He blamed himself for influencing the academies to let Krantz and Ingrid Påhl join him on the reception committee. In his absorption with the preparations that had been in his hands the sixteen days since the telegrams had been sent to France, Italy, and America, he had forgotten their antagonism to each other. As always the preparations had been hectic. There had been the detailed letters sent off to the winners. There had been the schedules and programmes. There had been the reservations for choice suites at the Grand Hotel. And there had been the reporters.
In the midst of all this activity, it had fallen on Jacobsson to recommend to the academies two of their members to join with him in receiving the winners. Because there had been no time to give it lengthy consideration, Jacobsson had hurriedly suggested the names of Krantz and Ingrid Påhl. His choices had been automatically approved. At the time, several weeks before, he had thought the choices excellent ones, regarding them as separate individuals, and not as collaborators with one another and himself. Both were eminently qualified in their fields, or so it had seemed.
Now, casting a sidelong glance at his companions, as if to support his earlier judgment, he tried to see them as the foreign guests would see them. Ingrid Påhl, beside him, was puffing away steadily at a cigarette in the ebony holder. A floral hat covered most of her greying hair. Her enormous face, with flat, fat features, was like a pinkish mound of unkneaded dough. Beneath her loose chins hung many strands of necklaces of varied coloured stones. A great pudding of a woman, her shapeless body was encased in a tentlike blue dress. She resembled, Jacobsson often thought, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, the Russian theosophist with whom his father had been photographed in London near the end of the last century. Although her face was now grim, aggravated still by the disagreement with Krantz, she was ordinarily pleasant, almost bland, exuding naïve Swedish simplicity and sweetness.
Because Jacobsson had wanted one member of his reception committee to be conversant with literature, as a gesture of respect to Andrew Craig, he had selected Ingrid Påhl with no hesitation. Not only was she well-read, but she was also Sweden ’s only living Nobel Prize winner in literature. This laurel constantly made her a useful showpiece. On the other hand, this same wreath, Jacobsson shrewdly perceived, too often made her shy, even miserable, in the company of notable visiting authors who had been awarded the prize more recently. For Ingrid Påhl, who had been unanimously voted the prize over a decade earlier, had always felt unworthy of it. Her novels, gentle prose poems dedicated to her beloved Sweden, lush word landscapes without people or life, had been honoured before more thunderous and memorable works of vitality by international greats. The award, Jacobsson knew, had embarrassed her, and she had never rid herself of the sense that she was being paraded before the world under false pretences.
The dangers of national nepotism, Jacobsson thought. Sometimes we are unfairly criticized, but sometimes quite justly, and then both giver and taker are the victims. In literature, a dozen Scandinavian writers, besides Ingrid Påhl, had received the Nobel Prize-while Marcel Proust, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad lived and did not receive the prize. Poor Ingrid, Jacobsson thought, and now she dreads meeting Andrew Craig, whose creativity she worships and whose cause she so vigorously championed.
Jacobsson shifted his gaze to the third member of their party. Carl Adolf Krantz was Ingrid Påhl’s opposite in every way. Physically, he was a gnome. Mentally, he was a giant. Personally, he was an irritant, grudging, troublesome, disagreeable, contrary, brimming with acerbity, but stimulating, interesting, brilliant. When seated, as now, he seemed more dwarfish than usual. His thin strands of hair, dyed black, greased, lay flat on his squarish head. His eyes were tiny pinholes, his nose a miniature snout, his mouth puckered as if a cork had been pulled from it. His neat brush moustache was black, as was his short pointed goatee. His suits were always too tight, all buttons buttoned, and he wore bowties at his collar and lifts on his heels.
There was an air faintly stiff and officious, entirely Germanic, about Krantz, which was what he intended, although he had been born in Sigtuna, Sweden. His pride was that his father, a minor government diplomat, had raised and educated him in Germany, a nation and people he admired-through all regimes-beyond words. His happiest memories were of his student days at Göttingen University and Würzburg University. Returning to Sweden with his parents, he had felt alien, a feeling which had never fully left him. After a decade in private industry as a physicist-several of his papers had earned him minor renown abroad-he had been offered a post in the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Uppsala. Eventually, he had begun to teach, and he aspired to the chair of physics at the University. With the advent of Hitler, his mind had turned from physics to politics. His native country’s abject neutralism made him ashamed, and he had identified himself with a resurgent Reich. On every pretext, he had visited Berlin, staying at the Kaiserhof Hotel, and mingling socially with Keitel, von Ribbentrop, and Rosenberg. During World War II, in Stockholm, he had preached for and written in favour of the German cause-to countrymen who had not known war in almost a century and a half, and whose survival depended upon neutrality. In those tense years, Carl Adolf Krantz had become a controversial and embarrassing figure to his fellow Swedes. The Reich’s fall was, in a way, his own.
In the cooler halls of science Krantz’s worth was not damaged. But in higher circles he had fallen into disrepute. During the decade before the war, he had been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, and had been one of two members with the right to vote for both the Nobel Prize in physics and the Nobel Prize in chemistry. After the war, his rôles on the Nobel committees had not been altered. However, at the University, the situation was different. When, finally, the august chair of physics had been open, Carl Adolf Krantz, despite seniority, had been passed over for a younger man. This slap in the face, this public reprimand, he could not forgive. He had resigned from the school at once. And, in the several years since, he had devoted himself part time to the Institute of Radiophysics in Stockholm, and given more and more of his days to his Nobel activities.
Despite Krantz’s checkered past and his erratic personality, Jacobsson had settled upon him as the third member of the reception committee because of his breadth of knowledge. Almost single-handedly, at least at first, Krantz had disregarded political differences to lead the inner fight to get Professor Max Stratman the Nobel Prize in physics. And although Krantz had opposed an award to the Marceaus, his position as a judge in chemistry made him eligible to converse with them as intelligently as he would with Stratman. Jacobsson had considered requesting the Caroline Institute to offer one of their own staff to the reception committee, but a fourth member would make the group unwieldy, and this seemed unnecessary since Krantz’s knowledge spilled over into physiology and medicine, too. And so finally, it had been Krantz, to join with Påhl and Jacobsson. But observing the crusty and embittered physicist now, Jacobsson had brief misgivings.
With an inaudible sigh, he straightened and saw his own countenance reflected in the glass partition. Examining his shimmering, ghostlike image, he was suddenly aware that he was probably no more qualified than either Krantz or Påhl to represent the will of Alfred Nobel, or, at least, that they were no less qualified than he. Hypnotically, his eyes held on his image, trying to see what the approaching new laureates would see of him. What? A very old man. An outdated aristocratic head. Sensitive scholar features. Face like wrinkled parchment, whitish-bluish, almost transparent. The body’s frame less tall now, limbs brittle, swathed in heavy garments to appear fuller, stronger, formidable. ‘I am a misanthrope, but exceedingly benevolent’, Nobel had written of himself. Perhaps, thought Jacobsson, a description of his own self, as well.