The Berlin Stories (35 page)

“Who’s he?”

“You’ve never heard of him?” This annoyed Sally; she pretended to be immensely surprised: “I thought you took an interest in the cinema? He’s miles the best young scenario writer. He earns pots of money. He’s only doing this as a favour to me, of course… He says he’ll dictate it to his secretary while he’s shaving and then send it straight round to the editor’s flat… He’s marvellous!”

“Are you sure it’ll be what the editor wants, this time?”

“Of course it will! Kurt’s an absolute genius. He can do anything. Just now, he’s writing a novel in his spare time. He’s so fearfully busy, he can only dictate it while he’s having breakfast. He showed me the first few chapters, the other day. Honestly, I think it’s easily the best novel I’ve ever read.”

“Indeed?”

“That’s the sort of writer I admire,” Sally continued. She was careful to avoid my eye. “He’s terribly ambitious and he works the whole time; and he can write anything—anything you like: scenarios, novels, plays, poetry, advertisements… He’s not a bit stuck-up about it either. Not like these young men who, because they’ve written one book, start talking about Art and imagining they’re the most wonderful authors in the world… They make me sick…,”

Irritated as I was with her, I couldn’t help laughing: “Since when have you disapproved of me so violently, Sally?”

“I don’t disapprove of you”—but she couldn’t look me in the face—”not exactly.”

“I merely make you sick?”

“I don’t know what it is… You seem to have changed, somehow….”

“How have I changed?”

“It’s difficult to explain… You don’t seem to have any energy or want to get anywhere. You’re so dilettante. It annoys me.”

“I’m sorry.” But my would-be facetious tone sounded rather forced. Sally frowned down at her tiny black shoes.

“You must remember I’m a woman, Christopher. All women like men to be strong and decided and following out their careers. A woman wants to be motherly to a man and protect his weak side, but he must have a strong side too, which she can respect… If you ever care for a woman, I don’t advise you to let her see that you’ve got no ambition. Otherwise she’ll get to despise you.”

“Yes, I see… And that’s the principle on which you choose your friends—your new friends?”

She flared up at this: “It’s very easy for you to sneer at my friends for having good business heads. If they’ve got money, it’s because they’ve worked for it… I suppose you consider yourself better than they are?”

“Yes, Sally, since you ask me—if they’re at all as I imagine them—I do.”

“There you go, Christopher! That’s typical of you. That’s what annoys me about you: you’re conceited and lazy. If you say things like that, you ought to be able to prove them.”

“How does one prove that one’s better than somebody else? Besides, that’s not what I said. I said I considered myself better—it’s simply a matter of taste.”

Sally made no reply. She lit a cigarette, slightly frowning.

“You say I seem to have changed,” I continued. “To be quite frank, I’ve been thinking the same thing about you.”

Sally didn’t seem surprised: “Have you, Christopher? Perhaps you’re right. I don’t know… Or perhaps we’ve neither of us changed. Perhaps we’re just seeing each other as we really are. We’re awfully different in lots of ways, you know.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

“I think,” said Sally, smoking meditatively, her eyes on her shoes, “that we may have sort of outgrown each other, a bit.”

“Perhaps we have….” I smiled: Sally’s real meaning was so obvious: “At any rate, we needn’t quarrel about it, need we?”

“Of course not, darling.”

There was a pause. Then I said that I must be going. We were both rather embarrassed, now, and extra polite.

“Are you certain you won’t have a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks awfully.”

“Have some tea? It’s specially good. I got it as a present.”

“No, thanks very much indeed, Sally. I really must be getting along.”

“Must you?” She sounded, after all, rather relieved. “Be sure and ring me up some time soon, won’t you?”

“Yes, rather.”

It wasn’t until I had actually left the house and was walking quickly away up the street that I realised how angry and ashamed I felt. What an utter little bitch she is, I thought. After all, I told myself, it’s only what I’ve always known she was like—right from the start. No, that wasn’t true: I hadn’t known it. I’d flattered myself—why not be frank about it?—that she was fond of me. WŤHT I’d been wrong, it seemed; but could I blame her for that? Yet I did blame her, I was furious with her; nothing would have pleased me more, at that moment, than to see her soundly whipped. Indeed, I was so absurdly upset that I began to wonder whether I hadn’t, all this time, in my own peculiar way, been in love with Sally myself.

But no, it wasn’t love either—it was worse. It was the cheapest, most childish kind of wounded vanity. Not that I cared a curse what she thought of my article—well, just a little, perhaps, but only a very little; my literary self-conceit was proof against anything she could say—it was her criticism of myself. The awful sexual flair women have for taking the stuffing out of a man! It was no use telling myself that Sally had the vocabulary and mentality of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, that she was altogether comic and preposterous; it was no use—I only knew that I’d been somehow made to feel a sham. Wasn’t I a bit of a sham anyway—though not for her ridiculous reasons—with my arty talk to lady pupils and my newly-acquired parlour-socialism? Yes, I was. But she knew nothing about that. I could quite easily have impressed her. That was the most humiliating part of the whole business; I had mis-managed our interview from the very beginning. I had blushed and squabbled, instead of being wonderful, convincing, superior, fatherly, mature. I had tried to compete with her beastily little Kurt on his own ground; just the very thing, of course, which Sally had wanted and expected me to do! After all these months, I had made the one really fatal mistake—I had let her see that I was not only incompetent but jealous. Yes, vulgarly jealous. I could have kicked myself. The mere thought made me prickly with shame from head to foot.

Well, the mischief was done, now. There was only one thing for it, and that was to forget the whole affair. And of course it would be impossible for me ever to see Sally again.

It must have been about ten days after this that I was visited, one morning, by a smaltpale dark-haired young man who spoke American fluently with a slight foreign accent. His name, he told me, was George P. Sandars. He had seen my English-teaching advertisement in the B. Z am Mittag.

“When would you like to begin?” I asked him.

But the young man shook his head hastily. Oh no, he hadn’t come to take lessons, at all. Rather disappointed, I waited politely for him to explain the reason of his visit. He seemed in no hurry to do this. Instead, he accepted a cigarette, sat down and began to talk chattily about the States. Had I ever been to Chicago? No? Well, had I heard of James L. Schraube? I hadn’t? The young man uttered a faint sigh. He had the air of being very patientwith me, and with the world in general. He had evidently been over the same ground with a good many other people already. James L. Schraube, he explained, was a very big man in Chicago: he owned a whole chain of restaurants and several cinemas. He had two large country houses and a yacht on Lake Michigan. And he possessed no less than four cars. By this time, I was beginning to drum with my fingers on the table. A pained expression passed over the young man’s face. He excused himself for taking up my valuable time; he had only told me about Mr. Schraube, he said, because he thought I might be interested—his tone implied a gentle rebuke—and because Mr. Schraube, had I known him, would certainly have vouched for his friend Sandars’ respectability. However… it couldn’t be helped… well, would I lend him two hundred marks? He needed the money in order to start a business; it was a unique opportunity, which he would miss altogether if he didn’t find the money before tomorrow morning. He would pay me back within three days. If I gave him the money now he would return that same evening with papers to prove that the whole thing was perfectly genuine.

No? Ah well… He didn’t seem unduly surprised. He rose to go at once, like a business man who has wasted a valuable twenty minutes on a prospective customer: the loss, he contrived politely to imply, was mine, not his. Already at the door, he paused for a moment: Did I happen, by any chance, to know some film actresses? He was travelling, as a sideline, in a new kind of face-cream specially invented to keep the skin from getting dried up by the studio lights. It was being used by all the Hollywood stars already, but in Europe it was still quite unknown. If he could find half a dozen actresses to use and recommend it, they should have free sample jars and permanent supplies at half-price.

After a moment’s hesitation, I gave him Sally’s address. I don’t know quite why I did it. Partly, of course, to get rid of the young man, who showed signs of wishing to sit down again and continue our conversation. Partly, perhaps, out of malice. It would do Sally no harm to have to put up with his chatter for an hour or two: she had told me that she liked men with ambition. Perhaps she would even get a jar of the face-cream—if it existed at all. And if he touched her for the two hundred marks—well, that wouldn’t matter so very much, either. He couldn’t deceive a baby.

“But whatever you do,” I warned him, “don’t say that I sent you.”

He agreed to this at once, with a slight smile. He must have had his own explanation of my request, for he didn’t appear to find it in the least strange. He raised his hat politely as he went downstairs. By the next morning, I had forgotten about his visit altogether.

A few days later, Sally herself rang me up. I had been called away in the middle of a lesson to answer the telephone and was very ungracious.

“Oh, is that you, Christopher darling?”

“Yes. It’s me.”

“I say, can you come round and see me at once?”

“No.”

“Oh….” My refusal evidently gave Sally a shock. There was a little pause, then she continued, in a tone of unwonted humility: “I suppose you’re most terribly busy?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Well… would you mind frightfully if I came round to see you?”

“What about?”

“Darling”—Sally sounded positively desperate—”I can’t possibly explain to you over the telephone… It’s something really serious.”

“Oh, I see”—I tried to make this as nasty as possible—”another magazine article, I suppose?”

Nevertheless, as soon as I’d said it, we both had to laugh.

“Chris, you are a brute!” Sally tinkled gaily along the wire: then checked herself abruptly: “No, darling—this time I promise you: it’s most terribly serious, really and truly it is.” She paused; then impressively added: “And you’re the only person who can possibly help.”

“Oh, all right….” I was more than half melted already. “Come in an hour.”

“Well, darling, I’ll begin at the very beginning, shall I?… Yesterday morning, a man rang me up and asked if he could come round and see me. He said it was on very important business; and as he seemed to know my name and everything of course I said: Yes, certainly, come at once… So he came. He told me his name was Rakowski—Paul Rakowski—and that he was a European agent of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and that he’d come to make me an offer. He said they were looking out for an English actress who spoke German to act in a comedy film they were going to shoot on the Italian Riviera. He was most frightfully convincing about it all; he told me who the director was and the camera-man and the art-director and who’d written the script. Naturally, I hadn’t heard of any of them before. But that didn’t seem so surprising: in fact, it really made it sound much more real, because most people would have chosen one of the names you see in the newspapers… Anyhow, he said that, now he’d seen me, he was sure I’d be just the person for the part, and he could practically promise it to me, as long as the test was all right… so of course I was simply thrilled and I asked when the test would be and he said not for a day or two, as he had to make arrangements with the Ufa people.. So then we began to talk about Hollywood and he told me all kinds of stories—I suppose they could have been things he’d read in fan magazines, but somehow I’m pretty sure they weren’t—and then he told me how they make sound-effects and how they do the trick-work; he was really most awfully interesting and he certainly must have been inside a great many studios… Anyhow, when we’d finished talking about Hollywood, he started to tell me about the rest of America and the people he knew, and about the gangsters and about New York. He said he’d only just arrived from there and all his luggage was still in the customs at Hamburg. As a matter of fact, I had been thinking to myself that it seemed rather queer he was so shabbily dressed; but after he said that, of course, I thought it was quite natural… Well—now you must promise not to laugh at this part of the story, Chris, or I simply shan’t be able to tell you—presently he started making the most passionate love to me. At first I was rather angry with him, for sort of mixing business with pleasure; but then, after a bit, I didn’t mind so much: he was quite attractive, in a Russian kind of way… And the end of it was, he invited me to have dinner with him; so we went to Horcher’s and had one of the most marvellous dinners I’ve ever had in my life (that’s one consolation); only, when the bill came, he said ‘Oh, by the way, darling, could you lend me three hundred marks until tomorrow? I’ve only got dollar bills on me, and I’ll have to get them changed at the Bank.’ So, of course, I gave them to him: as bad luck would have it, I had quite a lot of money on me, that evening… And then he said: ‘Let’s have a bottle of champagne to celebrate your film contract.’ So I agreed, and I suppose by that time I must have been pretty tight because when he asked me to spend the night with him, I said Yes. We went to one of those little hotels in the Augs-burgerstrasse—I forget its name, but I can find it again, easily… It was the most ghastly hole… Anyhow, I don’t remember much more about what happened that evening. It was early this morning that I started to think about things properly, while he was still asleep; and I began to wonder if everything was really quite all right… I hadn’t noticed his underclothes before: they gave me a bit of a shock. You’d expect an important film man to wear silk next his skin, wouldn’t you? Well, his were the most extraordinary kind of stuff like camel-hair or something; they looked as if they might have belonged to John the Baptist. And then he had a regular Woolworth’s tin clip for his tie. It wasn’t so much that his things were shabby; but you could see they’d never been any good, even when they were new… I was just making up my mind to get out of bed and take a look inside his pockets, when he woke up and it was too late. So we ordered breakfast… I don’t know if he thought I was madly in love with him by this time and wouldn’t notice, or whether he just couldn’t be bothered to go on pretending, but this morning he was like a completely different person—just a common little guttersnipe. He ate his jam off the blade of his knife, and of course most of it went on to the sheets. And he sucked the insides out of the eggs with a most terrific squelching noise. I couldn’t help laughing at him, and that made him quite cross… Then he said: ‘I must have beer!’ Well, I said, all right; ring down to the office and ask for some. To tell you the truth, I was beginning to be a bit frightened of him. He’d started to scowl in the most cavemannish way: I felt sure he must be mad. So I thought I’d humour him as much as I could… Anyhow, he seemed to think I’d made quite a good suggestion, and he picked up the telephone and had a long conversation and got awfully angry, because he said they refused to send beer up to the rooms. I realise now that he must have been holding the hook all the time and just acting; but he did it most awfully well, and anyhow I was much too scared to notice things much. I thought he’d probably start murdering me because he couldn’t get his beer… However, he took it quite quietly. He said he must get dressed and go downstairs and fetch it himself. All right, I said… Well, I waited and waited and he didn’t come back. So at last I rang the bell and asked the maid if she’d seen him go out. And she said: ‘Oh yes, the gentleman paid the bill and went away about an hour ago… He said you weren’t to be disturbed.’ I was so surprised, I just said: ‘Oh, right, thanks….’ The funny thing was, I’d so absolutely made up my mind by this time that he was a loony that I’d stopped suspecting him of being a swindler. Perhaps that was what he wanted… Anyhow, he wasn’t such a loony, after all, because, when I looked in my bag, I found he’d helped himself to all the rest of my money, as well as the change from the three hundred marks I’d lent him the night before… What really annoys me about the whole business is that I bet he thinks I’ll be ashamed to go to the police. Well, I’ll just show him he’s wrong–—”