‘I must have looked somewhat astonished, because he went on immediately, keeping it on a business footing, “As you see I haven’t bothered to change, I am going straight back to Berlin. The train leaves at 11.15. If it doesn’t take you too long to slip out of your glad rags you can come with me. What is the use of staying in Cologne for a pointless night?”
‘“Don’t be funny, Müller,” I said.
‘“I don’t feel in the least inclined to be funny, the whole affair is extremely embarrassing for me. I admit it is annoying for you too, but not to the same extent. When all is said and done you don’t know those gentlemen, but they know me. Let me tell you something. This transaction would only have made sense if we could both have worked together, right? Well, you can see that’s impossible. We are not suited to each other. You realise of course I am speaking of this morning. Don’t think I wasn’t watching you. I am also well aware that it was the first time you had flown. No, I’d rather you didn’t say anything.”
‘“What is that supposed to mean, ‘didn’t say anything’. What is the meaning of this whole thing? Are you trying to say that I was cowardly, you, who . . . I refuse to listen to such insane drivel. I think it was pretty big of me to refrain from commenting on your behaviour. But my God, even that has nothing to do with our business.”
‘I have never understood how Müller did this kind of thing, but he actually managed to seem completely astonished.
‘“What? What do you mean it has nothing to do with our business? You behaved like a clown. You fly into the air in some old thing that somebody has persuaded you is safe, and you sit like an umbrella with no sign of life. Like a semi-idiot, if you will pardon the expression, who can’t see what is being done to him, and I’ll eat my hat if you don’t call that courage. Let me tell you: a man who doesn’t adopt the natural attitude in an unknown situation – in this case, alarm – such a man merely proves that he has no natural instincts. To be blunt, I am not going into business with you. Your sort are capable of taking a cheque from the rag-and-bone man. You just don’t have the primitive minimum of mistrust which you will find in any animal you care to name and without which it would perish on a planet like ours.”
‘Saying which, he sidled into the lift.’
North Sea Shrimps
It is fairly well known that in November and December ’18 a vast horde of men came home whose manners had suffered a little and whose habits got on the nerves of the folk they had been fighting for. You can’t really blame them for this. It was considerably worse with another sort of returning soldier, of whom there were far fewer, namely, those whom the war had turned into fastidious gentlemen. Nothing can coax this sort out of their tiled bathrooms after they have spent all those years lying in muddy trenches.
Kampert of the Eighth Machine-Gun Corps was one such. He was a fine man. He lay in the mud at Arras, and he lay in the mud at Ypres, and he did everything that was asked of him. He never featured in the Lille Army Newspaper, but he always shared his tobacco with the man next to him, and when he was afraid, his fear was of the permissible sort, which is only a sign of common sense. Müller of the Eighth, my friend who is now back and an engineer in civilian life again, was at that time his lieutenant, and according to Kampert only missed promotion because he fetched the field mail himself, and was too familiar with the men. A very good sign. But then the war ended, and Kampert wrote it all off and within three weeks he had managed to forget Arras and Ypres, just as he had forgotten his birth 29 years earlier. He went back to work for A.E.G. as an engineer, and from the very moment when he stuffed his entire kit, underwear, pocket-knife, wrist-watch, even his diaries into a chest along with his lousy field-grey uniform and told the maid to get rid of it, he never deviated from his adopted line, which was that a man who had been forced to eat filthy grass and carry chamber-pots with unspeakable contents through stinking sick-bays for weeks on end had a right to sleep in eiderdown and dine in style for the rest of his life. I was recently present at an occasion when this led to total disaster.
Fatty Müller and I had heard nothing of Kampert for some time, almost nine months. We knew that in the meantime he had married and married money. We were not invited to the wedding, but a couple of weeks ago I saw him in a top-notch two-seater, all gleaming chrome with red morocco seats, in which you lay behind the wheel as if you were rocking in a bathtub, and a few days later he rang us up and said we should come over sometime, say tomorrow evening, and have a whisky with him, in very select company of course.
‘Whisky,’ said Müller as we climbed the stairs, ‘the boy really seems to be making an effort.’ And he took a nice little tin of top quality North Sea shrimps out of his jacket pocket. ‘The boy was always one for fancy nosh.’ I thought that was terribly nice of Müller.
Kampert himself opened the door. Müller greeted him volubly, and Kampert seemed very moved. As he impaled our hats on two very funny black enamelled iron spikes on the wall, he made excuses for the absence of the maid, who had the evening off. ‘But then you aren’t embassy attachés anyhow, are you,’ he said good-humouredly.
‘No,’ said Müller, ‘but I suppose there is a big crowd here?’
‘Nonsense,’ said he, ‘not a soul. Just the three of us. A most select company.’
‘You have got yourself up damned formally, old bean; that must be one of those bright, dinky little dinner suits that you’re wearing?’
‘Nonsense,’ said Kampert, ‘I just happen to like to change for dinner. It is a little foible of mine. You don’t mind?’
‘Not at all,’ said Müller, ‘Whisky is whisky.’ Then Kampert settled us into two very comfortable American easy chairs in his lounge and we waited for the lady of the house.
‘This is quite an exhibition hall,’ said Müller after a couple of minutes of silence while we looked round the rather high room which was all done in white. Müller seemed rather tired and yawned audibly. ‘Well, let’s have this whisky of yours.’
Kampert crossed the room and fished a few bottles of liqueur out of a little red mahogany cabinet. ‘One thing at a time,’ he said smiling. ‘Do you really think this room is too high?’
‘Um,’ said Müller, ‘just a bit. Yes, it is perhaps just a wee bit high, but you don’t spend your whole life in it. But these chairs are stupendous. And this curaçao is not at all bad.’
‘Just try the chartreuse,’ Kampert pressed us, ‘What I thought was, a large hall and a couple of plain seats in it. That would be damned restful.’
‘But the sun-blind is pretty,’ I encouraged him, ‘and quite original.’
It was a fine Japanese straw mat in front of a huge, sloping window.
He stood up and went over. Then he turned a little wooden wheel, and the whole thing rolled on to a bamboo rod at the top. ‘You feel as if you were sitting in Cuba all day. The thing collects an unbelievable amount of sunshine.’
‘Was the flat like this when you moved in?’ asked Müller, who clearly couldn’t make up his mind whether the time had come to mix the curaçao with the chartreuse.
‘What do you think? We did it up of course. It was two plain bourgeois rooms. You know the kind of thing, cramped to start with and then stowed to the gunwales with furniture.
Müller decided he had better wait until he had greeted the lady of the house before he started mixing his drinks, so, holding the chartreuse up to the light, he said, ‘Yes, people live like pigs, how thoughtless of them.’
At this point Kampert’s wife came in. She was very pretty, very nice, and very well dressed. She shook hands and acted as if we were her friends, not his. She said the flat was not finished, but we should take a look at it. We might notice this or that. The important thing for them in furnishing it had been the overall effect. Why shouldn’t one design a flat as harmoniously as one would an evening dress? Most people just lived their lives in a dreadful clutter of furniture without even realising how thoroughly they ruined their own taste by just getting up each morning. What, for
instance, did we think of the lounge we were sitting in?
‘Delightful,’ I said.
She laughed and looked at her husband. ‘I don’t know if delightful is the right word. At any rate, it’s not exactly what we had in mind. We wanted the lounge to be simple, almost crude, in fact I should really have liked garden chairs but they look so awful. Then some coarse matting. I drove round like mad before I found any. I looked at coarse canvas by the kilometre. But the moment I saw that mat standing somewhere at the back of the shop, I said, that’s it.’
‘Yes,’ I said mockingly to Müller, ‘and you just sit there as if you had paid at the door, acting as if it went without saying and was just accidental that we feel so much at ease here.’
Kampert seemed to notice nothing, and just asked, ‘Doesn’t anything strike you here – about the walls, I mean?’
‘They’re pretty high,’ said Müller.
Kampert’s wife laughed again. But Kampert said quite matter-of-factly: ‘What I meant was that there are no pictures. Most people plaster their walls with them as if they were billboards. I maintain that if a man doesn’t have a special room for pictures he should forget about them.’
That was the point where Müller cast his first nasty sidelong glance at me, but I have to admit that for some time I did not see what he was getting at.
Müller was not laughing as heartily as the others. He looked at the walls in some surprise. I had the impression that he would rather not have been told why he felt so comfortable.
‘Come on,’ said Kampert’s wife, ‘I’ll show you the rest.’ And as Kampert stood up saying, ‘The whole thing really wasn’t done with money, because then it would look entirely different, it just takes a little thought, and if you like, a certain skill. What we say is, we are not here for the flat’s sake, it is here for ours.’ I saw Müller, who had got to his feet with surprising alacrity, fill a tumbler with curaçao and take it pointedly on his tour of the house.
We climbed an iron spiral staircase which led to the rooms upstairs, and which Müller found remarkably practical. ‘It hardly takes up any space,’ said Kampert. And at the top he said, ‘Go on, look down, a room should be as beautiful as a landscape.’ At this Müller just took a swig of curaçao from his tumbler and tried to pass me another nasty sidelong glance. But Mrs Kampert was terribly nice and showed us Kampert’s bedroom.
This was a small, simply appointed room with an iron bedstead, a chair and a plain glazed washbasin. The only light came from overhead, ‘so that seeing the walls of the house opposite doesn’t give one the impression one is camping in the open.’ On the bed was a plain camel-hair rug.
‘You naturally expected a more sumptuous camping ground,’ said Kampert jokingly to Müller. Müller gave him a friendly grin (he was occupied exclusively with Mrs. Kampert, to whom I noticed he had taken a great fancy) and then led the way enthusiastically to the next room, the study. This was separated from the bedroom only by a chintz curtain: the two rooms together were a little world on their own. A pine table. A hard uncomfortable chair. Pine shelves. A low, hard chaise-longue. Books.
Müller emptied his tumbler.
As we climbed back down the spiral staircase (‘it saves having to do exercises each morning’), I told Kampert, since we had become a little silent, ‘Your study is excellent, really. It’s so spartan.’
‘There should be nothing in a study that’s not practical,’ said Kampert simply.
Downstairs Müller waddled over to the mahogany cabinet, which had clearly impressed itself more strongly on his memory than anything else, and groped among the bottles. He said, ‘The main thing is to have your whisky in the right place.’
Kampert laughed and put his hand on his arm. He brought out a large bottle, held it up to the light, and said, ‘Black and White.’ There is no doubt that ‘Black and White’ is the most highly regarded of all brands of whisky, and not without reason. But at this moment I sensed instinctively that Müller would have preferred it if something less than the right brand had been placed in the cabinet for him. He helped himself liberally. But the mere fact that he was drinking whisky (with very little soda) out of a tumbler which still undeniably had a little chartreuse in it was a bad sign; and a worse sign was that he suddenly seemed changed and demanded to be shown everything else in this carefully thought-out flat.
He stood resolutely in a lilac room in which everything was lilac, wallpaper, tables, cupboards, lamps. Pale lilac, dark lilac, violet. Of all things there was even a Bechstein grand that matched the lilac surroundings. He stumped through the cloakroom with its simple built-in cupboards in pale green, which were there for purely practical purposes, through the bathroom, which lacked for nothing, into the kitchen which was impeccably hygienic. Then he sat with us in a friendly dining-room holding his insidious peace and ate solid but delicious fare at a round oak table with no picture opposite to distract him. It was wrong of him to carry on drinking whisky out of his old tumbler between courses, taking less soda with each refill, but he needed it. He thought very highly of Kampert, who incidentally regaled us with some brilliant stories that showed he had a clear head and a sense of humour. It could not be Kampert or Kampert’s wife – whom Müller liked. What irritated Müller was the flat. He was completely wrong about this. It was a very pleasant flat, not at all ostentatious. But I think Müller just could not stand the carefully contrived harmony and the dogmatic functionalism of it any longer. And I must say that I was gradually coming round to the same view.
Then Mrs. Kampert, whose naturalness had held the whole thing together and, as it were, tamed the animal in Müller, withdrew and I could see immediately that something had to give.
With a casualness which for Kampert was imperceptible but for me was quite unnatural he cunningly steered the conversation round to the subject of North Sea shrimps. But then he grew more and more outspoken and finished up by suddenly expressing a blunt desire for North Sea shrimps out of a tin. Kampert was rather startled, but he was much too good a host and took too naive a pleasure in the completeness of his household not to be genuinely embarrassed. Added to which we had both by now, like Müller, drunk rather a lot; so Kampert stood up, took his hat and promised with a laugh to procure some North Sea shrimps.
And one can only assume that just that evening Kampert’s guardian angel must have gone to bed early, for before he left to satisfy his guests’ ultimate wishes, his unfortunate proprietorial eye fell on a chest beside the door, an unprepossessing brown affair with iron fittings, at which, quite naively and utterly oblivious to the predicament which he had already been in for well nigh an hour, he said, ‘Have you ever seen such an eyesore as that thing; it sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise quite decent dining room, eh, boys? But I wouldn’t part with it for anything in the world, because there is nothing so irritating as having every little thing just right. It isn’t necessary for everything to match everything else in a house, or else it would be unliveable in.’ And without waiting to see the effect of his words he hurried out to get the North Sea shrimps.
Müller nodded laughingly to me. His agony had left him. He was again the good, old, drunken, humorous Müller whom I loved and feared.
We lost no time. We got down to work straightaway. Müller took off his jacket and threw it in a corner. Then he went into the lounge and fell upon the mahogany cabinet. He took out three bottles, smashed the necks off them on a groaning bamboo chair. He then poured them all into a pan which had recently had tomatoes floating in it and came back into the dining room. He imbibed a soup-ladleful of this brew, waved me aside, and strolled to one of the original American armchairs, then fell into it with a groan and sketched his plan of campaign. This took three minutes, but without it he would not have been able to do the thorough job that I was about to witness. The first thing he did was to tear down the sun-blind (My God, how firmly this thing’s been fixed!), and hang it between the window catch and the spiral staircase, using some violet tassels from the drawing-room
to tie it up so that he now had a giant hammock which filled the whole room (This’ll cover the whole of Cuba!). Then he made a cosy corner with the lounge chairs, the dining room table and the kitchen curtains, and enthroned the ominous little mahogany cabinet in the middle of it all. (The little cabinet so there is something that doesn’t match), after which, using the left-over sugar in the coffee cups, he stuck some revolting illustrations on the walls, tearing them out of magazines since he had no time to look anywhere else. Having secured the cosy corner for all eventualities, he, with a bottle in his pocket, staged what he called a Macedonian triumphal progress through the upstairs rooms, hurling himself most perilously on the bed, overturning the pine table and the washbasin. All this in total silence apart from a few statements of principle. When he got back to the lounge he looked extraordinarily triumphant. Then, swinging in his Cuban hammock, under the stimulating influence of mighty amounts of alcohol, he delivered a fulminating and memorable Speech on Temperance.
‘Man,’ he said, ‘is born to fight. It is his nature to avoid the effort. But thank God there are natural powers which pep him up a little. Left to himself, in other words, Man is a miserable worm who would like to have everything matching. Pale blue, dark blue, blue-black. But on the other hand, and especially after partaking of North Sea shrimps, Man is like a terrible tornado, creating the grandiose multiplicity and admirable disharmony of all creation out of an almighty pile-up of patent American chaise-longues, common washbasins and old, venerable magazines. It is not given to man to grow up to heaven on sun-blinds and Bechstein grands. A home exists wherever a man throws his old collar in a corner. God has ordained it thus, not I, Müller. So be it. And now this is a home.’
And once he had said this, swinging from wall to wall in front of a huge window that gave on to the night, he climbed out of his hammock, unsteady after his unaccustomed intellectual indulgence, and proceeded with faltering steps into the lilac room to sustain himself with a modest repast. From the pocket of his jacket where it lay in a corner he extracted his tin of North Sea shrimps and opened it on the Bechstein grand with a paper-knife. And at that moment, Kampert appeared in the doorway with a paper bag in his hand.