Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by Nigel Dennis

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Same with me, deep inside.”

  They had scarcely had time to appreciate the shocking truth of this admission when they were shocked again by the conviction that it wasn’t entirely true. For a few moments they hung uneasily in the nasty atmosphere of over-hasty confession, ashamed either to re-affirm or to retract. Divver broke it up by suddenly becoming practical.

  “We may as well face up to things,” he said. “I don’t want to write home any more than you do. Right?”

  “Right,” said Morgan.

  “O.K. But we both have to write home. So, the sooner the better. We’ll both write now. We’ll take an hour by the clock. It’s now seven. Eight o’clock, our letters must be finished—some sort of letters. O.K.?”

  Immediately, they ran for pens and paper, and sat down and wrote.

  Morgan wrote as though he had not yet received his mother’s letter. He wrote as fast as he could, in order not to have to think about what he was writing. He paused only long enough to allow innocuous ideas to pop into his mind, and then stretched these trifles into paragraphs. He told his mother what Mell looked like. He described the old car. He described the Fourth of July. “It is all very peaceful here,” he concluded hurriedly, “and you would never know that anything was threatening.”

  They were both finished well before the hour was up. Divver, looking extraordinarily callous, shoved the two envelopes into his pocket. “We’ll mail them down below,” he said, striking the pocket. “And don’t tell me you feel cheap, because I know you do, and I do too. Warbling about guilt isn’t going to help. The deed’s done, and in the past. O.K.?

  *

  They both seemed to sense that it would be safer not to talk too much; so the next few days were peaceful, and each wore the distant but amiable look of men who are exchanging hair shirts for clean slates. Divver entrained for Tutin every morning, and would simply remark, vaguely and affably, before he went: “Looks like it’ll stay clear,” or “Another day begun, ho, ho.” When he came home in the evening, Morgan would ask seriously how the day had been, and Divver would knit his brows and describe an interview with a man in the Chamber of Commerce: “It was pretty interesting.” This mutual emphasis on matters that were of no interest to either of them made them feel very fond of each other.

  Divver also engaged a reader, the local organist, to visit their rooms at breakfast-time and translate the chief news in the morning paper. He would listen to the reading with a grave, dead-pan expression, occasionally twitching a facial muscle to show that his mind and heart were more troubled than his manner suggested. When the reading was over, he appeared relieved, but he would always shake his head and say quietly: “God knows where it’s all going to end,” or, “I guessed that would be the next little item on the programme,” and stand still, reflectively, before giving a great sigh and reaching for his hat. He was almost unceasingly active, but from time to time he would sit or stand still, and stare at nothing with a look that was either entirely blank or a mixture of exhausted submissiveness and inhibited rage.

  Once Divver had gone off into his empty world, Morgan entered on his own daily routine. He drew self-respect from the fact that not only had he promised Harriet that he would not disturb her, but that he had enough strength of character to keep his word absolutely. He saw her husband leave for the mines every morning, shortly before Divver left for Tutin; but when the black sedan had disappeared, he never picked up the ’phone and called Harriet. He thought about her all day, and he might easily have written her a friendly note, simply inquiring after her happiness; but he never allowed himself to.

  Instead, he explored Mell from end to end. He found that the most natural way to do this was first to descend in the elevator, like everyone else. This brought him out into the lobby, facing the little gold elevator of the Annex; he kept his eyes strictly away from it, but sometimes people bumped him, and threw his glance off-pledge. With a vexed mutter he would then walk across the lobby to the revolving door, steadying himself by looking objectively at the many passing faces. When he reached the square he turned sharply to the right, because the walk he liked best lay in that direction. Sometimes, the corner of his eye caught the little balcony of the Archduke Suite; and he was amused to note that any other person beside himself could, if he wished, actually see between the red curtains across to the farther wall of the drawing-room—that is, if the person happened to be strolling by at a certain distance, when the light was favourable, around 10 a.m., which was the time Morgan himself liked to go out. He would then pass the round cathedral, each of whose twelve, small, encircling domes was supported, aesthetically speaking, by a huge figure of one of the twelve apostles, with the main entrance tactfully substituting for Judas. At all times of the day, men and women could be seen arranging themselves on the ledges that supported the legs of the chipped, half-faceless statues, while friends, or Mell’s official photographers, bowed toward them over cameras. After a dip in the black lake, and a little meandering up and down its jetties and esplanades, where many women seemed to love to bask in the sun, Morgan liked to re-enter Mell from the other end of the square, where he found himself passing the whole spread of café tables, and where it was extraordinary to note what a variety of interesting types was present—literally hundreds of people, each distinguishable from her neighbour. He found himself so entertained by examination of the numerous faces that he developed a fancy for lunching at a different place each day and seeing if there was any face he could recognize: he called this “memory-test,” and went so far as to make jottings about it in a notebook. Now that he had become so interested in faces, he was worried to realize that though he could see, and later recall, dozens of strangers’ faces, he could not picture Harriet’s face at all, and he often thought it would be nice to get just a glimpse of it one day, so that he would have a picture of her to frame privately in his mind forever. This might easily happen, he often thought, smiling with surprise: chance and circumstance, which no promise can defeat, operate freely in a town as small as Mell.

  At last, this reflection proved absolutely true. One morning, when he and Divver had only two more days’ grace at the Poland, and he had been inquiring after rooms in various pensions (two of which had fine views of the Archduke Suite), he ran right into Harriet on Bread Street.

  She seemed delighted to meet him; her eyes shone with pleasure, her lips made the wide, warm smile he remembered so well. “I wondered if I’d run into you, Jimmy,” she said. “And on such a lovely day!”

  He scarcely knew how he recognized her; he seemed to recognize, and instantly, not her face but whatever it was in her that made him want to collapse on to the sidewalk. But thereafter, he found himself staring through a veil of bewilderment at a woman whom only his senses credited with being the woman he was now in love with. She had had her hair shortened and curled, so that instead of the sweep of hair he remembered so sentimentally there was a bare nape, like a baby’s, with the hair pushed above the ears, kiss-curled and frizzy, and something like a toy top-hat perched on the top. Her lips were cherubic, her brown eyes large. Her blouse was too simple for words, with pearly-white buttons running down it, and the result was not severity but childlike innocence. Her two-piece linen suit was of pale coffee, and cut so short in the skirt and so cutely from waist to neck that it made her look like a dainty girl, an old man’s dream, with nothing to hide, not even breasts. Girlish poise and self-satisfaction were written all over her.

  Before he could say anything, she pressed close up against him, as though she were placing a hand tightly over his mouth. She took his fingers and gripped them. “What have you been doing with yourself?” she asked, her voice carrying a mixture of urgent self-protection and chumminess that made him shrink.

  “Oh, walking about,” he croaked.

  “I suppose if you like that …,” she said, laughing, and then, as though she felt she had safely rounded a dangerous corner, she suddenly turned brisk. Her f
ace grew animated, every feature showed a painfully chickenish alertness. “Will you come shopping with me, Jimmy dear?” she asked, and to his surprise, in full view of all Mell, wriggled her hand behind his elbow and led him down Bread Street, her fingers confidently patting his forearm.

  He felt like a huge baby being jerked along in a harness. His arm shrank from her lively fingers, he felt miserably distressed, he kept saying to himself: And she was so beautiful, so beautiful, just what I thought real women were; now she’s all cute, like a toy mother, scrubbed and dolled-up.

  “First, let me see … cigarettes,” she said happily, “so we turn in here, I think, don’t we? … Quite soon I want you to come and visit us, and bring that nice friend of yours you talked about: he ought to meet Larry. Larry’s quite important here, you know, the important person, no matter what the Ministry of Mines may pretend, and he’d like to meet a journalist, I know; and I know he’d like to meet you too, and so would I, if we could somehow arrange it. Have you met many nice people yet?”

  “No.”

  “Because you should, you know. Things do look so terribly bad and everyone says this will be the last tourist season; you shouldn’t waste your holiday. Now, what next … my cold cream and Larry’s Gillette blades…. This way; I’m an old-timer in Mell, you know; my home-town is where I happen to be…. Do you mind my dragging you around like this? I know most men hate it.”

  She turned her face to him, and the spectacle of elaborate innocence and gaiety was an insult of the most revolting kind both to him and to the woman she had been. He ceased to be miserable and became furious. He snatched his arm away from her and walked off down the street as fast as he could go, bumping off one person and on to another, hating her.

  At the end of the street he stood stock-still, asking himself incredulously: How could she do it? However could she do it? To make herself ridiculous, to kill herself like that, to take all that was so warm and lovely and turn herself into a doll, a little wooden girl, with that horrible smile, that baby’s appeal, like a trimmed child-mother, like being a manicured twelve years and fifty years at the same time, with all the real, woman’s years thrown out, like the children who wear nail-polish and lipstick, a baby bridge-player. How could she do it? She had a plan; is this it? How could anyone make a plan with that in it? She renounced me so as to look like that? I don’t care how worthless I am, I know I’m better for her than that. If she was in a pigsty she’d be better. I think I’d have ten harridans of a mother, plotting my good all day, rather than one squeaking little baby like that. I’d not give up one idea, one act, for a thing that looked like her. How can she not know it? She can walk out, in public, in broad daylight, looking like that, and not feel like the most ridiculous creature in town? It’s awful, it’s unbearable, to know that she could do that to herself; it’s worse than anything else she could do to me, or to him. What does he say? Doesn’t he tell her? He likes her like that? They must both be perverts, or is he just too old to see? Perhaps he just doesn’t know she exists unless she screams at him like that, screams: “I’m your baby!” right in his eye.

  Oh, murder, murder, murder! She’s killed herself, little stupid, poor, scheming idiot! She’ll never be alive again, her hair will stay in those stinking little curls until she dies, and she’d better die now. How could she do it?

  Through his rage he suddenly warned himself: stop! you’ll work yourself into a fit if you go on. But he knew he wouldn’t. They come when I think I’m happy and at peace, he thought, and this knowledge made him feel more miserable than ever, and quite took his strength away.

  He sat down, trembling, at a café table. Well, he said to himself: I’m getting more than I bargained for, coming here. But I’m still glad, and proud, and I’ll go on this way, against anything.

  He kept repeating dolefully: But how could she do it?

  He walked ten miles in the afternoon, and was too exhausted to speak when Divver returned from Tutin.

  *

  It was at this point that he felt for the first time a deep curiosity about her husband. The engineer was in his thoughts when he mournfully fell asleep; and in the morning he watched from the window impatiently until he saw the usual little play: the black sedan at the steps, the official waiting with one arm against the door, the commissionaire’s salute as the engineer came out of the hotel and descended the steps. Morgan could always see the thick white hair shining in the sun, and the workclothes; but he could never see the engineer’s face; and it was the face that he so desired to see, as if expecting it to explain the new and dreadful face of the wife. When Divver came in, still wearing his bathrobe, and said he didn’t feel like Tutin today, Morgan said: “Why don’t you go to the mines?”

  “The mines here? I thought of that. What do you know about them?”

  “Nothing, except that they use them now to buy dollars.”

  “I think I will go, maybe in the afternoon. Thanks for the idea. Why don’t you come too?” His voice was not only cordial; it sounded lonely and appealing.

  Morgan felt frightened. “No, thanks, I’ll just stick around town.”

  All that day he was so full of curiosity that he could hardly wait for Divver to come back from the mines. He also felt ashamed: he felt he had played a trick on Divver, a trick that had worked too easily to be decent, for which he had been thanked, and which had made Divver seem unfairly childish and himself unfairly powerful. After Divver had left he walked to the edge of the town, from where he could see, two miles away, little puffs of white smoke above the trees of the nearest mine. In the evening he sat in the lobby watching the door, and met Divver when he came in.

  He was glad he had been polite enough to question Divver about trips in which he had pretended to be interested; now he could safely question him at once, pretending the old pretension, acting the new lie through the old one. It’s not going to harm anyone, he said fiercely to himself.

  “I didn’t get very far,” Divver told him. “They’re all spread out.” He talked for a long time about the decrepit machinery. “But I’ll go out again in the morning. I met the American who runs them, a tough old bird, who seems to know his job. It’s a more important place than you’d think…. What’s this?”

  “From the manager,” said the bellboy.

  Divver read the typed letter, and looked disgusted. “I thought the so-and-so would calm down, but he’s reminding us to get the hell out, day after tomorrow. Have you found anything?”

  “One or two possibilities. Everything is still jammed.”

  “Goddam the whole —— place. Anyone would think we were a pair of criminals.”

  *

  Morgan ate lunch next day in the hotel’s so-called Baron’s Hall, which resembled a good American university club. Its concrete walls were so treated as to give the appearance of blocks of rough-hewn stone; the white ceiling was plastered and beamed; the dog-irons in the wide fireplace were spread eagles; huge pewter platters stood on the mantelpiece; there were the antlers of eighty antelope, and a tapestry showing Poland defeating the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg. A suit of armour was bolted at the back to a side of the main door; the helmet, in turn, was bolted to the armour, two previous helmets having been removed to the New World. The tables were all of oak, with scrubwoman’s legs; charges of metal sand, fired by a factory-hand from a pistol, had speckled the table-tops with attractive old wormholes. The place was crowded with day-tourists, shepherded in flocks by guides with company insignia hanging from their lapels. The manager stood at the entrance, his head back and an amiable smile on his lips; but when Morgan entered he gently turned his attention to the smorgasbord.

  Morgan had hardly begun to eat, when Divver appeared in the main entrance, and stood framed for a moment in the baronial arch, elliptically rimmed by the shields of distinguished Tutinian knights. His left eye still looked like an eclipse of the sun. He was clearly annoyed to see Morgan, but he came over, with the reluctance of a man distracted from special business, looking s
harply from side to side. All his despondency seemed to have gone. When he was still a long way off he raised one hand and began to protest:

  “I can’t sit down.” He sat down. “Waiter! Oh, waiter! Here, please, waiter!” He mopped his face with a big handkerchief, leaving streaks of sweaty dust across his cheeks. His suit was crumpled and dusty: his shoes scarred at the toes: he was most excited. “Waiter!” he cried again, and to Morgan: “No time for a lunch-hour! Things are moving … Waiter; no lunch if you please: I want you to make me up a lunch box; two very large sandwiches, please, to take away. You make sandwiches, of course?”

  “Two hundred and fifty every day,” said the waiter.

  “Yes. Now, what do you put in the sandwiches?”

  “Beef, mutton, chicken, fish, ham, turkey … Stilton, camembert, cheddar, Wensleydale, goat cheese … Liverwurst, black pudding, salami, paté.”

  Divver pondered, rubbing his damp jowls furiously. Morgan watched him with astonishment.

  “Grouse,” said the waiter.

  “Grouse!” cried Divver.

  “Nice breast of grouse….”

  “Breast of grouse: that’s it! Now, look, waiter: you’ll put that—let’s see: you’ll put that in waxed paper….”

  “In napkins,” said the waiter.

  “Much better, yes. And of course you’ll put in the you-know-what’s,” Divver’s hands and fingers skirmished knowingly: “the trimmings, little bits, lettuce, tomato, slices….”

  “Bottle of white wine, dry?”

  “Swell! And dessert, eh?”

  “Big bunch of grapes? Thermos coffee?”

  “All set!” cried Divver. He bent forward and wagged a finger. “Now, waiter, if you please, I want you to attend to that immediately. I’m taking it to the mines, and we can’t afford too much time, see?” He fixed the waiter with his discoloured eye, through whose sombre purple, yellowish patches were breaking: he beat a tarantella on the table with his fingers, smiling abstractedly, frowning, looking nervously toward the kitchens. “What a day! Ever see a gold-mine? It’s something, I tell you. Oh, I didn’t tell you, I guess, did I: that’s where I’ve been all morning, at the mines, with the director. He’s got a real job on his hands: quite a man. Thirty piddling little mines to reorganize for the Polish Government, to make into two or three big units; lousy material, no one speaking a word of English except the Government representative, trying to keep the mines running at the same time as he’s trying to reorganize the whole works; new stuff coming in on trucks all the time; most of the labour illiterate, and no co-operation of course from the smallholders the government’s buying out….” Divver suddenly became stern. “He tells me,” he said, looking sharply at Morgan, “that production will jump 50 per cent. Working in three units instead of thirty, production costs will be more than halved, and the cost of reorganization will be balanced in a maximum of six months. Ten per cent. of output will go to the local Bread Street trade, the remainder to the purchase of dollars. The Poles are pretty smart.”