Later that evening, long after the mist had lifted and silently they had returned, long after the detailed and not unembarrassed accounting of their adventure to fellow-guests in tea-lounge and cocktail bar, and shortly after a dinner eaten separately at two ends of the cold dining-hall—Rose walked down from his bedroom again to the public rooms. Through intersecting doors he caught sight of her. Her back was half-turned; he paused for a moment watching her profile bent over an illustrated paper. She was alone. He hesitated, almost started in her direction, then still on the wide stairs turned down towards the front door. She was dressed as on the previous night, her hair was arranged as previously he had known it, she had assumed again all the garment of his previous disinterest, of the wan atmosphere of the lounges of hotels.
She for her part had not been reading. She had sat particularly in that chair to be seen and to see the stairs from an inclined and obvious mirror. As he had appeared, she too had noticed with a sense of disappointment how he no longer looked like the man on the moor—only a mild and not attractive man moving self-consciously down in evening clothes. But as from her hidden eye she saw him change his direction, there came a harsh moment of anger and loss—for she of her nature as a woman considered herself to have given rather than taken. Then that, at least for the time being, was overcome; with a heart full of resentment she rose, replaced carefully the magazine, and rejoined her friends.
A World of Glass
CELLS become writers. Writers are solitaries and cells are solitary: here I can sit in imposed solitude, free from my pity of solitude self-imposed, absolved from all decision and responsibility and all question of selecting diversions of the outside world. Physically I can choose practically nothing: mentally I am freer than before. I must simply sit here and serve my sentence. It was, of course, for assault.
Assault, and I think justified. That is why I refused any concession that might have been offered, and decided to let them all do with me just what they wished. I did not think it would turn out as well as this. And so, in moderate and pleasantly austere comfort, with none—or at least very little—material seduction, I can sit within these six walls—for here the ceiling and the floor are as much walls as the walls themselves—and let my mind and my pen run free. Not surprisingly, they run upon the course of events that led to my arrest: not upon the arrest itself, which was a small matter, but upon the emotions—and they were as strong as I will try to tell—that preceded the affair.
*
I shall never forget the terrible beauty of the journey to Trondhjem: and the beauty of Trondhjem itself. To travel to a place in circumstances of mounting beauty, mounting with no moment of regression, and then to find that after those long elating hours the destination is no dross of achievement but is even more beautiful than all the rest, that it expands about one like a great flower whose petals unfold the final, endless, sleepening glory—that is an experience seldom to be enjoyed. We began at Oslo. Early morning. A great black monster of a steam train. An empty carriage with cushions of carmine velvet. And throughout the day mounted through long Norway, from slush to snow, from snow to deeper snow, proceeding both up the map and on to higher ground. Which together makes for a most pleasing sensation.
From the warm, almost the hot carriage—it was invigorating and fresh to watch the snow. No fierce peaks and sharp summits to disturb a gentle skyline, but instead a good rolling of high distant hills that swam around the wide perspective with a rise and fall of waves: often these were fir-capped, when the snow-back stood fringed against the sky with short rich bristles. For this was no barren country. And all the way up the line one passed small stations, dark brown wooden stations eaved with dragons’ heads in the Viking manner. The station officials wore high black fur caps, and in their black uniforms they looked like a fierce contingent of Turkestan police. The ticket collector on the train also—but his red round face and bucolic Norwegian address belied the Turk: he was always up and down the carpeted corridor outside announcing the imminence of unpronounceable stations, and when on this journey I say ‘we’, it is of him and the engine and myself that I speak, for I was alone at the time.
By midday we had passed through the ski-ing country, where, apart from the beauty of the snow, there was at certain stations a spirit of festivity as red-capped skiers left the train and sought sleighs to take them out to their snowy places of holiday. But some time after that the real country began, the skies changed, a frozen magnificence charged the air with a peculiar magic. Great lakes appeared, ice-bound, their miles to the horizon furred with wide-fanning flat snow. Near the shore frozen waves lay ridged like skin under a microscope: logged on the banks piles of fresh stripped wood shone like pigskin. Icicles as thick as tree-trunks hung their green glow from rock ledges, and where waterfalls had been struck solid they hung in rows like monstrous teeth: but cruelly as these were shaped, their glass made music of them: over everything the far-gleaming sun and its greening sky played strange tricks of transparency. Such a sun! It hung and travelled all day on the horizon so low that losing heat it grew in complement larger—it gleamed more than shone. It gleamed like a force of great candlepower over the wide land, turning the snow to lavender and pink, greening the icicles and greening the sky; and the sky itself receded infinitely, it became more transparent than itself, it provoked in its pale green a visible sense of infinity. Yet this was no true Arctic sun—although we were travelling near to the polar circle: it shone not on a barren land, but on a snow-laden gentle place rich with cream-coloured birch and black fir. On such country its low long beam cast everything into a strange clearness—in the same way, though a thousand times clarified, that a lowering sun on a summer’s day clears and stills the air just before evening. Everything seemed set in glass, transplendent, motionlessly clear.
So the day passed as we steamed on through the snows, higher ever north. The sun set early. The last thing I can remember was the passing of a river, swift-flowing water of bottle-green that pooled and snaked down between the rocks and ice and moussed snow, disappearing one knew not whither, and in the cold air smoking. Then the light was gone, the snows grey—and soon after we ran into a blizzard.
Three-quarters way up, three-quarters way penetrated north, and with the ominous fall of night—some ancient listening God pressed the loud-pedal and sent the great pianoforte of his mountain scorn into action. Now from the warm and easy carriage nothing was to be seen: only the drive of snow hailing by, and the white steam and smoke of the forward engine driven down past the windows by the weight of the wind. Up and up, winding along the white track into a blank curtain of white: only at stations could anything be seen, and these—with their snow-swirling lamps, their dark-stamping figures, with the high-funnelled great engine steaming its monstrous black iron against the snow—these could only remind me of scenes dreamed over from novels of the Russian nineteenth century. From the warm red-covered lighted carriage one saw passing along the curtained corridor travellers in fur caps and astrakhan, ladies with white fur collars and once a curious ermine bonnet. The feeling was of Russia—for all our first impressions are allied quickly with previous knowledge, with things nearly similar—but it was not exact: for there were the names of stations passed—Hjerkinn, Kongsvoll, Driva; and there were the Viking dragons uptilting like pagoda eaves from the roof-beams of each wooden station; and there was the recent memory of standing in wonder at the fine dark beauty of the retrieved Viking ships themselves, abstractions of dark curved planking as beautifully draped as a classic robe, objects indeed that must take their place with the other few abstract, complete, Parthenon beauties of the world. This was Norway of Haakon and no tsarist Russia.
We steamed out of the blizzard into clear cloud-high height. A hidden moon shone a starshine light over the snow, giving to things mysterious visibility but no exact shape. Then the train passed through the last station, and curled round towards Trondhjem. There was a stirring in the corridors. People who had sat still for twelve hours rose
to get their luggage out first—to save a minute. This movement I find irritating, and always swear to remain seated until the train is cleared. But as usual I became infected, started pulling at my bags, and as usual missed the sight of the entrance into my town of destination. A grinding of iron brakes, a jolt of luggage, and the train came expiring its last steam to a halt. Outside, a babel of fresh faces to receive us the stiff and weary.
There was not much to do that night but get to the hotel and go to bed. I had a mixed impression of crossing a river from the station, entering streets wide and squarely laid, and many of the muddled sensations with which a new town receives one. I remember a busy sense though the streets were empty, a solid feeling after the fluid day on wheels, and a sense of unconfessed astonishment that lives were really lived here all the time without one’s presence and not even in the knowledge of one’s existence. Yet perhaps because of this and because of the alerted nerves of journey a new city is always a place of great promise and possibility: a feeling so often punctured absolutely after a day’s acquaintance.
Next morning I parted the old lace curtains—it was a barish room, Ibsen in remnant, with a horse-hair sofa and a brass lamp that might have once burned oil—parted those curtains and looked out on to the wide snow-covered street. Instantly the amazing impact came—no dragons, no dark wood! Instead—a white-painted classic town! Suddenly this—at three degrees below the polar circle!
It was of course a reversal of everything expected. But it was only a beginning to the confusion that followed. I went downstairs to take a walk quickly, taking no overcoat—and naturally after a few steps along the pavement felt it too cold and returned. Perhaps, after all, breakfast first. I asked for the restaurant. I was shown it. And again the confusion arose—for that unbelievable restaurant was a palm garden and no potted place from warmer latitudes but a real palm garden growing in real earth real big palms. I remember flipping the snow from my glove on one large tropical frond that stretched with the stealth of a bird-eating spider near my table. So. One could only sit coffee-less and muddled in such a place. Moreover, lighted Christmas trees had been placed at regular intervals among those palms and exotic plantains and the whole was turfed in an earthy basin circled with granite pillars of an oldish Nordic style. A fountain made water music in the centre.
As I sat there muddled the porter came through. A gentleman to see me. A gentleman? A gentleman from the newspapers.
I was travelling unannounced. My real name was not the one by which I was generally known. All the way up through Copenhagen and Gothenburg and Oslo I had been received and interviewed. It was a necessary, and not at all times unpleasant, duty. There is a flattery about it that never entirely fails, however often the process has occurred: nevertheless it is also a duty, and as a duty it must sometimes call for the pleasure of being avoided. It was such a pleasure that I had promised myself on this last lap of the journey before taking ship for the British Isles. But I had forgotten that the Oslo papers are read in Trondhjem: and, anyhow, that there is a telegraph between journalists. Perhaps it was this very stupidity that made me suddenly say ‘No!’: and knowing this refusal to be of little use, made me get up from the table breakfastless (it was, to give the reporter his due, eleven o’clock) and demand the backstairs exit to reach my room. There, rummaging quickly for sunglasses, a drab old scarf, and putting on my overcoat and soft hat twisted ridiculously down over my eyes, I felt myself disguised (to no one, of course, but myself) and left the room angrily just as the telephone was beginning to ring.
So here I was, some time after eleven, slipping into the side-streets, all guilt on my tail, simply for the sake of avoiding a ten-minute conversation. It was absurd: yet how often one clings to such first decisions with bone-brained vigour—and it may be that obstinacy in such small matters trains one for resolution on more important principles: but I hardly think so, it is more a strength to be able to change one’s mind.
For some time walking the streets I felt myself followed, I thought everyone looked too curiously into my face, I imagined the whole town conspiring against me. Once I tried to telephone the hotel to forbid them to admit any more reporters, but the instrument, the little øre pieces, and the thought of the Norwegian voice answering defeated me. And soon after a small boy in the street asked me the time. I knew it was that because he pointed to a clock. I could not answer in Norwegian. The boy looked astounded, then hurt. It was a foolish moment, standing there falsely dressed and apparently unable to read a clock. Perhaps the boy lost forever what faith he had left in adults.
However—with all these confusions the particular quality of that town surprised and exalted me. It is a small town, but the streets are wide. The streets seem wider than the houses which range them, houses of not more than two storeys. These are of planked wood. Planked wood painted white, but a white greyed or creamed so by the purer white of snow, white coloured as softly as some gentle shade of hand-made paper. And at the doors there are pillars of carved wood, with carved wood capitals and pediments, and the windows are set with classic regularity. There are some small palaces and there is also a royal residence, the largest wooden building in Europe, a fine white-painted low-lying mansion windowed with lavender blinds, pedimented with a red regalia like a scarlet royal seal, gilded occasionally and touched with wrought iron. Then there are the great apothecaries’ houses, designated by emblems such as The Swan, throughout Scandinavia the largest of the old shops, and in themselves like small hospitals. Trondhjem has much the look of an American colonial town, with its wide perspective and wooden classic builidngs—yet it is finer, and there is the snow to throw everything into greater relief; and here and there a yellow toy-like tram gives an air of business. Wherever you walk, too, you come to water, for the town is nearly encircled by its lazy oil-green river Nid, bestower of the town’s old Viking name Nidaros. That name in itself added a confusing charm—a false Greek word among derived Greek architectures in the snowbound north. And one must never forget the sun, lying so low, beaming everywhere its curious inexact light.
It was after I had been walking for almost an hour that I met the girl. I remember leaving the streets—which I had already traversed more than once, for the town is pleasantly limited—and deciding to have a good look at the rivermouth harbour. So once more down broad Mungkegaten to the waterside wharves. And I remember then being glad of those ridiculous sunglasses, because at every gap between houses, when one was walking laterally to the sun, the great candlemass hidden below roof-level shone out with tremendous power, at eye-level it struck just as though one had chosen to look the sun in the eye, it nearly knocked one down.
Resting on something—a barrel, a smoked-fish-crate, a wood railing?—I looked out over the packed fleet. I remember coughing—and then feeling both self-conscious of the noise and of the mist of my breath on the air, for exactly then I noticed her standing quite near. I felt she might have mistaken this for the beginning of an intrusion. But it was she who intruded. She moved along nearer me—for she also had been simply standing and looking, and said pleasantly something in Norwegian.
I stuttered back:
— Kan ikke Norsk—I cannot speak Norwegian, I am English.
— Oh, you speak English? I too. We all speak English. You are English?
— Yes. I am on my way to England.
— From Trondhjem? There is another English man here in Trondhjem now, he came yesterday, a famous actor. You know him?
It is easy to adopt the disguised lie, difficult to speak the lie direct. But after a suspended moment, I did. I said I had not seen myself. And what a beautiful morning it was.
She answered immediately, with a strange enthusiasm:
—It is, it is. That’s what I said first. The sun isn’t warm but the light is lovely. The ships so still….
For a while she went on like this. She seemed too enthusiastic about the weather, strangely so for a modern-looking girl—but then I remembered how all Scandinavians were devout
lovers of nature, they love with an elemental love not far removed from their ancient sun and forest worship.
— I do like how open it is, and how gentle the hills round—no steep mountains….
— Then you are on a visit too?
— Oh, no, I live here. I’ve always lived here.
She too was wearing sunglasses: but I could see from the high lift of her cheek-bones that her eyes would have that curious Mongolian tilt so fascinating among the Norwegians with their china-blue eyes.
— And you have seen our statue to King Olav?
— One could hardly miss it. Yes, it’s most striking.
— And our cathedral?
— I am against the cathedral. Too much fuss is made of it—few people speak of what is much more beautiful, the town itself and its elegant houses.
— …. that’s the first time I’ve heard—but I think you are right. And the warehouses, did you see? …
Her hair was blonde. She wore one of the youth-caps, a red woollen thing with a becoming tassel. Round her neck was a soft wool scarf of Norwegian pattern, a black spiky design on plaster-grey. Her skin against the wool looked fresh and soft. I went on talking:
— The warehouses, yes. Perhaps that view from the little bridge down the Nid to the sea is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, ever.
— … the warehouses lining up on either side on their stilts, we used to call them giants….
— But such extraordinary colours—olive, maroon, dark ochre, they’re the colours of oil-paint, of a painting of Breughel’s….
— You like paintings? I have not seen many.
Her coat was pale blue, smartly shapeless. She wore fur-trimmed boots, and I could just see above them the beginning of woollen stockings on legs slim above the fur.
— So you haven’t travelled much?
— I have never been away from Trondhjem. Never.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 18