He turned away from the window, and found my eyes upon him. His own gaze met mine. I noticed his eyes as though it were the first time. They were brilliant, penetrating: most people found them hard to escape: they had often helped him in his elaborate solemn dialogues, in the days when he played his tricks upon the “stuffed”.
“Anxious?” he said.
“Yes.”
“About me?”
“Yes.”
“You needn’t worry, Lewis,” he said. “I shan’t disgrace you. I shan’t do anything unorthodox.”
He looked at me with a faint smile.
“There’s no need to worry. I promise you.”
He spoke as he had come to speak so often — quietly, sensibly, kindly, without fancy. There was still just a vestigial trace of mischief in his tone. I accepted the reassurance implicitly. I knew I had nothing to fear at the end of this journey. It was a relief. Whatever happened now, I could cease to worry at the level of practical politics, at the level where Houston Eggar would be concerned.
Yet, in those quiet, intimate words, there was an undercurrent of something more profound. Perhaps I did not hear it at its sharpest. I was not then attuned. But could anyone, still struggling with hope, still battling on with the selfish frailty of a human brother, be so considerate, so imaginatively detached, so desperately kind?
We arrived at Basel late at night, and went at once to Willy Romantowski’s address. We were met by an anticlimax. Yes, he was living there. No, he was not in. He had been staying with some friends for a night or two. He was expected back tomorrow or the next day.
“Willy must have found someone very, very nice,” said Roy with a grin, as we left the house. “Really, I’m surprised at the Swiss. Very remarkable.”
I grinned too, though I was more frustrated than he by the delay. I wanted to get it over, return safely to England, clear off the work that was waiting for me. Roy did not mind; he was relaxed, quite ready to spend some time in this town.
He remarked that Willy was not doing himself too badly. It was midnight, and difficult to get an impression of a strange street. But it was clearly not a slum. The street seemed to be full of old middle-class houses, turned into flats — not unlike the Knesebeckstrasse, except that the houses were less gaunt, more freshly painted and spick-and-span. Willy was living in a room under the eaves.
“His standard of living is going up,” said Roy. “Why? Just two guesses.”
Willy did not get in touch with us the next day, and we spent the time walking round Basel; I was still very restless, and Roy set out to entertain me. At any other time, I should have basked in the Gothic charm of the streets round our hotel, for the consul had found us rooms in a quarter as medieval as Nuremberg. There were only a few of these Gothic streets, which led into rows of doctors’ houses, offices, shops, as trim as the smart suburb of a midland town in England; but, if one did not walk too far, one saw only red roofs, jutting eaves, the narrow bustling old streets, the golden ball of the Spalenthor above the roofs, gleaming in the spring sunlight. It took one back immediately to childhood, like the smell of classroom paint; it was as though one had slept as a child in one of those tiny bedrooms, and been woken by the church bells.
We used an introduction to some of the people at the university. They took us out and gave us a gigantic dinner, but they regarded us with a regretful pity, as one might look at someone mortally ill. For they took it for granted that England had already lost the war. They were cross with us for making them feel such painful pity — just as Lord Boscastle sounded callous at having his heart wrung by Roy’s sorrow. I found myself perversely expressing a stubborn, tough, blimpish optimism which I by no means felt. They became angry, pointing out how unrealistic I was, how like all Englishmen I had an over-developed character and very little intelligence.
Roy took no part in the argument. He was occupying himself, with the professional interest that never left him, in learning some oddities of Swiss-German.
Roy had left a note for Willy, and we called again at his lodging house. At last he came to our hotel, on our second afternoon there. His mincing mannerisms were not flaunted quite so much; he was wearing a pin-stripe suit in the English style, his cheeks were fatter, he looked healthy and well-fed. He was patently upset to find me with Roy. Roy said that he was sure Willy would be glad to see another old friend, and asked him to have some tea.
Willy would love to. He explained that he had become very fond of tea. He had also become, I thought, excessively genteel.
Roy began by asking him about the people at No. 32. Willy said that he had not seen them for eighteen months (both Roy and I thought this was untrue). But the little dancer had unexpectedly and suddenly married a schoolmaster, back in her native town; she had had a child and was said to be very happy. We were delighted to hear it. In the midst of strain, that news came fresh and calm. We sent for a bottle of wine, and drank to her. For a few moments, we were light-hearted.
Roy questioned Willy up to dinner, through the meal, through the first part of the night. Roy mentioned the clerk, Willy’s old patron, the “black avised” — Willy shrugged his shoulders: “I do not know where he is. He was tiresome. I left him. I do not know him any more.”
Roy scolded him: “It is hard to be kind to those who love you, Willy. But you need to try. It is shameful not to try.” It was strange that he took the trouble to rebuke Willy, who had always seemed to me inescapably hard, petty and vain. Perhaps Roy saw something else. Perhaps he remembered that he himself had sometimes behaved unforgivably to those who loved him.
From the black avised, he switched to Willy’s own adventures. Here we became inextricably entangled for a long time: it was difficult to pick out exactly where he was lying. His first, as it were official, story was this: he had been called up in the summer of 1939, had gone with an infantry division into Poland, had spent the winter with the army of occupation, had been transferred to the western front in the spring of 1940. His division had been sitting opposite Verdun, and had done no fighting; in the winter, they were moved across Europe again to the eastern front. It was then that Willy “got tired of it”. He had deserted, on the way through Germany, and smuggled himself over the Swiss frontier. Since then he had been living in Basel. “How are you keeping alive?” asked Roy.
“Thanks to friends,” said Willy, turning his eyes aside modestly — but added in a hurry: “I am poor. Will you please help me, Roy?”
Most of those statements were lies. That was quite clear. It was also quite clear that, if he wanted to make a proposition to Roy, he would have to admit they were lies. So we examined him, tripped him up on inconsistencies, just to give him a chance to come down to the real business. Meanwhile I was hoping, in the exchange, to collect a few useful facts.
I ought to say in passing that the results were disappointing. Willy was sharp, quick-witted, acquisitive, but he did not know enough. All he could have told us, even if he had had the will, was the day-to-day gossip of Berlin and the personal facts he had observed. Roy made some deductions from the gossip which proved more right than wrong: I missed the significance of something Willy let fall. He said that the draughtsman at No. 32 had not been able to find a job for months. I ought to have pounced on that remark, but I was just obtuse: it seemed incredible then that their administration should be fundamentally, for all its streamlined finish, less sensible, less directed, less businesslike than ours.
We drank a good deal before and during dinner. We hoped to get him drunk, for we were both, of course, accustomed to wine. But he turned out to have, despite his youth, an abnormally strong head. Roy said to me in English, over dinner: “We shall be dished, old boy — if he sees us under the table.”