At long last, Ernest Moldys regained full possession of his wits, and simultaneously of his voice. Although he was still finding it hard to believe that this was not all a wonderful dream, he knew exactly what had to be done and how to do it.
“Mrs Hurley,” he said, “if you won’t think I’m being presumptuous, you have no problem. I’d be honored if you’d let me drive you to wherever you were going.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t possibly take up your time!”
Thus, after a little perfunctory argument and an interval of a few hours, she was seated with him at a window table on the Strand Hotel’s roof terrace, overlooking the lights of half the city, while they toasted each other in various experimental flavors of brännvin over the prawn pancakes and debated amiably on the merits of each. It was not even an ordeal for Mr Moldys, for although she was considerably older than his usual choice, she was in such a superbly groomed and pampered state of preservation that she did not look a day older than himself. She had classic features and a Vogue-model figure, and her personality would have made the local chick whom he had sidetracked for the occasion look insipid beside her.
The only fault he had to find was that the diamonds he had heard so much about were not in evidence. As if sensing something critical in the way he had studied her evening finery, she fingered the costume necklace and bracelet set she was wearing, and said, “I’m afraid I’m not very dressy, for a place like this. But I only came for a couple of days, and since I was driving alone it didn’t seem very smart to load all my baubles in the car, so I left them in the hotel safe in Copenhagen.”
Moldys gallantly concealed his disappointment, although it seemed as if the luck which he thought had changed was turning dangerously coy again.
“A woman like you doesn’t need jewels as much as they need her,” he said, omitting to credit the writer from whom he had swiped the line.
Later in the meal, he learned for the first time that Hälsingborg, their destination on the west coast of Sweden, lay only two and a half miles across a narrow strait from the similarly named Danish town of Helsingör which was practically a suburb of Copenhagen, a mere thirty miles from the Danish capital.
“Both sides used to be fortified,” explained Mrs Hurley, “and King Erik of Pomerania, who owned all the Scandinavian countries too, in those days, five or six hundred years ago, charged a toll on all the ships going through the Sound. It must have been quite a racket, because when Frederik II got to be King of Denmark he rebuilt the fort on his side into a fancy castle which he called Kronborg. It was finished about 1585, only fifteen years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and made it the scene of a practically prehistoric legend. That’s what they call poetic license, I guess.”
“You sound as if you’d made a real study of it,” he said admiringly.
“Well, naturally I’m interested. You see, I’m putting on a production of Hamlet there — of course, Helsingör is the place that Shakespeare called ‘Elsinore.’ ”
“What a wonderful idea, to do Hamlet right in the very place where it happened!”
“It probably never happened at all, and it certainly couldn’t have happened there, as I’ve told you. But even the Danes have probably convinced themselves by now that it did. It isn’t a new idea to put on the play there — people have been doing it since 1816. The challenge is to do it better.”
“You know, I’d never have taken you for a producer.”
“Because I’m not chewing a cigar? But I’m as tough as any of them, I hope.”
“I refuse to believe it. At least, not like most of the ones I came across.”
“Don’t tell me you’re an actor!”
“I used to be, sort of.” He was ad-libbing furiously now, not sure where he was going, but inspiredly sure that he was on the right track. “Nothing very important, you know. But some kind critics predicted a great future for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I quit while I was ahead. I was on the verge of getting somewhere, when I inherited quite a bit of money, and the incentive to keep struggling was gone. But even now I can feel what it would mean to speak those lines in the place that Shakespeare himself was actually thinking of.”
“Lots of ’em have done it — from Sir Laurence Olivier, way back in 1937 with Vivien Leigh, to Sir John Gielgud in ’39. Sir Michael Redgrave in 1950, and Richard Burton in ’54. He doesn’t need to be knighted since they made him the King in Camelot. But I still see the part differently from any of them.”
Mr Moldys saluted her with another heartening measure of aromatic alcohol followed by the traditional beer chaser, and said:
She looked at him with thoughtful interest.
“That was a nice reading,” she said. “I’ve always thought Hamlet should be played something like you would naturally do it — as a real he-man trying to break out of a neurotic tradition, not a tormented introvert himself.”
“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” he said.
“And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “Now, I’ve got a young actor who’s physically just the way I visualize a Hamlet type, but temperamentally I’m beginning to worry about him.”
Moldys was astute enough not to crowd his luck any harder at that moment, and in any case he wanted time to decide what to drive for. But he was exultantly certain that he had made a tremendous impression, and it was unthinkable that such a sequence of breaks could fail to climax somehow in a perfect pay-off.
The Saint had a privileged insight into that psychology, having been the subject of it on several occasions himself.
Moldys played it with creditable restraint for the rest of the evening and through the following day’s long drive, devoting as much time as possible to the rôle of intelligent listener, sympathetic but disinterested, agreeable but authoritative, which demanded a minimum of effort but gave him the maximum space in which to wait for the decisive opening.
But in spite of all that, when they sat at dinner again the following night on the terrace of the newly completed Kärnan Hotel on the sea front of Hälsingborg, he began to experience some of the classic emotions of the mythical giant Tantalus (of whom he personally had never heard) whose name is immortalized in the word “tantalize,” whose doom it was to be parched by eternal thirst while chained beside a pool which always playfully receded a millimeter beyond the utmost reach of his tongue. He had even developed a confident belief that he was attractive to her on the most downright sexual plane, and that was an angle from which he knew unlimited approaches. But between consummation and salvation, between all his tactical advances and her jewels, still lay those two-and-a-half miles of international water and the whimsies of international treaties. His lawyer, who was highly conscientious within his limits, had been most insistent on those technicalities.
Thus they looked at each other in a farewell atmosphere across a table which commanded the narrow strait separating them from the romantic turrets of Kronborg Castle, which was accommodatingly floodlit, and sighed with appropriate appreciation, and she could say, “I just hope everything will work out all right. I’m taking on such a big thing on my own. I mustn’t even begin to doubt what I’m doing.”
Ernest Moldys took a big chance, from desperation, and leaned forward to try another quote, in his best voice: