Jacobsson chuckled and turned back to the door. ‘Very well, Mrs. Steen, show her in, but tell Miss Wiley it will be only for a moment.’
He waited at the open door, and Craig occupied himself with kindling his pipe.
Sue Wiley entered breezily, thanking Jacobsson, and briefly disconcerted by Craig’s unexpected presence. ‘Well, I didn’t think I’d find you here,’ she said to Craig. ‘What’s up? Counting your money?’
Craig kept his temper. She was not worth it, and she was too ridiculous in some kind of newly purchased fur Cossack hat, with a matching fur muff that she carried looped over one wrist. ‘If it’s private, I’ll step outside,’ said Craig.
‘None of my comings and goings are private, Mr. Craig. Stay put. I’ll be out in a flash.’ She pivoted on her spiked heels towards Jacobsson. ‘Just a point of information, Count. I’m becoming a historian-and I’m strictly contemporary-so every once in a while, I get shaky about a fact. This one concerns George Bernard Shaw. Remember him?’
‘I certainly do’, said Jacobsson courteously.
‘Somebody told me he turned down the Nobel Prize flat. That’s it. True or false?’
‘I am afraid I must disappoint you, Miss Wiley. What is true is that we voted Mr. Shaw the prize in 1925. When the Swedish Minister in London notified him of the award, Mr. Shaw, who was often critical of prizes in general and our own prize in particular, replied in strongest terms, “No, I do not want it. What do I need the money for?” The untrue part is your information that he actually turned it down. He did not. After giving the matter more mature consideration, for one week, he changed his mind and accepted the prize. I will add that he was most gracious about the money we gave him. He assigned it for use in the creation of an Anglo-Swedish Alliance that would encourage literary and artistic understanding between Great Britain and Sweden.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sue Wiley, ‘and, may I add, you are wrong to think I am disappointed. If I didn’t know you were such a nice person, I’d believe you were letting people poison your mind against me. What do you think I’m after, Count Jacobsson-scandal and nothing else? I’m anything but an advocate of yellow journalism. I’m simply after the truth.’
‘Miss Wiley,’ said Jacobsson with infinite restraint, ‘in my experience I have found that truth has three faces-a whole truth, a half-truth, and a white lie that is barely truth.’ He paused. ‘As a matter of fact, I am glad you brought the word up. I have meant to invite you in for a little orientation talk. It has come to my attention-or would you prefer to converse at another time in private?’
‘Not at all. Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of Mr. Craig or anyone else.’
‘Then, what I have been meaning to say to you is this-and only the pressure of my responsibilities during this week of festivity has prevented my saying it sooner-it has come to my attention that you have been making numerous inquiries about the city concerning one type of information and one type only.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘The inference has been, and I have heard it from several reliable sources, that you are attempting to acquire only such information as will be detrimental to the Nobel institutes.’
‘Says who?’ snapped Sue Wiley, colouring. ‘That’s ridiculous. I’m an objective reporter doing an objective job. I don’t invent material. I take it as it comes. If it sometimes turns up black instead of white, well-as I said-truth.’ Suddenly, her eyes began to blink, and they narrowed. ‘You wouldn’t be suggesting that I leave out some of the things I find, to conform to your ideas of-of censorship, would you?’
Craig found this unbearable, and shifted from one leg to the other, irked by her tone, her obvious attempt to force a censorship angle out of Jacobsson. But Jacobsson remained unruffled and diplomatic. ‘I am suggesting no such thing, Miss Wiley, and do not even dream of it. You are in a free country, among a free people, and we encourage you to write as you please. I only say that it distresses me to have our guests seek half-truths about us, and offer them to the world as whole truths.’
‘If that’s all that is worrying you, have no fears about me. I’m sticking strictly to the facts. If you find lies or libel in my copy, you can sue. That’s how sure I am.’
A smile flickered across Jacobsson’s wrinkled features. ‘The Nobel Foundation is a quasi-government institution, Miss Wiley. We approve or disapprove, but we do not sue.’
‘Then we understand each other. Well, I guess I’ve taken enough of your-’
‘One moment, Miss Wiley. Something occurs to me. Since you have been gathering so much information from so great a variety of sources, perhaps it would be to your benefit to add one more story that comes to you straight from the headquarters of the awards.’
Sue Wiley brightened. ‘A story! Any time!’
Jacobsson looked off. ‘If you do not mind, Mr. Craig-’
‘I’m as interested as Miss Wiley.’
‘Please sit down, Miss Wiley. You too, Mr. Craig. I will make it as short as possible. Do you have a pencil, Miss Wiley?’
‘I’m all set.’ She had seated herself across from Jacobsson’s antique walnut desk, fishing pen and notebook from her handbag. Craig stayed on his feet, lighting his pipe again, Jacobsson busied himself with the row of green ledgers on the shelf above his desk, removed a single ledger, and brought it down to the desk behind which he now seated himself. He leafed through the pages until he had located what he was after. He looked up.
‘Miss Wiley,’ he said, ‘as you know, there are five Nobel Prize awards, and they have been given with some regularity almost every year since 1901. The world has come to look upon these awards as the highest achievement-highest honour on earth man can confer upon man. Therefore, the Nobel Prize awards have become a sacred cow. The temptation to journalists, every so often, to prove this sacred cow only a common bovine is irresistible. You will go around the city, and you will find it all too easy to learn our shortcomings-how many times in my too many years I have heard them repeated and broadcast with relish and glee-how we are anti-Russian, how we are pro-German, how we indulge ourselves in nepotism-above all, first and the worst of it, how we vote our prizes out of prejudices and politics and fears. Some of this is truth, and I am the very first to admit it. In fact, whenever I have the honour to take visiting laureates on tours of our academies, I always make it a point to let them know our worst side as well as our best, and Mr. Craig will confirm this. What bothers me, all of us here, the most is that our visitors seize upon our worst side, and too often ignore our best side. I am going to take the liberty of giving you one instance, my favourite, of our best side. I promised you a story, did I not?’
‘You did,’ said Sue Wiley, less brash than earlier.
‘You came here this afternoon wondering if George Bernard Shaw had actually turned down the prize, and I told you he had not. Now, I will tell you the story of another man who was prevailed upon to turn down the prize, and did not, and of his prize that was by all logic and commonsense not to be voted and given, and was voted and given. I will tell you about Carl von Ossietzky, and I will write the name down for you, because I want you to spell it right and not forget it and not let your readers forget it.’
Unhurriedly, Jacobsson block-printed the name Carl von Ossietzky on a piece of notepaper and handed it to Sue Wiley, who accepted it and studied it with bewilderment. Hearing the name, Craig tried to remember where he had heard it before-either at the Royal Banquet or the Hammarlund dinner, one or the other-but still, the name was foreign to his ears, and he was curious about what Jacobsson might have to say of this unknown name.
Jacobsson gazed at his open green ledger, and then he resumed speaking. ‘There is an expression that has gained currency in our day that refers to “the little man”. There are variations on this expression like “the common man” or “a member of the masses”. This is supposed to mean, I presume, the average man on earth who is not distinguished by wealth or fame or authority. From cradle to the grave, he eats and sleeps, does drone’s labour, propagates the species, makes no policies or headlines or scandals, and when he dies, is mourned by none but relatives and a handful of friends, and disappears from the planet as casually and unmissed as the ant one inadvertently steps on every day. Such a man, for forty-two years, was Carl von Ossietzky, a German national who wrote mediocre articles for his bread, and whose one foible-we all of us have one foible-was that he hated militarism after having served four years in the Imperial German Army during the First World War. What lifted Ossietzky from the obscurity of the ranks of “the little man” was his growing obsession that all soldiers were, in his words, “murderers”, and that there was “nothing heroic” about war. Most men know this and think it and hate any memory of killing, and most men live on, doing nothing about it. Ossietzky was the one who decided to do something about it, to eliminate the evil, to practise and preach what he believed.’