead Swede at my feet.

It was my voice that shouted in a high unnatural key: ‘Come on, Jake, come on,’ and they were my hands that fastened themselves round the throat of a man, and my feet that kicked something lying on the ground. For this was flesh against my flesh, and teeth that broke with my fist and the warm blood of a man I hated, and his cry of pain - crying because of me.

‘Hullo, Jake,’ I shouted,‘hullo,’ and then I laughed for no reason, except that my pain was as great as the pain I had caused, and this was glory, I thought, and this was hell, and here was a man’s fingers at my throat, and here was a great limp body under me, and ‘Fight, you unholy bastard, fight,’ I said.

Then from away down the street there was the shrill summons of a whistle, answered by another, and the call of voices, and the patter of footsteps running swiftly, and I heard Jake’s voice near me, and the touch of his hand on my arm.

‘Come, Dick,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to run for it,’ and I shook a man’s grasp from my collar and followed Jake out in the street, where the white light shone as clear as dawn, and the water glittered.

A whistle sounded close now, round the corner of the café, and the rush of feet was near.