Read Online England Made Me by Graham Greene - Free Book Online Page B

girl’s face); only a bawdy joke remained of all that companionship.
    But later there was Hall; we used to drink cheap red wine together near the Bull Ring and talk; once Hall wore a paper nose during a festa ; we used to talk till midnight and after; of what? The machine, the friction, the expansion of metals were the only subjects he could remember.
    â€˜Your car, Herr Krogh.’
    He picked the price list from his desk and pretended to read it. Why should I go?

    He took in very little of what he saw.
    â€˜Your car, Herr Krogh.’
    â€˜I heard you. I’m coming.’
Chile Copper
14
14
Colgate-Palmolive-Peet
15½
16 ⅛
Continental Can
76
77
    He turned to the end of the list. U.S. Industrial Alcohol, U.S. Leather, U.S. Rubber, U.S. Steel. He thought grimly, quite without amusement: I’m a shy man.
Woolworth Co.
49½
50 ⅜
Worthington Pump
24½
25½
Youngtown Sheet and Tube
26½
27½
    It no longer gave him any pleasure to think that soon a new company under his control would be quoted there, as already he was quoted in Stockholm, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw and Brussels.
    A joke, he thought, an inquiry after his family; ought I to offer him a cigar or a cigarette?

3
    â€˜There should be speed-boats,’ Anthony said. ‘Are you sure there aren’t speed-boats?’
    â€˜Listen,’ Kate said, ‘is that the lift?’ She could not disguise her anxiety; she had planned everything, her voice plainly told him, but with Krogh even she could not be certain of the result.
    â€˜What will you do,’ Anthony asked, ‘if he won’t have me?’
    â€˜What will you do?’
    â€˜Oh,’ Anthony said. ‘I’ll scrounge along. Why worry, anyway?’ He was like a native campaigner accustomed to travel vast distances with the lightest food; one didn’t starve; one didn’t die; in the kind of war he fought, survival was the greatest victory. Kate stood with strained pale face between Krogh’s bookcase and Krogh’s door, and he knew that she was afraid for him. He would have liked to explain to her the baselessness of her fear, but he lacked the right words. ‘I’ve been on my uppers before,’ he said, but the phrase even to himself failed to convey the idea of his success. This was victory: somehow to have existed; happiness was an incidental enjoyment: the unexpected glass or the unexpected girl. It was perhaps the only lesson he had thoroughly learned at school, the lesson taught by the thirteen weeks of overcrowding, tedium and fear. Somehow time passed and the worst came to an end; there were breaks, there were moments of happiness: sickness, tea in the matron’s room, punishments which carried with them a momentary popularity. One even after a time adapted oneself to circumstances, learned the secret of being tolerated, wore with conviction the common uniform.
    But Kate he recognized was different: she had ambition, or perhaps the greater difference (for he had ambition too: his patent hand-warmer was a sign of it: the ambition to have money to spend) was that she had hope. Behind the bright bonhomie of his glance, behind the firm hand-clasp and the easy joke, lay a deep nihilism.
    When he spoke again it was with a note of patronage as if she were a child for whom he was responsible, an imaginative child, a child with ideas. ‘Don’t worry, Kate, about what he’ll say. Really, you know, it doesn’t matter. We may as well amuse ourselves. Show me the place. Are those books his?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Does he read them?’
    â€˜I don’t think so.’
    â€˜And through here?’
    â€˜His bedroom.’
    She was ill at ease; for the moment he felt himself older, more responsible, more knowledgeable than she. He was in his element, accustomed as he was to filling up time, better able than anyone to banish apprehensions. There had been a period, lying in cubicle beds,