That evening, our lawyer protesting, all three of us were seen safely on to the train by the gendarmerie, forcing an unsatisfactory policeman’s end to the story. I have no idea what happened to the partner, the manager or the concession, for the law-suit which was to decide their fate had hardly begun when Henley died on the cricket field. He may have known his heart was doomed, and for that reason wanted quick results.
No word of this adventure ever reached the bank; so that both they and I were resigned, more or less contentedly, to the continuance of my career. I rented new rooms more central and more spacious. I took to regular golf on Sundays and a four of bridge once a week; and instead of wasting time and money in the search for ever more exotic avatars of the female, I was prepared to wait for them. So blasé had I become that I took over the running of the bar at the Country Club—an invention of the diplomats swiftly patronised by the court society—because it gave me an excuse to avoid dancing.
I imagine I was becoming quite a smooth and pleasant young man with all outward eccentricities firmly suppressed unless time and season for them were presented. I had consciously decided that the two most important human virtues were dignity and discretion. I blush for this; but since dignity and discretion had cost me so much trouble to attain, it is not unnatural that I attached undue importance to them.
Yet these complacent terms upon which I was beginning to live with myself could not disguise from me the fact that, though my salary had risen to seven hundred a year, I was not earning it. When on leave in London in the summer of 1925 I suggested that I had long since learned all an insanitary correspondence department had to teach me and that I did not seem to be on the way to learning anything else. I had not long been back in Bucharest before I was offered a transfer to the Anglo-Persian Bank, a subsidiary of the Ottoman, as a travelling inspector of local branches.
I should have enjoyed this; so would any of the local managers who happened to be feathering his nest. I still wonder why the London directors should have assumed that I was born with a knowledge of book-keeping. But perhaps they did not. My duties might have been to talk politics and high finance with the manager over a long and delicious Persian lunch, while the trained accountant, appearing from a different point of the horizon upon a somewhat balder camel, checked the bank’s holdings of securities.
As a creature of moneyed or diplomatic society there was, that last autumn of my old self, little wrong with me. I was set firmly on the road to becoming a pillar of Throgmorton Street with my house in Surrey and a whole portfolio of good industrials deposited with my sententious stockbroker. Nothing could have changed the routine of a limited self and a limited society but surrender to a far more generous and powerful personality than my own, and nothing, short of disaster, could have caused that surrender but the finding in one woman not of the qualities I had tried to discover in so many, but of those I never knew existed.
Casually, and satisfied by the exquisite choosing of my midday menu, I passed down the length of the bank with some trivial enquiry from the Correspondence Department to Bills and Discount. Upon the hard bench where clients who wished to cash a cheque in foreign currency were compelled to remain a good quarter of an hour was sitting a woman of, at a guess, about my own age. With foreknowledge of the future our eyes met and could not be parted. The look was gentle, and not quite that veiled stare which arises from the mutual decision of the genes, imperious and generally inaccurate, that they are compatible. Nor was it curiosity. I can only describe it as recognition. To avoid still wider conjecture I fall back on J. W. Dunne for explanation, and assume that the violence of the future was projecting itself into the present. As for my actions in the familiar three-dimensional world, I requested that her cheque be cashed with reasonable speed, and that was all.
Next day we passed in the street, and exchanged some remarks of a curious, sudden melancholy, unnatural for complete strangers. As in a first act of Ibsen, nothing that was said had any obvious relation to what was meant—at least not to us two who may be taken as only reading the play. To the unseen watchers in the stalls, ironic cherubim of Ashtoreth, experimenting with the human capacity for pain, the action no doubt appeared perfectly straightforward.
If the love story were fiction I should write only the woman’s view of it, inevitably wiser and more sensitive than that of a young banker who would have given, if ordered, all the world but had still to learn what giving meant. Here, remembering reality, I am compelled to see the narrative through my own eyes. Rather than divide so unfairly a common possession, I shall record only those emotions—I cannot call them facts—which were relevant to my movements.
When she returned from Bucharest to Paris, the flame roared up in daily correspondence. I took my 1926 leave in February and we spent it in Nice and England, desperately searching for enough common ground to justify marriage. She could not find it. I was prepared to find it ten times over even if it was not there. Our backgrounds were as different as those of Cortés and Marina—by which I mean that however far in known history the lines of male and female descent be traced, there would be no common ancestor and no common culture. This sudden doubling of the world was fascinating for each of us; but more intimate ‘recollections’ were needed—using the word both in its normal sense and that which Jacquetta Hawkes has given it. The yawn of Cortés when Marina babbled of girls, unknown to him, at Montezuma’s court, the indignation of Marina when he traditionally insisted that you could not put a proper cutting edge upon obsidian though he knew from the wounds on his own body that you could—I can well imagine both and the desperate search for a community of interest to justify not only mutual love but mutual respect.
The stage was heavy with tragedy and longing and the impossible. But I was not taking impossibility for an answer. All the vitality of my youthful excesses was now channelled into a single ambition: to distort the world and the woman into the shape I wanted.
Life with an irresponsible stranger was difficult enough for her to envisage, especially since he was too young for her both in years and in experience; life with him in anti-Semitic Roumania was harder still, for she came of a long, pure and mystically distinguished line of Chassidic rabbis. She was American by birth, but her childhood background, though moved across the Atlantic in space, was in time exactly that of the Moldavian village which my horse, alone of all living things in it, had been unwilling to leave.
So Roumania had to go; nor was Persia a tempting spot for the foreign wife of a continually travelling inspector. I was faced with the desperate business of finding myself another job while fifteen hundred miles from London where the jobs were handed out, and with my yearly leave already taken.
My mother, who would readily ask any stranger she met for anything she wanted—a quality which frequently caused acute embarrassment to her husband and sons, but on occasion was useful—managed to get for me a firm offer from Elders & Fyffes, the banana importers. It gave me what I wanted: employment abroad with reasonable prospects, though my salary returned to its 1922 figure of four hundred a year.
Elders & Fyffes were model employers, ahead of their time in pensions and welfare schemes, and deservedly loved by all their British and some of their foreign employees—some only, because they believed in the curious superstition, common to nearly all British and American firms, that it was wiser to send abroad one of their own nationals of average ability or less, rather than to spend the same amount in obtaining an exceptionally able foreigner.
In the early nineteen-hundreds the firm pioneered the introduction of the West Indian banana into the British Isles and, through Rotterdam, the Continent. Their fleet suffered such losses in the war that they were compelled to merge with the United Fruit Company. It was, I believe, a very friendly Anglo-American partnership. United Fruit produced the bananas in the West Indies and Central America. Elders & Fyffes collected and sold them to Western Europe.
They were then monopolists,
and could be ruthless to buyers. They had to be, for they were competing with the Canary Islands banana, which is good eating even if not fully ripe, whereas the West Indian banana, until it is deep yellow and spotted with black, is a dull vegetable rather than a fruit. So the firm had to compel wholesalers to ripen their bananas scientifically, and to market them only when ripe they were. It was a monopoly which had its advantages for the public. Today the warehousemen and retailers, secure in their knowledge that Canary bananas are hard to find and that the housewife looks for appearance rather than taste in what she buys, defraud banana-eaters with insipid turnips of daffodil-green.
In July 1926 I reported for duty to Elders & Fyffes’ immense warehouse at St Ouen outside Paris. It had the size and something of the appearance of a main line terminus in a large provincial town. The banana trains from Rotterdam were shunted in under the glass roof, and unloaded into the ripening rooms which lined, on two levels, the long sides of the building. Dealers of other nations could be bullied or persuaded into holding the fruit until it was ripe; but nothing on earth could make a Frenchman do so. With few exceptions, therefore, every West Indian banana sold in Paris had been ripened at St Ouen.
Between the tracks and in the centre of the concrete floor was a control box where one Englishman, recruited expensively in Lancashire, and another, bought cheap in Paris, checked every bunch in and every box out, bilingually and blasphemously, for ten hours from eight to six. After listening to them at work I realised that while my French might do very well for polite conversation in international society I had not even begun to speak it.
The slightly precious young banker was out of place and felt it, desperately certain that he was never going to care whether the French ate bananas or whether they performed with them the difficult operation which was being constantly recommended by the control box. It was also evident that the fruit trade called for approaching complete strangers with brazen confidence and getting up very early in the morning. The first gift I have since managed to acquire; the second, never. I spent four years trying to persuade the Correspondence Department that when I arrived at 9.20 it was the moral equivalent of 9. At St Ouen it was 8—and, if customers on Les Halles had to be visited, it was so early that one might as well sit up all night.
After a few weeks in Paris I was sent to Lille as an extra hand while the manager was on holiday. In this small office, handling mere trucks where St Ouen handled whole trains, I began to understand the paper work of the trade and—when the market collapsed under us in a blazing August—its morale. Loyalty was not to Elders & Fyffes but to the fruit. London and Paris, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Hamburg and every little branch with an active fruit market and a goods yard baking in the heat were all trying to relieve the pressure on each other.
Hours ceased to count. Dealers were taunted into taking a wicked loss for the sake of future profits. The barrow boys charged into the battle, filling the streets with the perfume of bananas and driving the sellers of early pears and melons and peaches and grapes into appeals to their bank managers and suicidal telegrams to the growers. To be compelled to send for the municipal garbage lorries to remove a whole ripening-room of bananas was a disgrace like losing the guns. It was in fact a game, and appealed to the simple minds of the British, including my own, who prefer to exert themselves not for money or any personal reward, but simply because it has been agreed to set up a bottle in a quite arbitrary position and throw stones at it until it smashes. It may be that absurd simplicity which has made of us a people so dangerous in war. Our view of the government and its aims is generally derisory; our pay, inadequate though it be, is disputed by the War Office; our only enthusiasm is for the minor criminalities which loyalty to the unit invites and pride in ingenuity permits; but we cannot stop shooting at the bottle.
The interest in reading thermometers and gambling with my employers’ assets which I began to show at Lille came too late. I was, I suspect, considered unworthy to serve the gods of the West Indies, and relegated to the society of those degenerate Latins who had the effrontery to produce, to sell and even to eat Canary bananas. I was asked if I would like to go to Spain. I said that I would. I cannot remember an occasion in my life when, if asked to go somewhere, I did not accept.
Once in the Canary department, I was freer to enjoy Paris. So long as I turned up at St Ouen for the communal lunch—followed, to aid digestion, by violent cricket in the great concrete spaces of the warehouse—nobody much cared what I did for the rest of the day. I was supposed to be learning the business at Les Halles in the small hours of the morning. As the friendly little Spaniard who was our chief Canary salesman did not in the least want to be bothered by a sleepy and incompetent amateur, both he and I kept discreetly silent as to the time when I had really joined him on his rounds.
Again I was fated to be a wealthy bachelor. That summer in Paris the franc fell to 240 to the pound and settled around 220, but prices remained at the equivalent of 100. The rate of the franc, combined with my exasperated private misery, permitted excesses which equalled those of 1923 Roumania; but they were not enjoyable, for they were always succeeded by remorse. What should have been a gay and glittering period of my life, I remember as long weeks of futility. They ended abruptly when Marina returned to Europe. She felt the atmosphere, accompanied me to Madrid, moved by charity rather than any faith in the future, and departed again. I was becoming used to leaving railway stations with set face and alone.
The remedy was work. I did my still ignorant best to assist my companions to open the office in Madrid. They were brilliantly chosen. The General Manager in Rotterdam must have been a cunning picker of men. Moore was plain English with no frills, quietly determined to make a success of his first independent command and with enough temperament, when annoyed or enthusiastic, to delight the Spaniards. Blairsy, the accountant, was a Canary Islander of French parentage. He took a lot of knowing, for he had slid unnoticed through the jungle of Spanish, French and English business methods until he came out on the far side with thought and speech of his own. He was a loving, gentle man, from whom eccentricities would burst surprisingly as the triumphant appearance of a tramcar just when dawn streets are at their most silent.
I was continually reminded of Borrow’s Bible in Spain—though the three of us were but a pale shadow of one Borrow—for on the face of it there was an almost religious unworldliness in sending a British expedition to Spain to make the Spaniards eat their own bananas. But Elders & Fyffes were playing a most intelligent game. Bananas in Spain were the food of the well-to-do. If they could be made the food of the poor, then Spain would consume a high proportion of its own Canary bananas which would thus be taken off the European markets. Elders & Fyffes themselves were the biggest producers in the Canary Islands and intended to remain so, but their harvest was always getting in the way of more profitable business.
At first our mission seemed to us quixotic. The wholesalers in the Plaza de la Cebada had a proper sense of the value of leisure; they did as little work as possible for as big a price as they could get. The gospel which we had come to preach—that they should double their sales and halve their profits—was not, therefore, easily acceptable. Worse still, they were accustomed to sell bananas on commission, while we insisted that they should pay cash.
Neither Moore nor I spoke any Spanish beyond the few phrases we had picked up at hasty Berlitz lessons. But we wrestled with the language as best we could—since Blairsy, who was deep in leases and licences, could not always be interpreting for us—and persuaded the wholesalers to buy a little on our terms. It was not really our babbling which won the trick, but the merchants’ fear lest the incalculable Fyffes—that was the name of the firm in Spain, and my affectionate memory still pronounces it Feeffess—should do something English and awkward in the Islands. There was also a threat in the shape of a large empty warehouse behind the office where we could, if forced, store and ripen bananas for sale direct to the retailers. We
were always trying to explain away politely the presence of this empty warehouse. We must have been altogether too courteous about it, for the wholesalers soon decided that their fears were groundless, and refused to have any truck at all with our absurd idea of selling fruit for cash.
The new and untried team was given permission to meet ultimatum by war. That was typical of our employers. They always stuck to the rule that the man on the spot knew best, and he was never reproached for making a mistake so long as it was bold and honest. In return they received an eager devotion quite unknown to businesses modelled upon the cautious and distrustful methods of government bodies.
Moore let the usual shipment come through, though we had not a buyer in prospect. Perishable fruit, remember! We hung our bunches in the warehouse and even in the offices, and sold at cut prices to the retailers, who gladly absorbed our propaganda that the merchants were making too much profit. Another outlet was Pablo Dominguez. He was an illiterate and genial barrow boy who had won a big prize in the Spanish lottery and set himself up as a wholesale fruit merchant. We flooded him with bananas at any price he chose to pay for them, and preserved the illusion of selling for cash by collecting in nightly instalments before he could hit the cabarets with the kitty. After a few weeks of this the grave wholesalers surrendered. As for Fyffes, Madrid, it could not only speak a sort of Castilian, but was prepared to shout it in the streets. We were accepted for the unscrupulous and laughing bandits that we were, and the warehouse was never used again.
Against the Wind Page 3