Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (29 page)

Divver ignored the remark. He sank into a chair, blew out a gust of breath and said: “What a day! What a day!” His stricken eye was as colourful as marzipan.

Why, you good, gentle soul! thought Morgan. He asked courteously:

“Were you in Tutin, Max?”

“I certainly was. It’s not like here, not a bit like here.” He shook his head slowly. “Oh, brother!
They
know what’s going on. You can feel the tension just as soon as the train starts into the station.” He hung his hands wearily, and said with disgust: “Well, tension is all
I
got out of today…. Do you by any chance remember an article I wrote a year or so ago about Polish unions?” He raised his legs and rested them on the top of a packed suitcase.

“I don’t
exactly
recall it, but I’m sure I could.”

“Well, I got the material for that from a Polish union president who was visiting New York. It was a friendly piece; it recognized all the problems confronting the honest Pole. After it appeared I was sent a card of honorary membership in the Polish Metallurgical and Allied Trades Union. I was careful to bring the card with me on this trip; it’s important in a foreign country to have some person to tip you off to what’s good and what’s bad, otherwise how would you know?

“The card had the address of union headquarters in Tutin on it This morning I showed it to a cab driver outside Tutin station—and that was the way it all started. The driver was illiterate, so he showed the card to a passing plumber; the plumber was illiterate and took the card into a bar; the bartender handed it around the customers, who all looked polite but completely vague—well, we wasted a half-hour monkeying around like that, and when finally the driver found out the address he didn’t seem to believe his ears. He kept pointing to the card and raising his shoulders and hands, and I kept nodding and nodding—quite a commentary, no? on the average American visitor, when a cab driver just can’t believe he could want to visit a union headquarters.

“He kept on like that all the way through the main part of
Tutin. He kept pointing to churches, museums, parks, fountains, war memorials, as though he was sure I would be better off looking at them. At first I responded by smiling and nodding, pretending I was interested, the way one does with strangers; but I soon gave that up, because each time I showed interest he thought I’d really changed my mind, and tried to stop. I think he just couldn’t believe that I was seriously identified with Labour. We drove clear across the town that way, until we came to the industrial section, and then he had to stop at every corner and ask for directions. Finally, we landed up at the entrance of an alley. He pointed down it, and when I paid him off he wanted to wait until I came back. I don’t wonder; he’d already cost me the equivalent of four or five bucks.

“I went down the alley and it opened out into a court, a scrubby sort of square made of the backs of houses. Some of the words on my card were painted across a wall of one of the houses. There were no doors and windows on the ground floor, only a flight of outside stairs, with a handrail made of old rope, leading up to a door just under the roof. There was an old woman sweeping these stairs; and when I climbed to the top and showed her the card we went through the whole damn rigmarole all over again—along with half the people in the court with nothing better to do; old men with stinking pipes, and children and women straight out of the washtub; all gathering around and screaming at each other and looking at me as if I was something out of a theatre: one always feels self-conscious about being well dressed among workers. Well, all that happened after all this debating—and one or two of them seemed to be half out of their minds, they got so excited—was that I gathered that if I cared to wait the president would be along.

“The old woman led me up the stairs and in at the door, where there were stairs dropping down into a typical union
meeting-room: they’re the same everywhere I’ve ever been: tables for committees, dozens of hard chairs, a dusty wooden floor, and a bulletin board with printed appeals and carbon copies of manifestoes and dates of meetings, and the usual union art; you know, mimeographed sketches of workers representing or wanting something. Don’t think I’m being snide; art is a natural instinct even when it’s bad.

“So far so good. I sat down to wait. Once in a while the old woman would open the door and stick her head in from under the roof and wave her hand approvingly; and each time she did it, I figured that Mr. Big would be along. Around one o’clock I began to feel hungry, but I was afraid to miss my man if I went out. At two o’clock whistles blew, and some shift must have ended because a couple of young workers came in. The old woman pointed to me and I showed them my card; they were perfectly polite, but they only shrugged their shoulders; and so I went back to my chair. They put a sheet over one of the tables, laid a poolboard on it and began to play.

“I’d got to the stage where since I’d missed half the day I felt I might as well sit out the rest. Lucky I felt that way, because the very same business happened each time someone new came in: the dame pointed me out, I showed him my card—it was beginning to look soiled—he talked to some others about it—then the same shrugging of shoulders, and so on. By four-thirty, three committee meetings were going on around me; there was a whole gang of people talking and sitting but leaving a small space just around me: I began to feel like an electric chair. But when the five o’clock whistles blew, half the people in the place turned and gave me assuring looks, and patted their hands at me to be patient.

“When at last the door opened and the big boss climbed down with his henchmen—I’m joking, but that’s frankly the way I felt—they all sat up and drew his attention to me, and then sat back to watch.

“He came over and bowed. I said: ‘May I see Mr. Korbycski?’; which seemed to surprise him; and then I said, still in English of course, ‘I am Max Divver, your honorary member, from the American magazine
Forward’
—smiling, because my appearance must have seemed suspicious to him; I was prepared for him not to have the least idea who I was. I handed him the card and he read it over slowly, sucking his lips and frowning; and finally he let out a snort, shrugged his shoulders and passed the card on to his escorts. The escorts examined it in the same grim way, and then gave the same hard noises, looking at me in a tired manner, and shaking their heads. The boss didn’t even wait around; he just gave a short order to one of the escorts and went off to talk to a man at the pool table. The escort spoke English, and said to me, in very slow, exact words: ‘I am sorry.
Mister
Korbycski is no more president of this union. He is no more a member of this union.’

“I asked, jokingly, was he dead?

“He said:
‘Mister
Korbycski is a traitor.’

“I said: Oh, in what way?

“He said: ‘Korbycski is an agent of imperialism. He is dismissed from our ranks as a disruptor of worker unity and a Trotszky politician of power. He is in the pay of General Goering and Lord Leverhulme.’

“I said, how could that be? we ourselves had had Korbycski to an editorial lunch.

“He said: ‘My good friend, you have much to learn about Europe.’

“I said, with a good deal of sarcasm in my voice, that I’d been learning for fifteen years.

“He said: ‘Your gentle nose has not yet learned the stink of a Polish dung-heap.’

“I was getting mad by that time, so I didn’t wait for him to reply: there was something so unreal about the whole place:
the president playing pool, everybody staring at me like owls, puffing little brown cigarettes: I was mad and jittery: it was like landing up in some sort of Labour looney-bin. The last straw was when I was walking to the door, and the man I’d talked with suddenly pointed his finger at the old woman on the stairs and shouted: ‘She is the traitor’s mother, yet she will confirm every word that I have said!’”

“And did she?”

“She just looked at me miserably, and nodded, and then began to cry.

“The cab driver was actually still waiting for me. He seemed sorry for me, and tried to make me stop and see the Museum of Science and Industry. I feel like a goddammed fool. I’d depended on the president to show me the ropes. Well, my first article will just have to be plain description, that’s all, a sort of summing-up of the total atmosphere, of the whole sense of social disintegration. I can still hardly credit what happened: either they’ve gone crazy or I’m crazy: I’ve reached the point where I hardly know
what
I am.” He looked guiltily at Morgan’s suitcases. “Would you mind very much if we hang on here another couple of days: I can’t face collecting my things again and hunting for a place? I just can’t make decisions right now. The thought of deciding any more things makes me want to vomit. I don’t know what’s come over me. First I want to go one way, then another: every few hours I feel a spurt of determination and spirits, and I think: thank God! Now things are going to pick up: and then, half an hour later, I’m back in the same depression again. What with old Grieg turning out to be an intellectual flop, and Korbycski changing into Labour’s dung-heap, and the things we talked about yesterday, and getting out of this dump—why, hell! I feel I’m at the end of my tether without even knowing what my tether is.” He sighed, and added: “Sometimes I despair of helping Europe.”

Morgan sighed too. “I know very well what you mean, Max.”

“Do you? You seem to me to be in fine shape. Incidentally, what
did
happen to you last night? Did you meet up with a woman?”

“Sort of.”

“Polish or American?”

“Oh, she’s American.”

“A tourist, I suppose.”

“In a way.”

“You’re not wasting much time are you?”

Morgan grew in stature, but he smiled modestly. “She was really a very nice sort of a girl,” he said.

“Well, that’s something. But I hope you do understand why I was sore last night.”

“Oh, sure, Max.”

“You just can’t go running around hotel corridors stark naked.” Divver began to smile, rather wistfully. “But you had a good time, eh?”

“I certainly did.”

“Well, that’s an important thing, too … Do you know, frankly, what I feel? No matter what I may have said to you yesterday, or may ever say, for that matter; however ashamed I may feel of being here, however much I despise this sort of dump—believe me, I know that no place is as terrible as one’s own living-room. Sometimes, when I just hear the word ‘home,’ it gives me the feeling of terror I used to get when I was a kid and came to the part in a play where it said ‘Enter Torturers.’ I think that if I deliberately said ‘home’ over and over, I could drive myself insane. When there’s been a war, it’s terrible to think that half the heroes in it were men who, whatever they said aloud, went down on their knees in their hearts and thanked God for giving them the only valid excuse for leaving home—as though, really, peace had been
declared. Sometimes I think of war as a huge sigh of relief. And since we’re being so frank, tell me now, honestly: if you were only able to get away from home by war, wouldn’t you want war to come?”

“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.