Andrew Craig had passed out.
2
IT was a crisp, sunless, silvery early afternoon in Stockholm, the temperature 15° C., this first day in December, when Count Bertil Jacobsson, formal in his silk hat and overcoat, brown cane tucked under his arm, pearl-grey spats on his shoes, emerged from the Nobel Foundation at Sturegatan 14 and walked to the Cadillac limousine awaiting him at the kerb.
The Swedish Foreign Office had furnished the limousine for the occasion. Now it stood in splendour, its rear door held open by a blond, liveried chauffeur. As Jacobsson approached, the driver inclined his head respectfully, and saluted. Jacobsson answered with a nod, and entered the car. He settled into the nearest corner of the cushioned rear seat, already amply filled by Ingrid Påhl and Carl Adolf Krantz. On the return trip, he and Krantz would sit on the jump seats and allow their guests to join Ingrid Påhl on the softer rear seat.
‘Good afternoon, good afternoon,’ said Count Bertil Jacobsson. ‘A lovely day for our beginning.’
‘Hello. Yes, lovely,’ said Ingrid Påhl nervously.
Krantz, who always appeared preoccupied, muttered, ‘Count,’ in greeting, and no more.
The chauffeur had slammed the front door and was behind the wheel. Jacobsson leaned forward, slid the glass partition open, and said, ‘ Arlanda Airport, please.’ He consulted his watch. ‘We are early. You may make this a leisurely drive.’
He closed the glass partition, as the car started and moved away from the kerb, eased himself back into his corner, and turned his head to his companions.
‘Why so solemn, my friends?’ he asked. ‘I always find these first meetings refreshing.’
‘I never know what to say,’ said Ingrid Påhl.
‘We are privileged,’ Jacobsson went on. ‘We have the opportunity to receive, and intimately acquaint ourselves with, the geniuses of the world-’
‘Whom we have made famous,’ Krantz interrupted acidly.
‘Not so, Carl, not at all. They have their fame, all of them, before we recognize and crown it.’ He considered this a moment, objectively, and then revised his judgment. ‘Well, not always, but usually, often enough.’ He regarded his companions for a moment. ‘I hope neither of you regrets participating with me on the reception committee? It was not only my judgment, but the various academies-’
‘We are honoured,’ said Krantz curtly. He stared out the window a moment, and then he added, ‘Perhaps I’m still smarting at the vote. Except for Professor Stratman-’
‘You’re surely not objecting to Dr. Garrett and Dr. Farelli? Their findings electrified the entire world.’
‘The press, the press,’ said Krantz. ‘We were swept away. I think we should be more judicious. Perhaps their heart transplant, limited as it is may be the great medical discovery of our time. On the other hand, it may be a circus stunt. I think the Caroline committee should have waited another year or two, for more experiments, more results. As to the Marceau team, I am still not impressed. Sperms in cold storage. Who cares? There were half a dozen more worthy findings to be honoured. The literary award to the American, I won’t even speak of-’
Ingrid Påhl’s chins quivered with indignation. ‘Var snäll och-please, Carl, do not mix in again. You are a physicist, not a literary critic. I am sure you have not even read Mr. Craig’s books-’
‘I read one. It was enough.’
‘Well, you simply have no judgment in such matters. I do not meddle when you make your decisions in chemistry and physics, and I do not think you should interfere with those of us in the Swedish Academy. Every year, the same. You made the same comments when we selected Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemingway. Why is it always the Americans you object to? Why is it that you were only happy when Eucken and Heyse and Hauptmann, your darling Germans, won?’
Krantz’s lips were tight. ‘On this level, I will not discuss the matter further with you.’
Krantz turned back to the window. Ingrid Påhl opened her beaded handbag with irritation and sought cigarette and holder for solace. Jacobsson, who had been listening with concern, determined to remain detached.
By the time they had reached the suburbs of northern Stockholm, the first portion of their twenty-two-mile drive to Arlanda behind them, Jacobsson realized that he could not remain detached, at least not within himself. It was his task, as senior head of the Nobel reception committee, to see that they presented a united and gracious front. For ten days, from this afternoon until the Ceremony on the afternoon of December tenth, the three of them would be living together, and living with their distinguished guests who had won the prizes and come long distances to receive them. Any note of discord or dissension among the three of them, before their guests, the press, the public, would be disgraceful. Jacobsson decided that should another such argument occur, he could not remain above it, outside it, but must act to put a stop to it at once.
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.