Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

Then a young woman spoke to me: “You are Mr Eliot, please?”

She was spectacularly thin. Beneath her fur coat, her legs were like stalks. But she had bright clever grey eyes, and as I said yes she suddenly and disconcertingly burst into laughter.

“What is the joke?” I asked.

“Please. I did not quite understand you.” She spoke English slowly, but her ear was accurate and her intonation good.

“Why do you laugh?”

“I am sorry.” She could not straighten her face. “Mr Calvert has said that you will look more like a professor than he. But he said you are really less like.”

She added: “He has also said that you will have something wrong with your clothes. Such as shoelace undone. Or other things.” She was shaken with laughter as she pointed to the collar of my overcoat, which I had put up against the cold and which had somehow got twisted. She thought it was an extraordinarily good joke. “It is so. It is so.”

It was one way of being recognised, I thought. I asked why Roy was not there.

“He is ill,” she said. “Not much. He works too hard and does not think of himself. He must stay in bed today.”

As we got into a taxi, she told me that her name was Mecke, Ursula Mecke. I had already identified her as the “little dancer”: and she told me: “I am tänzerin.” I liked her at sight. She was ill, hysterical and highly-strung; but she was also warm-hearted, good-natured, and had much insight. She was quick and businesslike with the taxi driver, but when she talked about her earnings on the stage, I felt sure she was hopelessly impractical in running her life. I did not think she had been a love of Roy’s. She spoke of him with a mixture of comradeship and touching veneration. “He is so good,” she said. “It is not only money, Mr Eliot. That is easy. But Mr Calvert thinks for us. That is not easy.” She told me how that winter her mother had fallen ill in Aachen. The little dancer could not afford to go; she was always in debt, and her salary, after she had paid taxes and the party contributions, came to about thirty shillings a week. But within a few hours she found in her room a return ticket, a hamper of food for the journey, an advance on her salary, and a bottle of Lanvin scent. “He denies it, naturally,” said Ursula Mecke. “He says that he has not given me these things. He says that I have an admirer. Who else has given me them, Mr Eliot?” Her grammar then got confused in her excitement: but she meant who else, in those circumstances, would have remembered that she would enjoy some scent.

The Knesebeckstrasse lay in the heart of the west end, between the Kurfürstendamm and the Kantstrasse. No. 32 was near the Kantstrasse end of the street; like all the other houses, it was six storied, grey-faced, and had once been fashionable. Now it was sub-let like a complex honeycomb. Roy had the whole suite of five rooms on the ground floor, but the stories above were divided into flats of three rooms or two or one: the tänzerin had a single attic right at the top.

All Roy’s rooms were high, dark, and panelled in pine which had been painted a deep chocolate brown; they were much more sparsely furnished and stark than anywhere else he had lived, although he had added to them sofas, armchairs, and his inevitable assortment of desks. The family of von Haltsdorff must have lived there in dark, dignified, austere poverty; now that Roy had leased the flat from them they had gone to live in austere poverty on their estate on the Baltic. They had permitted themselves one decoration in the dining-room; on the barn-like expanse of wall, there stood out a large painted chart on which their eyes could rest. It was the family genealogy. It began well before the Great Elector. It came down through a succession of von Haltsdorffs, all of whom had been officers in the Prussian Army. They had intermarried with other Prussian families. None had apparently had much success. The chart ended with the present head, who was a retired colonel.

We had to pass through the dining-room on the way to Roy. I glanced at the chart, and wondered what Lord Boscastle would have said.

Roy’s bed was placed in the middle of another high, spacious room: the bed itself had four high wooden posts. Roy was lying underneath a great pillow-like German eiderdown.

“How are you?” I said.

“Slightly dead,” said Roy.

But he did not look or sound really ill. He was pale, unshaven and somewhat bedraggled. I gathered that he had had a mild influenza; his friends in the house, Ursula Mecke and the rest, had rushed round fetching him a doctor, nursing him, expressing great distress when he wanted to get up. He could not laugh it off without hurting them.

That night I sat at his bedside while he held a kind of levee. A dozen people looked in to enquire after him as soon as they arrived home from work (they did not get home so early as their equivalents in England). Several of them stayed talking, went away for their supper, and returned after Roy had eaten his own meal. There was a clerk, a school teacher, a telephone girl, a cashier from a big shop, a librarian, a barber’s assistant, a draughtsman.

Some of them were nervous of me, but they were used to calling on Roy, and he talked to them like a brother. It mystified them just as much. His German sounded as fluent as theirs, and after supper, when I was alone with Ursula, I asked how good it was. She said that she might not have known he was a foreigner, but she would have wondered which part of Germany he came from. It was not surprising he was so good; he was a professional linguist, had been in and out of Germany for years, and was a natural mimic. But I envied him, when I found the fog of language cutting me off from his friends. Both he and I picked up so much from words and from the feeling behind words. He could tell from the form of a sentence, from the hesitation over a word, some new event in the librarian’s life, just as piercingly as though it were Despard-Smith saying “in his own best interests”. I wanted to know these people, but I could not begin to. I saw an interesting face, Roy told me a scrap of a story, and that was all. It was a frustration.

Faces told one something, though. The lined forehead of the librarian, with the opaque pallor one often sees in anxious people: he had a kind, gentle, terrified expression, frightened of something he might have left undone. The hare eyes and bulbous nose of the elderly woman school teacher, who had strong opinions on everything, not much sense of reality, and an unquenchable longing for adventure: at the age of fifty-eight, she had nearly saved up enough money for a holiday abroad. The diagonal profile of the draughtsman; he was musical, farouche and shy. The hot glare, swelling neck and smooth unlined cheeks of the clerk, who was a man of forty: he had got religion and sex inextricably mixed up. It was he who was keeping the barber’s assistant, Willy Romantowski; though some of the rooms in the house were very cheap, like Ursula’s, none of them would have come within that boy’s means.

They were interesting people, and I wished I could talk to them as Roy did. Of them all, I found the little dancer the most sympathetic. I did not much like young Romantowski, but he was the oddest and perhaps the ablest of them. He had the kind of bony features one sometimes meets in effeminate men: so that really his face, and his whole physique, were strong and masculine, and his mincing smile and postures seemed more than ever bizarre. His manner was strident, he insisted on getting our attention, he was petulant, vain, selfish and extremely shrewd. He was not going to be content with a two-room flat in the Knesebeckstrasse for long. He was about twenty-two, very fair and pale: Roy called him the “white avised”, by contrast with his patron, who was the “black avised” and who doted on him,