My ‘no national prejudices’ meant that I was prepared, unlike the majority of our brusque foreign representatives, to treat with anything on two legs as easily and courteously as Spain had dealt with me. And that, no more and no less, was understood by Percy Squire, the chairman of John Kidd & Co., manufacturers of printing ink. He was a dear, bad-tempered old autocrat who did just what he pleased with the firm—on the whole doing it very well—and had built up a useful export business by his own personal travels in years past.
He sent for me to Wine Office Court and explained what he wanted. Printing in Europe and the Middle East was often a Jewish trade. Germany was the chief exporter of printing ink. The Jewish boycott of German goods was far from absolute, but at least offered new opportunities. I was to go out and grab them. If I could not, I was to explain why. I was to live in good second-class hotels and not stick him with damned great bills as if I were selling coal, steel or ships. I was to get on with it before his British competitors woke up.
If I had been asked to choose my job, it would have been something very close to that. True, it offered little immediate hope of domestic life, but Marina and I were accustomed to this strange marriage which carried on the continual partings of early days. And in any case I could reasonably dream, if things went well, of opening a branch factory abroad.
I spent three weeks between Wine Office Court and the factory in Old Ford, learning how inks were made and—far more important—enough of papers and printing processes to be able to talk to a customer for five minutes without giving away my complete ignorance. Fairly straightforward were the selling and shipping, the prices and qualities, the characters of existing agents, the tastes of their chief customers; and made still simpler by the close and affectionate relationship which developed between Reg Green, the export manager, and myself.
In July 1933 I started out through Scandinavia and the Baltic States. I have seldom in my life been so consciously happy. To be completely fulfilled as a commercial traveller for a small firm which was frankly doubtful if it could afford such a luxury certainly argues a lack of ambition; but in my youth I never possessed much, and disappointment had trained me to limit the little I did have to the immediate future. That in itself was an aid to enjoyment.
One cause for excitement may have been the anticipation of curious kitchens and irresponsible adulteries, but the other ingredients of my content need not be so cruelly analysed; they merged together into one glorious whole of delight which was reflective quite as much as it was sensual. I was free of the Europe which I so greatly loved. My salary was eight hundred a year, and no government could steal a penny of it in return for services I did not want. Much of it Marina and I were able to save, for I could make my expenses—though I seldom charged John Kidd more than a pound a day—cover everything except evening amusements and extravagant explorations of wine lists.
For the first time in years I was unconscious of any anxiety or nervous strain. In fact there must have been some, since my first trip for John Kidd still turns up in mild nightmares. I find myself wandering about Europe from capital to capital, selling nothing and vaguely wondering why I have not sent any report to the office. At the time, no doubt, I hid from myself an inquietude that I was not producing enough new business to pay my salary.
But all the early part of that first trip was and had to be exploratory. Scandinavia, the little Baltic States, Belgium and Austria were too close to the German frontiers, and the habits of their printers had been formed by German manufacturers. We offered too high a quality at too high a price. It was competitive, since a printer uses less of a good than of an inferior ink, but we expected the buyer to change his customs instead of changing our own.
It was a conservatism typical of the British exporter. Yet I think John Kidd kept it within reasonable bounds. They could not be expected to put much faith in the early reports of an inexperienced representative. Later on, when the little sample tins of blacks and colours which I posted home began to tell the same story in the laboratory as my reports on the managerial desk, they lowered their standards of what a printer ought to use and gave him what he did.
The routine of the pioneering was simple—once a local agent of sound financial standing had been caught. That was my first duty. Agents recommended by consuls and commercial attachés were generally too large and shiny, not of a type to visit printers bag in hand, and do business, continually interrupted, in a glass-fronted cubby-hole among the thud and rattle of the machines. It usually took some days of visiting paper merchants and printers’ suppliers before I found a man who was willing to invest his money and energy in the marketing of British inks. When I had him, we would go round the printers together from nine till six, and occasionally amuse ourselves in town thereafter.
I do not think John Kidd ever had cause to regret my choice of an agent—except perhaps in one case where they extended very humanely and on their own responsibility a quite alarming line of credit. I must have learned in Roumania more than I suspected. I should not pretend to any keener insight than my fellows, but when a man has started his career among businessmen with no ethical sense whatever he is inoculated against undue optimism.
It was not until I reached the shores of the Mediterranean that I really began to sell—partly because I was farther away from the German factories and their ubiquitous travellers, partly through those of my own qualities which blossom in the sun. An Englishman in northern Europe is expected to be true to type, so that an insular, honest and—to my mind—somewhat bluff north-country-man will lose no business through lack of manners; but in southern Europe the Latinised Englishman, accepting unhurriedly the local courtesies and conventions, comes into his kingdom. Success in Greece and Italy, Spain and Portugal reassured me, showing that I really had that character with which during the weary years in America I had—for want of anything better—credited myself.
It seemed to me that I had left Spain not a mere three and a half years earlier, but ten. There were they all, in Barcelona and Madrid, still selling bananas. And why not, indeed? I myself on my return from America had tried, very unconvincingly and with the sense of failure inseparable from retracing a path, to get back into Elders & Fyffes. The task of my former colleagues was not so genially expansive as it had been. During the depression every nation with a tropical colony had planted its own bananas and saved foreign exchange.
When the two capital cities had been well stocked with Kidd’s inks, I was free to revisit the Basque provinces. For most of the pious journey I stayed awake, eager not to miss the call of the porters and the hushed bustle around the sleeping-cars as the train stopped at Medina del Campo and Burgos and Miranda de Ebro—junctions where, on my return from Asturias or after explorations of the markets of Old Castille, I would wait in the station restaurant, darkened but still alive, for the heavy express to come wailing across the Spanish plateau and carry me back to Bilbao and the sea.
In the north, though big printers were few and there were no Jews to boycott German goods, it was a point of honour to me that I should sell. Bernardino Garay in Bilbao and Macario Sanz in San Sebastian saw to it that I did—and also ensured that there should be no conscientious necessity to rise and do business at nine, since we were frequently very much awake till four. Printers? Were they not fellow members of the Chamber of Commerce? First we would get them interested and then we would discover an agent whom they liked. It was an inversion of the usual routine and it worked. I appointed a charming little anti-Nazi German who, settled domestically in a fishing village and doing a quiet trade in small machines, was somewhat taken aback by a be-Spanished Englishman, far noisier than life, hurling business into his lap.
It was a pleasant interlude. Too seldom does fate allow the homeless so to wheel about his mulberry bush that he returns into the heart of friends. Yet my regret that I had ever left the North of Spain was not so poignant as in America. Biscay, I knew, was still a country where I cou
ld live happily and where my eyes would be delighted by roof and village and green downs as freshly and continuously as in England. But to live there permanently? To surrender, like my new German agent, to its sturdy charm? I was greedy for more world—not yet, perhaps, for more object—before I settled my spiritual relationship to the map or my plain place in it. How I squared that restlessness with my longing for a branch factory and a suburban flat I do not know. The contradiction is one of the curses which lie heavy upon the man without a trade. He can only guess at what will satisfy him.
For some weeks in the middle of that first tour Marina had been with me. She joined me in Brussels and we went on to Vienna together, where we recaptured a shadow of our old Parisian freedom. She had an awareness of enjoyment, when she was enjoying, as keen as my own, and a sense of humour which revelled in the Rabelaisian as well as in those delicacies of feminine insight which can find and smile at butterflies in a winter room.
So on to Greece; and fresh to both far travellers were the ivory and white of Athens, the ivory and blue of the Gulf of Corinth seen from the hills above Patras. I do not know which of us surrendered to the clear divinities more absolutely, she for whom classical culture was an affectation or I who peopled every stone which was joined to another with the high voices of the dead. Nor did it matter, for the tangible realities of Greece remain unchanged. When you sit upon the quay at Eleusis eating cockles from the dripping hand of the fisherman, that dawn-of-the-world taste is no less sweet to the postulant than to the initiate.
But London intruded upon Athens. Percy Squire in one of his incalculable moods of savagery—entirely harmless if you were in the office below his, and could march upstairs and bully him back—suggested that if the business I had done was all I was likely to do I could not look forward to any steady future. That frightened Marina, and she took the usual boat to New York. It was a hasty, but not a selfish removal, for all she wanted was to take responsibility off my shoulders. She could always earn her own living in California.
Too soon. Too eager. A month later, when Mediterranean sales had made their impact, I was again highly popular in London. But Marina and I were creatures of our generation, of those ’twenties and ’thirties when the emancipated determined that the chains of marriage should sit lightly on each other. With such a view, it is sheer folly to enter the contract at all. The chain itself, the pride in being bound, is the very heaven of marriage; if it is not, there is little point in easing it.
After a quick overhaul in London, my next trip took me to the Middle East. Excited by the first fringe of Asia I certainly was, but neither geographically nor intellectually could a Mediterranean coast be wholly new. My attitude was possibly nearer to a Venetian trader’s matter-of-fact acceptance of differences than to that of the tourist who travels to see Arabs as it might be in an exhibition, or that of the benevolent officials who take the money at the gate.
I went first to Palestine, then to the Lebanon and last to Egypt. It is difficult to recapture first impressions of the Levantine coast when peoples and frontiers, roads and mountain villages were all to become so familiar. I thought the seaboard from Acre to Tripoli—sparsely decorated rather than spoiled by man, his villas and his agriculture—the most beautiful I had ever seen. I still do. And close contact with French and British administration has not much modified the first opinions of a free traveller.
The impact of French culture upon Arab seemed to me wholly delightful, creating a harmonious mixture of two ways of daily life, both equally valid for content. The impact of British culture was funereal. Yet British administration was sourly admired, and French uninhibitedly abused. To me, as to the French officials, that was quite inexplicable. They were inclined to ascribe it too readily to the intrigues of British agents.
The true answer is that the British way of life, its solemnity, its cups of tea, its women so intolerable in exile, its odd insistence that you cannot have both rectitude and vitality, was not a threat; it did not and could not permeate Levantine culture. But French influence did, and therefore was the more to be feared. To a European there could be no conceivable doubt that French-controlled Beirut was a more liveable town than, for example, British-controlled Port Said. To a race-conscious Arab, however, Beirut was an insidious attack upon his traditions.
I met only one nationalist who from the bottom of his heart hated my country—though he bought my inks—and did not disguise it. He was an Egyptian newspaper proprietor, and I found it hard to take his opinions seriously. The Egyptian habit of dressing in cotton nightshirts, the patterns of which we only use for the covering of mattresses, had, I am certain, much to do with my lack of interest. One can listen to Arab robe or lounge suit; one can even put up with striped trousers and top-hat; but when a man continually brings to mind a morning hotel bedroom, with the mattress rolled back, the bedclothes upon a chair and the hairpins clicking into the vacuum cleaner, it is impossible to treat him with a respect which is more than verbal. That is a pity, since only the most sincere of nationalists could force himself to wear, unnecessarily, Egyptian national dress.
My Arab customers, Christian or Moslem, seemed much like southern merchants anywhere else, and as hagglers for price no worse than Greeks. With the desert Arab, familiar to me from Doughty and Lawrence, I had no intercourse at all—beyond, that is, an exchange of looks so penetrating that the memory remains with me to this day. He was, later knowledge suggests, a notable of the Aneyzi, robed and crowned, and he was striding up through the Jerusalem bazaar as I was wandering down. For a full two seconds he held my eyes with a bold, direct look, neither liking nor disliking, but appraising my qualities as a male animal—my manners, courage, capacity for poetry and fecundity. He might have been watching the paces of a stallion. To what conclusion he came I shall fortunately never know, but it astonished me that there were still men who could so examine a stranger without discourtesy. In Europe such self-confidence died with the seventeenth century.
In spite of Arab charm, I left Jerusalem an ardent Zionist, for no Gentile could know much more than I of the miseries of the Pale and the dynamic faith in the promise. And there under my eyes was the promise day by day gallantly fulfilled. I suppose that, so far as pure emotion is concerned, I am still a Zionist, but the impartiality of the security officer has intervened. Israel for me is like a woman whom you understand with a profundity too bitter for clear passion. You wish her well. You watch her career with fatherly interest. You may even be moved by her youth to a momentary splendour of desire. But youth alone is not enough for beauty.
From Alexandria I took a little Greek steamer to Athens—more to keep an eye on credits than to sell. The Greek Easter overtook me, bowing but not quite breaking my exaggerated ideals of commercial politeness. It was necessary, the agent told me, that I should partake of the Paschal Lamb in the garden of a newspaper manager. I was willing enough. At ten-thirty in the morning I lapped my retsina—the resinated wine which temporarily destroys the taste for all others—in the shade while watching, mouth a-water, a spitted sucking lamb roasting in a pit. I ate heartily.
Would I accompany the agent to just one other important customer? Well, I had no objection. Lunch was already an impossibility, but a short sleep at my hotel would deal with the retsina. At twelve we tasted another newspaper lamb; at twelve-thirty, a machine-minder’s; at one, a lithographer’s; at one-thirty, a colour-printer’s; from two to three we descended to rotogravure and the local comics in red and black. Every swallow became deliberate; every breaking of wind a gamble with nature. Not that I felt sick. The lambs and the wine were far too good for so rude a rejection. All was prepared to stay in place, but the only way of accommodating each additional mouthful was to swallow it floating in retsina like a large pill.
After five hours of it I took a taxi to the foot of Hymettus, climbed to the top and came down in the dark with a raging thirst. Such memories confirm that one is but a guest in one’s own body. Were I—an
d to me it is the same I—to climb today so mild a mountain with an even moderately charged stomach, I should imagine collapse with such intensity that I should probably witch-doctor myself into dying.
In the spring of 1934 I was back in Bucharest. Eight years had destroyed the last of Ruritania. Taxis had taken the place of cabs, and there were but two aged eunuch drivers left. Peasant costumes had vanished from the city except on Sundays. The dusty streets of white, one-storied houses were metalled, and flanked by blocks of flats. The Bank alone seemed unchanged, and, for the sake of old friendship, presented me with a magnificent agent who, even before the boycott, had declared his own private war on German trade. Two former chief clerks had become the Christian and Jewish managers. I found myself far nearer to them in spirit and understanding than I had ever been as a gay and unused apprentice. I mourned my gilded youth, but I did not regret that it was over.
The successful tour ended with Warsaw and blue-and-white Stockholm. I hoped with no very good reason for some months without travel; but July and part of August were all I had. Then John Kidd required me to get my visas and pack my bags and take that Spanish of which I boasted, and had indeed made proof upon their business in Spain, to South America.
I look back with extraordinary content upon the seven formative months which followed. I felt at the time that I could live the rest of my life in sub-tropical Spanish America. Even today when my ways are set and neither my Castilian nor my energy is any longer equal to three-quarters of the demands on them which I should wish to make, I would not complain if some eccentric fate compelled me to settle my family there.
Against the Wind Page 7