I'll Never Be Young Again (16 page)

‘Then what would you do?’

‘I’d send it to my father and say, “Well, what about it?” and if he didn’t like it I’d laugh, for yours would be the only opinion worth a cent to me.’

‘You’re becoming a responsibility, Dick.’

‘You shouldn’t have stopped me from going over that bridge,’ I said.

‘I see. So whatever happens, I’m to take all the blame, am I?’

‘Sure.’

‘Even if you become a stockbroker?’

‘More than ever if I become a stockbroker.’

Jake laughed and threw away his cigarette. ‘Come on, Dick. We’ve got to push if we want to reach Otta in two days.’

‘Why do we bother?’

‘Must get somewhere.’ He stood up and looked down at me with a smile.

‘I like hanging around here doing nothing,’ I said.

‘I know you do. You’re born lazy right through. If you stay much longer in this country you won’t become anything, not even a bank clerk!’

‘The South Sea Islands would suit me, Jake.’

‘I guess they would. You’d sleep all day and drink all night, and write dud poetry, and make love to native girls under a palm tree.’

‘Sounds good,’ I murmured, chewing a stem of grass.

‘That’s because I’ve made a picture of it. In reality you’d loathe the flies, and you’d loathe the rain, and you’d sit bored stiff with a glass of bad whisky listening to the small-town gossip of a local trader,’ he said.

‘I’d be disappointed?’

‘Of course you’d be disappointed.You always expect too much.’

‘You’re hard on me, Jake.’

‘I’m not hard on you.’

‘Oh! hell. So we’ve got to push on to Otta, have we?’

‘Yes.’

‘You think it’s bad to drift like this? So we’ve got to find a train to take us to a city and I have to set to and do a job of work. Is that it?’

‘I think it’s time you took a pull on yourself, Dick.’

‘Do you want me to?’

‘You can leave me out of it,’ he frowned. ‘I’m thinking of what’s going to be good for you.’

‘I want to know what you feel.’

‘Go on wanting.’

‘No, tell me, Jake.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘If you were alone, what would you do? Where would you go?’

‘Oh - if I were alone . . .’ He broke off abruptly.

‘Yes.’

‘God knows.’

‘I believe you’d strike up to the North Cape and lose yourself looking for icebergs,’ I said.

‘Possibly.’

‘Instead of which, I’ve made you responsible for me, and you have to stick around.’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t see what you get out of all this.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I’m damned if I do. Listen, Jake, have we really got to cope with the world?’

‘I think you ought to.’

‘Maybe you know best. Jake, would you get sick of it all if we stayed out here?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘No.’

‘Why do you go back then?’ I asked.

‘Because of you.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘Never mind.’

‘We’re just going through some bloody idea of yours that it’s slack to stay here and enjoy ourselves?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t believe in being happy when you can?’

‘Oh! quit talking, Dick. You’d argue till the skies fell.’

‘Anyway, you haven’t answered my question yet.’

‘What question?’

‘Whether you want me to take a pull on myself, as you say.’

‘For your own sake, yes.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t matter.’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘I have told you.’

It was hopeless to have any sort of argument with Jake. He put one off all the time. I called him every name under the sun, and he only laughed. I tried to hit him, and he laughed again. We got up and pulled on our packs once more. I walked at his side, kicking a stone in front of me.

‘You’re bored with me,’ I said.

‘It looks like it.’

‘You’re fed up, that’s it.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m no sort of a companion. I’m a dud, and a fool.You wish you were back in prison.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Jake - can’t you be serious for one minute?’

‘No.’

It was useless to speak to him at all.

‘When we get to Otta,’ said Jake, ‘we’ve got to decide something. ’

‘What’s that?’

‘Whether we go north or south.’

‘Let’s take a squint at the map,’ I said. He stretched it out, and we saw the dark line of the railway crossing Otta and bearing north to Trondhjem on the coast, or south to Oslo and Stockholm, and Copenhagen.

‘Let’s toss for it now,’ I said.

He found a coin in his pocket.‘This is very serious, you know,’ smiled Jake, ‘a whole lot depends on this.’

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘call.’

‘No, you call.’

‘I’ll say “Heads”.’

‘Right.’

He flicked the coin into the air and brought it down on his palm, covering the face of it with his hands.

‘What is it?’ I said.

We looked. It was heads.

‘You’ve won,’ said Jake.

I looked back again at the map. I saw Trondhjem on a big fjord to the north, some two hundred and forty kilometres perhaps, and then south there was Oslo, and Copenhagen where we had been. But there was another line south-east crossing the frontier into unknown territory, marked white on our Norwegian map. And because I thought it would be different, and because I guessed Jake would have chosen Trondhjem, and because I really did not care at all, I laid my finger on this line.

‘We’ll go to Stockholm,’ I said.

So the whole of our future depended on this flick of the coin and the choice I had made.

‘Another city?’ said Jake.

‘Well, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘For you.’ He put the map back in his pocket.

‘What would you have chosen?’ I asked.

‘Trondhjem, I expect.’

‘It’s too late now. Stockholm is where I take a pull on myself.’ We were silent a while.

‘I should have chosen the North Cape,’ he said suddenly.

‘Why?’

‘It’s farther away, Dick.’

‘You wanted to get somewhere, I thought?’

‘Not really.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Not when I think selfishly.’

‘How do you think, then?’

‘I think of keeping away from cities and people, Dick, and staying out in the hills by ourselves.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want you to grow up,’ he said. He laughed at me, but I did not understand. We went on walking along the road.

W
e came to Stockholm just as the sun was setting, with the dark spires standing out against the rose-coloured sky. The light of this spilled itself into the blue water, spanned by many bridges, and the square buildings like palaces gave back the reflection from their windows, casting a beam of light on to the wide streets, into the fluttering leaves of an avenue of trees, and on to the grey outline of the ships at anchor.

There could never be a more beautiful city than this. It was cold, austere, belonging only to the water.

Perhaps there were shops and traffic, and people passing one another in the streets, but I did not notice them. All I did was to lean over one of the bridges and watch the shadowed lights dancing in the water, this river itself framed by the group of buildings carved against the sky. Jake leant over the bridge beside me, and we said that this was like the Venice of our dreams; but here there was no picture postcard loveliness, no sweeping gondolas and pink palazzos bathing in a soft indolent air.

Stockholm was a northern city, her beauty stark and frozen even in midsummer, the blue water like the pure caverns of a glacier; and across the bridge I could see a wide cobbled square, and a white palace, and a crimson tower like a splash of blood standing in definite clarity, with no mist of a spent day to wrap them in a vague obscurity.

When the sun was gone they would be clearer than before, the bridges silver arches spanning a glittering lake, the buildings frosted carvings, motionless under a white sky.

I thought there should be snow upon the ground, and the jingle of bells, and a fur-clad coachman whipping his horse, blowing upon his hands, but there was none of this, because the air was warm, and the stone of the bridge hot where the sun had been, and a flaxen-haired girl passed me, hatless, in a thin dress. Warmth should not have belonged to this white city and this white sky, yet it was part of it, part of the still atmosphere and the still water.

There would be no darkness here, no diminution of light, and all through the night a cool whisper of a wind in the shivering trees, with the sky breathless and expectant, as though waiting for the dawn. I should never be weary here, I should never be at peace, for this was a place where restlessness would not be controlled, where some secret called to me, elusive round a hidden corner, where I must walk, and search, and wonder at something with no name.

It seemed to me we crossed a hundred bridges, and we walked a hundred streets, we had food by a garden and an open window, we slept and we woke again. We left the carved buildings and went and lay under an avenue of trees, we travelled down the river and came upon a thousand islands all alike, jagged rocks set in a deep pool with the trees bowing their branches at the water’s edge. We bathed from one of these islands, slipping into ice-cold water under a hot sun, we watched the pale light flicker in the leaves, we saw the white sails of little yachts dance and shake their shadows on the stretch of water.

We came back to Stockholm, cold and carved against the frosted sky; we went into a theatre where a girl sang, her eyes as blue as the water under the bridges; we came out again and stood in the cobbled square with a dance band playing from an hotel nearby, and there should have been darkness and stars, and the feeling of midnight, but there was nothing but the still river bathing in a white light. And I had not found my secret, nor did I know what it was that called to me.

Once more we wandered by the waterside where the ships were anchored, ugly coal-fouled tramps, incongruous in their jewelled setting, their sides rusted, their grey decks blackened by smoke, and so to a street café, with the tables huddled close together, the smell of tobacco and the ring of glasses, the voices and the breath of sailors. We sat down in a corner and watched their faces, the broad square faces of Scandinavians. They seemed all alike, their pale eyes, their dull close-cropped heads, and suddenly there would rise from a group a great blond fellow with a golden beard, or a boy - a Dane, I think - with blue eyes and a pink skin like a girl.

They were mostly Swedes here though, and Finns, bullet-headed and flat-faced, and it seemed wrong that the forests and the mountains, the snow and the rushing streams, should belong to them, who lived like animals cooped in the hot fo’c’sle of a dirty tramp steamer. We sat here, Jake and I watching the crowd, scarce talking to one another, and listened to their monotonous guttural voices, that neither rose nor fell, and the sudden chink of money, or a laugh, or the scraping back of a chair upon the floor.

Outside the air was still and pure, and the sky was white and the water the same colour as the sky, but here there was a smell of drink and tobacco, heat and sweat over dirt, and it was good, this atmosphere of not thinking nor caring, and of men without women.

Next to us there was a man who sat by himself, who turned his eyes upon us from time to time, but mostly he kept them fixed upon the door, as though he were waiting for someone.

Sometimes he looked at the clock on the far wall above the bar, and he tapped his fingers on the table before him, then lit one cigarette, and then another, and still he glanced at us and back from us to the door.

‘What’s wrong with that chap?’ I said to Jake;‘have you noticed his hands and his eyes?’

‘Yes,’ said Jake, ‘I’ve been keeping a watch on him for a quarter of an hour. He’s scared stiff. Don’t say anything, but keep your eye on that door.’

I did not answer, but I shifted in my chair so that I could now see the man and the room, and the swing doors of the café without turning my head. My eyes dropped again on to the table, I began to lose myself in a train of thought, picturing the island where we had bathed that afternoon, and the white sails of the little boats dancing against the sun, and how it was that Stockholm should hold this café and that island, the two merging, making an impossible pattern, when Jake spoke again, his voice low, just in my ear.

‘Did you see that?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Did you see how one by one they disappeared, with a glance at the clock, and now there remains no one but this fellow at the next table, the barman and ourselves.’ I looked up and saw that in five minutes, whilst I had been dreaming, the café had emptied, the room was silent and the smoke hung heavy in the air.

‘They’ve only cleared,’ I said, ‘it’s five to one. Maybe this place shuts at one.’

‘No,’ said Jake, ‘these places don’t shut.’

‘Well - what is it then?’

‘Wait - there’s something wrong.’

I glanced at him and his head was thrown back, and he was smiling.

‘While you’ve been dreaming I’ve been looking at things,’ he said; ‘the barman went round to all the tables and cleared the glasses away. On each table he left a slip of white paper. When the crowd saw that, they laughed, or shrugged their shoulders, or didn’t say a word. But they all glanced at the clock, and they went - every one of ’em. Look here.’

I saw that on our table too there was a slip of blank paper, which the man must have left when he cleared our glasses.

‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

Jake laughed softly. ‘It’s the notice to quit,’ he said.