— Don’t you want to?
— No. Once. Not now.
— But aren’t you curious, don’t you wonder what the rest of the world’s like? Your own country? Oslo? The North Cape?
— I couldn’t do without Trondhjem. You see …
She paused, I thought she was thinking how to explain herself. But then I saw her lips quietly smiling, she seemed to be listening and then turned to look at the road behind. A horse and sledge were passing. The horse was white, a short long-maned horse sturdy as a pony: it jingled its harness bells at an easy walking-pace, the sledge carried two oil-drums painted bright brown.
— There you are, she said. The horse! In Oslo it’s all cars? … Besides, I have to stay here because of my husband.
I remember feeling then a sudden disappointment. It was not as if I had thought definitely towards that girl, it was more simply a sudden lowering of the pleasant tension that exists always, with no conscious endeavour, at a fresh meeting of the sexes. But there. She had a husband. One felt a sensation of having been robbed. Yet slight, it passed, and of course I said something like:
— Well of course that’s a different matter. You’re home’s your home, you’re right, no wanderlust can compare with building a home with the right person, the person you love—
— When do you leave?
— What? Leave—oh leave here? Tomorrow, the boat.
— He’s not the right person.
— Oh.
My face felt that if I looked at her it would show too dramatic a concern, something too intimate and curious. She went instantly on:
— I don’t love him. As you go tomorrow I can say that. It’s good to speak sometimes, you rarely can. No, I don’t love him.
As she went on, speaking in so even a voice, as if enquiring into herself, I could again look at her. Her soft and beautiful face—young, in her early twenties—had the amused look of reminiscence, whether the thought is amusing or not, a softening play of the mouth to accompany the play of thought. And then suddenly she broke off, and looked over at the ships, at the pale low railway station islanded out in the harbour, at the sky beyond:
— I used to think the station looked like a palace out there with sun gold along it’s roof. Its golden now, isn’t it? And the sky green between the masts?
I laughed:
— Isn’t it? Why, you can see it is.
I found myself taking off my glasses to see more clearly the colours. And then realized and corrected myself:
— But of course, your glasses. No one can see properly in the damn things. Half the beauty of life goes, and half the world seems to wear them. Things look like a thunderstorm or a rose-tinted hell. Why do we wear them!
— Why! Why indeed?
Then she took off her spectacles. She turned her face full to me, and I saw for the first time her china-blue eyes. They stared full blue into mine. I had been talking more quickly about the dark spectacles—when she had said she had no love for this husband my spirits had briefly, absurdly risen. A male cunning had asserted itself, a predatory wile that leapt on the question—was she then in some way offering herself to me? Wishful thinking made it so. I had talked faster, dressing the moment to cover my true feelings. And when she took the glasses off I was so disturbed, for it cut against careful grains of reserve, that I must have seemed to have asked her to take them off: and she had assented, that made it no less embarrassing. In fact she had spoken to me first, she was assenting too quickly. Though a man might dream of such affairs proceeding without the delays of propriety, when it happens he does not quite know how to adjust himself.
But delighted beyond all that I looked down into her face, into her eyes with expectation.
She was smiling up at me. But it was no smile of invitation: it was instead a wise smile—and though her freshness of appearance made this seem unbelievable—almost a sneer. I felt immediately: Here we go. The old game. Lead him on. Get him going. Then laugh—for you knew all the time.
But as I thought this—I was looking still into her eyes and saw then that they were suffering, there was a mist of pain in them. So that smile of wisdom was one of knowledge of some pain, of perhaps how tired she looked, and of a rejection of sympathy. Then suddenly I saw that she was not looking into my eyes at all—she was looking at my forehead, glazed, asleep, set dreaming. And even then there crossed my mind other possibilities—the nymphomaniac glaze, powerless and overpowering; the endreamed set stare of someone weak in the head. But then she nodded, a solemn conspiring slow nod. And I saw exactly what these eyes were. They were glass. She was blind.
— You see?
— I never dreamed—
— There it is. And he did it.
The eyes, infinite in their dream, turned a little away, she stared straight into the sun. I could see now that the flexing sensibility of her lips moved from a reflection of other senses working—senses of sound, of the touch of air, of other proximities ordinarily unperceived. Her eyes fixed, her face was the more alive. Then—as though the act of play was over—she resumed those dark spectacles. And became visibly as other women.
I could not stop myself—there was hardly a need, since she had first wished to talk of it—from asking:
— He did it? But, how, an accident? Some dreadful accident?
— On purpose.
— But—
— If you like, accidentally. He was drunk.
— But how could he …
— With a broken bottle.
She must have felt then that so shocking a statement would have made me angry: an anger to which she may have been well used. For without pausing she drifted on, easily, with the same strange smile of reminiscence. She might have been talking of a well-loved garden.
— You mustn’t mind if I talk so. It’s a little forbidden at home, with my friends. It is awkward, you see.
— Yes. But—why—
— Oh really it is simple. It was I suppose my fault also: must not forget that. You see, he was away on his ship: it was midsummer, you know that is a gay time with us. To cut the long story short—I was a bad girl. It was sudden, a foolish thing: it never occurred again. But there—he found out.
She paused now, it seemed as if she were frowning to remember. But there was no exact frown:
— He got drunk. He was proud, he was upset and mad. He came home and held my arms, tight. I was frightened, I got away and I threw something at him. It was heavy and it hurt him: I think that must have jolted his mind—perhaps he thought he was in a real fight, somewhere else, with men, I don’t know. Anyway—then the bottle, it was done in a second. He broke it in the same movement as he cut me with it, I remember his arm coming, it came across, I don’t think he ever meant to stab, it was just perhaps unlucky. However—as you see …
She paused. Her lips suddenly lost all movement, her face grew blank. In remembering she had come across a moment too strong for her. There was nothing to say. At such times one can be quick to feel pity, sorrow: but unable to make the move of sympathy. The deeper the feeling, the more impossible this.
But she continued:
— Of course he came to his senses. I was sent to hospital. There was no chance.
— But then why do you stay?
— How can I go … he is so sorry.
— But—
— He feels he must make this up to me. It’s all he lives for now.
— Then you’ve forgiven him?
— No. I don’t believe in forgiveness. Forgiveness, forgetting. I have heard it so much, an old … distinction? ‘I forgive but I never forget’. Or ‘I forget, but I don’t forgive’. None of such things is true. You simply grow used to a changed way of things. Time takes the sharpness away. But you are not proof against your own moods. So sometimes—not often—but sometimes—I become angry and for a time I do not forgive. Then again, in a happy mood, when things are sweet, I not only forgive but say to myself this forgiveness. But for the most I do nothing, neither remember n
or blame, neither forgive nor quite forget. I simply do not care. It was four years ago.
I thought ‘four years’—a short time. But then four years at twenty are long.
— Still, you don’t love him. You could stay away.
— He feels he must make it up to me.
— But if you say you don’t want it?
— How could I?
She turned those dark glasses on to me, glasses of the sportswoman and the beach. Her voice had altered. With three words it lost its evenness, its reasonability: then broke suddenly deep, as words felt deeply do, as if they are searching deep down in the breast for the heart which bore them.
— How could I? He’d think I had gone away to leave him free. He’d think I was unburdening him. He’d have no more way of making up for what he did. He’d be left alone with his conscience … I could never do that to him.
There was nothing to say to this. I searched hard for an answer, one must answer when looking at a blind face. I made some noise of affirmation, only that, while my own eyes searched the harbour before me. The small steam fishing boats lying still, never rocking, smooth on the river water: their sides varnished over natural wood, cleaner thus than other vessels; and themselves set in glass with their bright brass and varnish shining in that transparent northern air. The sky above so distant, glassy blue as the flesh of a seabird’s egg. From one side hammering came, the curious painted pale brown and apple green of a liner rose above the houses from a hidden dock. A bird, black and white, strutted among the fishcrates, pretending to be a penguin. I could only think of the usual dread of mutilation, the story as often told—the dread of the mutilated that their affliction should imprison the loved one. And this girl….
Her voice was again calm, she was smiling:
— In any case. I cannot leave Trondhjem. It’s the only place I’ve seen, it’s the only place I can still see….
Later I asked whether there was some small restaurant where we could lunch. I watched her fingers select with more precision than a sighted person the numbers on the automatic dial when she telephoned that she would be out for lunch: her black, white-rimmed spectacles bent looking at the dial, it was embarrassing to be so near a woman who could not see. I found I could look closely at, say, the very fine hair at her temples without worrying about the expression on my own face, I could look at whatever I chose; and for this reason I particularly did not, I had been already punished enough for my presumption of the morning.
Then throughout the afternoon we explored and examined that strange city. It can only be remembered as a dream—no ecstatic dream, but a time suspended from reality, caught in a mirror, never properly experienced. We did not walk far. We stayed down by the quay, walked a little against the cold in the very narrow streets running back between the great wood-gabled warehouses, but always returned through the snow to the ships.
So what I saw of Trondhjem was through her eyes. She behind the blind glasses evoked again for me the picture, a picture more familiar and more sensitive of the streets I had walked that morning. I saw them in fact more freshly—as if in fact I had worn no tinted glasses—the pale beauty of white houses against the whiter snow, the lavender blinds of the great planked palace, the extraordinary gabled warehouses lining the rivers on stilts and painted the deep oily reds and greens and browns of a Breughel painting picked out with snow. I heard of the people, residents of this royal and merchant city—and matched their rich dull appearance with her more intimate knowledge of them as individuals and friends; so that they began to live, they ceased to be types and national puppets formed in a foreigner’s eyes. Both portly and merry, their figures seemed cut from the previous century: yet they rode up the surrounding hills on electric rails, their lights at night were neon.
In mid-afternoon the sun began to set. The short day of long summer-evening light was over, and we walked back towards her home. Paused in the small square where the brilliant tall Christmas tree threw out its frosted light. I wondered whether she had ever seen it. She knew it was there, she raised her face to it and seemed to be looking. Its light flashed on her glasses black in the night. She talked of its candles. Candles! Had she ever seen that the candles were electric? I dared not ask.
We parted at the corner of her street. We simply shook hands, she turned and went along between the houses. She walked more slowly, her back a little bent. She looked like a young girl walking moody in thought.
Two men, drunk, swaying together like stage drunks as many Scandinavians seem to do, raised their hats and said something as she passed. She answered pleasantly. They watched her walking away, making gurgling noises of drunken approbation.
*
All that evening I could not keep myself from thinking of her—of the beauty of her very humble demand from life. The reward often of people resigned to illness, to amputation. And the next day again I woke with the thought of her. I went early to the boat, found my cabin, hung about. To the top of each mast was lashed a small Christmas tree ready to be lit at night as we would plough through the dark rough North Sea.
So it was later, when the boat sailed and I went into the bar, that I ran into my trouble. I was still exalted, still clouded by both the beauty of Nidaros and of that young girl’s undemanding humility.
Two men were in the bar, speaking English. They were, I think, both pleasant-looking ordinary men of middle-age. Business men enjoying their trip. But one was already looking at his watch, comparing this with the clock of the wall:
— Well—goodbye to the North! Back to good old British Time!
The other looked up, and nodded. Nodded in sudden complacent pleasure. He nodded brightly:
— Yes! We gain an hour!
It was then, as if something outside myself had gripped me, that I smashed my fist with all the force I had into his smiling, nodding teeth.
The Girl on the Bus
SINCE to love is better than to be loved, unrequited love may be the finest love of all. If this is so, then the less requited the finer. And it follows that the most refined passion possible for us must finally be for those to whom we have never even spoken, whom we have never met. The passing face, the anguish of a vision of a face, a face sitting alone in front of you so endearing and so moving and so beautiful that you are torn and sick inside with hope and despair, instant despair … for it is hopelessly plain that no word can ever be spoken, those eyes will never greet yours, in a few minutes the bell will ring, the bus will shudder to a stop, and down some impersonal side street she will be gone. Never to be seen again. Gone even is the pain of listening to where she will book for—a fourpenny, or a three-halfpence ticket?
It is due to such an encounter that I find engaging the story of my friend Harry. Only Harry’s girl was not on a bus, she passed on skis.
It was one late January afternoon when Harry was walking out at Haga. The snow lay thick, and everywhere over the fine rolling park groups of Stockholmers had sought out the best slopes for an afternoon’s ski-ing. The sun was already low and yellow over the firs, it sent a cold tired dusk across the snow—and one could feel the pleasantly weary, flushed trudge of the skiers making their last climb before nightfall. Harry walked about tasting this air of a winter’s day ending, enjoying the rich smell of birchwood burning, watching the first yellow lights square in the cream-coloured palace, tasting his own frosted breath. Up on the highest ridge stood the line of cavalry barracks, the fantastic line of false mediaeval war-tents—their great carved wooden folds were draped to the snow, a last glint of the sun flashed the gold emblems on their snow-domed roofs. From such an elegant extravagance it must have been fine to see the blue-cloaked cavalry ride forth steaming and jangling on to snowy hills. But now it was a ghost-house: and as if in evocation of its ghosts, every so often through the tall erect firs black-crouched skiers would glide, swift as shadows, like trees themselves flickering downward home.
It was some time then, in this bright half-light, that Harry turned and saw on the path be
hind him the figure of a girl trudging up on skis. He walked down towards her, enjoying the precision of her slender erect shape slide-stepping along towards him. Skiers walk with a beautifully controlled motion, feet always close together on the long hickory, pressing so lightly forward in long strides, pausing it seems invisibly between each forward motion, listening to a music playing somewhere in their shoulders—and always in firm endeavour, as on some enviable purposed unhurried quest pondering seriously forward.
Harry was looking down at her skis as she came up, taking pleasure from the movement and the slimness of her stride. So that not until she was nearly parallel with him and about to pass did he glance up at her face.
What he saw then took his breath away, he drew in a deep astounded breath and this then disappeared, so that there was nothing inside him at all.
Poor Harry did not have even a bus-ride’s worth, not a three-ha’pence worth. He had the length of two long ski-strides’ worth. But that, he said, was in its expanded way enough. Not as much as he wanted—that would have amounted to a lifetime—but enough to provoke the indelible impression such passing visions may leave for a lifetime.
It would be useless to describe her. When Harry told me he talked of ‘beauty’ and of a colour of hair and a grace of cheek-bone and an expression of lips. But what he said did not amount to a concrete image, and particularly she did not necessarily fit the blueprint of my own imagined vision, should such a one ever chance to pass. Each to his own. Suffice it that this woman’s face and manner and whatever she evoked was for Harry perfection: was beyond what he thought might be perfection: was absolute.
He was so shocked he nearly stopped, he certainly hesitated and half turned his body—heavily coated and thus making what must have been a most noticeable movement—to follow his wide-eyed worshipping glance. But in the same short time, perhaps on her second stride forward, she suddenly turned her face to him. Terrified, he looked away. He never knew whether she saw him staring, or saw him at all, or looked past or though him—he only felt a surge of embarrassment out of all proportion to the occasion. He felt small, despairing, hopeless, and above all horrified that she might have caught his eye and thought it the eye of an intruder.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 19