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EX LIBRIS

VINTAGE CLASSICS

N O v ELS

The Man Within

It’s a Battlefield A Gun for Sale

Brighton Rock

The Confidential Agent

The Ministry of Fear

The Third Man

The End of the Affair

Loser Takes All

The Quiet American

A Burnt-out Case

Travels with my Aunt

Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party

The Human Factor

The Tenth Man

England Made Me

Stamboul Train

The Power and the Glory

The Heart of the Matter

The Fallen Idol

Our Man in Havana

The Comedians

The Honorary Consul

Monsignor Quixote

The Captain and the Enemy

P LAYS

Collected Plays

S HOR t St OR i ES

Collected Stories

Twenty-One Stories

The Last Word and Other Stories

May We Borrow Your Husband?

tRAv EL

Journey Without Maps

The Lawless Roads

In Search of a Character

Getting to Know the General

E SSAYS

Yours etc.

Reflections

Mornings in the Dark

Collected Essays

Aut OB i OGRAPHY

A Sort of Life Ways of Escape

Fragments of an Autobiography A World of my Own

Bi OGRAPHY

Lord Rochester’s Monkey

An Impossible Woman

C H i L d REN ’ S B OO k S

The Little Train

The Little Horse-Bus

The Little Steamroller

The Little Fire Engine

GRAHAM GREENE DUEL DUET

Selected Stories

Edit E d AN d wit H AN i N t RO du C ti ON BY Yiyun Li

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Introduction

Return to the Home Key

Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have the luxury of having no known biography. Greene, having written about his life and having had his life extensively written about by others, remains near when one reads his work – not insistently dominating or distracting, as some writers may prove to be, but as a presence often felt and at times caught by a side glance.

The first moment appears in Greene’s memoir Ways of Escape. In a chapter about Brighton Rock, which Greene called a labour of love, he explains the original inspiration for the novel with a reminiscence about the first film he saw at age six – a silent film about a kitchen maid turned queen, with live music played offscreen – he writes, ‘Her march was accompanied by an old lady on a piano, but the tock-tock-tock of untuned wires stayed in my memory when other melodies faded . . . That was the kind of book I always wanted to write: the high romantic tale, capturing us in youth with hopes that prove illusions, to which we return again in age in order to escape the sad reality.’*

The second moment appears in Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant by Leopoldo Duran.

* Ways of Escape, Simon and Schuster, 1980, p. 82.

In 1983, Father Duran accompanied Greene on a journey to Spain for the filming of his novel Monsignor Quixote. At a Trappist monastery, Father Duran noticed an elderly monk, Father Juan. ‘I saw him, standing discreetly apart, at the entrance to the porter’s lodge, learning on this walking stick, chin in both hands, and totally absorbed by these people and the strange things they were doing . . . With seventy years’ experience of Trappist rule behind him, Father Juan did not want to go to heaven without seeing how films were made.’*

To say that these two moments encapsulate Greene’s work for me is an irresponsible cliche: the point of literature is not to be put into capsules, a trick good only for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Rather, the two moments provide a home key whenever I read Greene’s work. There are multiple pairings of twos in both scenes: a duel or a duet; who can say which is the more apt noun here?

In the first, the heroine, a kitchen maid and a queen within one being, offers a fairytale setting for some confrontations: reality versus fantasy, past versus future, entrapment versus freedom – variations of these appear in many of Greene’s novels. But a more interesting pairing is the beautiful image of a silent woman on the screen and the old lady plinking-plonking off stage: which of them is more dramatic, more romantic, more illusory and yet more permanent? And of course, in that same passage, there is also Greene the author (in his mid-seventies, going by the publication date of the book) and Greene the six-year-old boy. The mature man feels the young boy’s emotions – in Greene’s own words, ‘to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to

* Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant, HarperSanFrancisco, p. 229.

feel them, as I felt them then, without irony’.* The younger self, in carving into his memory feelings he’s not yet capable of articulating or even understanding, is nevertheless an equal partner: here is the source of a writer’s sense and sensibility, like the initial vibration that makes the sound; what comes after are echoes and reverberations.

In the second moment, again the illusory cinematic art appears. Father Juan, with his seventy years of Trappist history, must never have watched a film, and there he stands, witnessing what would remain a mysterious process to most audiences in the cinema. The clash and the harmony between the holy and the secular, believing and make-believing, faith and entertainment, the pending death of Monsignor Quixote – a fictional character, whose Sancho in the novel is an ex-mayor, a communist – and the pending death of Father Juan in the not too distant future: one has a sense that one enters, at that moment, the quintessential Greene-land.

There is defiance that comes only with youth and inexperience, the refusal to accept life as it is: no one says a kitchen maid cannot also be a warrior queen; no one says a child cannot have the emotions that would put the world, which is often indifferent, to shame. There is also a defiance that comes with old age when the world seems no longer new: surely there is still something more to ponder, even if you’ve lived close to God in a Trappist cell for seventy years. And those who understand both kinds of defiance, one suspects, will be the right readers for Greene.

There are different ways to talk about Greene’s work. We can focus on the amphitheatre of history, where wars, revolutions and colonial intrigues play impersonal gods to the mortals.

* A Sort of Life, Vintage Classics, p. xi.

We can scrutinise the mundane settings waiting for major and minor human dramas to happen – the streets and alleyways of Brighton and Saigon, the un-aired offices of London ministry buildings, the manicured suburban gardens, the well-lit casinos and much-visited seaside resorts, the jungles and rivers of Africa and South America. We can also step away from those external settings and enter the interior landscapes of many of his characters, some of them with God on their side, others without; some have time on their side, others not; some with friends or loves or even enemies on their side, others not. But all of them have memories and dreams on their side – a blessing, even if it sometimes masks itself as a curse. And all of them, it seems to me, are only half of a duel or half of a duet, their partners sometimes visible and other times invisible.

In ‘A Day Saved’, an unnamed narrator follows an unnamed man, with a detailed plan to kill him and yet with the horror that he knows nothing about the man, not even his name. This seems a classic Greene dilemma, where one man’s despair and (partial) knowledge and another man’s innocence and faith in the ordinary (if he takes a flight instead of a train, he will save a day) constitute the quicksand for the reader: surely we are in a worse situation than the two characters; there is no choice for us but to be both of them at the same time. ‘A day saved . . . Save it from what, for what?’ We may as well ask ourselves every day, for the rest of our lives, without knowing the answer.

In ‘The Basement Room’, a child – temporarily orphaned (his parents are out of town) – and the butler of the house, whom the child loves genuinely, are set on a course from page one to betray each other in the most fatal manner, and nothing will help them or save them. All the same, for as long as they go on being gentle and tender towards each other, we readers hold on to wishful thinking: of course, life will not take their sides, but perhaps – just perhaps – because of that, they will end up on the

same side, two partners in a perpetual duet rather than being pitched against each other in a duel. But wishful thinking neither saves the butler nor the child nor us.

There is a general belief that short stories are better read one at a time – one sees some sense in that. But stories (and novels, too) are like people. For a writer with a long career, chances are, many stories and novels have their duet or duel partners in other stories and novels. In selecting the stories for this collection and ordering the sequence, I have taken the liberty of ignoring the chronology of publication. Instead, I have allowed myself to be guided by this thought: rather than to be read one at a time, the stories in this selection may be more interesting and illuminating if read two at a time.

For instance, ‘Dream of a Strange Land’ and ‘The News in English’. The former is set in unnamed countryside near ‘the capital’, where a ‘Herr Colonel’ is requisitioning the house of a ‘Herr Professor’ for one night and converting it into a Monte Carlo casino for a ‘Herr General’. The transformation, a strange dream for the professor, becomes a stranger dream for a patient of his, who is trying to reach the house after dark on a lifeand-death matter. ‘The wrong house? But this is not the wrong house; it is the wrong country,’ the patient ponders. The two men meet at an existential bleakness that is more than a momentary despair – but only fleetingly. They are not engaged in a proper duel, though one of them dies after that encounter; they are not in a proper duet, either, though their music, like the untuned piano music that went on living in Greene’s recollection, has never faded in my memory. The echo of that music easily intertwines with another tune from ‘The News in English’, in which a husband, a POW in the Second World War, broadcasts German propaganda in English to England, but only his young wife recognises the real messages conveyed. Is

she imagining it, or is it that he and she live on a higher plane of consciousness and understanding that is so extraordinary and unfathomable to the world at large? Like the patient and the professor in the previous story, these two also form a duet, though its music remains unheard, and the meaning of the music dwarfs wars and history.

In ‘The End of the Party’, twin boys hold hands in the dark, as though they were back in the womb together, waiting to be found in a game of hide-and-seek, and yet only one of them will be born again this time. In ‘The Case for the Defence’, twins, having lived to adulthood, face the same situation: one of them must save the other through their twinhood – a pair of identical twins can destroy the most waterproof legal case merely by looking like each other. Does it work? A little better than for the pair of boys, though not much.

I have placed the two long stories, ‘Under the Garden’ and ‘The Other Side of the Border’, at the end of this selection. Both are novelistic (Greene called the latter manuscript one of his ‘abandoned novels’), and there was a moment when I was reading them side by side when I had an eerie feeling of their merging in my imagination into a novel: one has to shake one’s head decisively to dispel that (mis)apprehension.

I could go on, though that would be to spoil the pleasure that awaits. A better way is for a reader to read these stories closely, two at a time.

I must admit that the stories, arranged according to my understanding, may offer other insights to readers, who may then want to reorder the stories according to their own liking. That would be even better: a rearranged piece of music sometimes speaks of discoveries. And Greene has offered sufficiently for each of his readers to come up with his or her arrangement.

Is there any fundamental difference between a duel and a duet? In each, a connection pre-dates the actual event. What comes after – understanding or misunderstanding, agreement or disagreement, harmony or dissonance, conversation or argument, life or death – may surprise us, but it is because human relationships are by nature surprising; what comes after may feel inevitable, and that too is what human relationships are about.

I started to read Greene when I was a young writer; twenty years later, he remains among a handful of writers I reread. His work keeps one’s mind on tiptoe. Illusions beget disillusions but also hopes; hopes beget illusions but also clarities.

As I was writing this introduction, I looked for Ways of Escape on my bookshelf, wanting to revisit the cinema scene with the six-year-old Greene. It would be like a return to the home key, I thought, but among over twenty books by Greene (a few in duplicates) and still more about him, the one book I was looking for was absent! So much for the wish to see my previous annotations in the book and to have a duet with my younger self. And that missed connection, I must admit, is surprising and inevitable, like a tree standing inconspicuously and yet meaningfully in Greene-land.

Yiyun Li, 2025

Dream of a Strange Land

The News in English

Dream of a Strange Land

The house of the Herr Professor was screened on every side by the plantation of fir-trees which grew among great grey rocks. Although it was only twenty minutes’ ride from the capital and then a few minutes from the main road to the north, a visitor had the impression that he was in deep country; he felt himself to be hundreds of miles away from the cafés, the kiosks, the opera-houses and the theatres.

The Herr Professor had virtually retired two years ago when he reached the age of sixty-five. His appointment at the hospital had been filled, he had closed his consulting-room in the capital, and if he continued to work it was only for a few favoured patients who were compelled to drive out to see him, or if they were poor (for he had not clung to a few rich patients only) to take a bus which landed them about ten minutes’ walk away at the edge of the trees and the rocks.

It was one of these poorer patients who stood now in the doctor’s study listening to his doom. The study had folding pitch-pine doors leading to the living-room, which the patient had never seen. A heavy dark bookcase stood against the wall full of heavy dark books, all obviously medical in character (no one had ever seen the Herr Professor with any lighter literature, nor heard him give an opinion of even the most respected classic. Once questioned on Madame Bovary’s poisoning, he had professed complete ignorance of the book, and another time he had shown himself to be equally ignorant of Ibsen’s treatment

of syphilis in Ghosts ). The desk was as heavy and dark as the bookcase; it was only a desk as heavy which could have borne without cracking the massive bronze paperweight more than a foot high which represented Prometheus chained to his rock with a hovering eagle thrusting its beak into his liver. (Sometimes, when breaking the news to a patient with cirrhosis, the Professor had referred to his paperweight with dry humour.)

The patient wore a shabby-genteel suit of dark cloth; the cuffs had frayed and been repaired. He wore stout boots which had seen just as long a service, and through the open door in the hall behind him hung an overcoat and an umbrella, while a pair of goloshes stood in the steel trough under the umbrella, the snow not yet melted from their uppers. He was a man past fifty who had spent all his adult years behind the counter of a bank and by patient labour and courtesy he had risen to the position of second cashier. He would never be first cashier, for the first cashier was at least five years younger.

The Herr Professor had a short grey beard and he wore oldfashioned glasses, steel-rimmed, for his short sight. His rather hairy hands were scattered with grave-marks. As he seldom smiled one had very little opportunity to see his strong and perfect teeth. He said firmly, caressing Prometheus as he spoke, ‘I warned you when you first came that my treatment might have started too late – to arrest the disease. Now the smear-test shows . . .’

‘But, Herr Professor, you have been treating me all these months. No one knows about it. I can go on working at the bank. Can’t you continue to treat me a little longer?’

‘I would be breaking the law,’ the Herr Professor explained, making a motion as though his thumb and forefinger clutched a chalk. ‘Contagious cases must always go to the hospital.’

‘But you yourself, Herr Professor, have said that it is one of the most difficult of all diseases to catch.’

‘And yet you caught it.’

‘How? How?’ the patient asked himself with the weariness of a man who has confronted the same question time without mind.

‘Perhaps it was when you were working on the coast. There are many contacts in a port.’

‘Contacts?’

‘I assume you are a man like other men.’

‘But that was seven years ago.’

‘One has known the disease to take ten years to develop.’

‘It will be the end of my work, Herr Professor. The bank will never take me back. My pension will be very small.’

‘You take an exaggerated view. After a certain period . . . Hansen’s disease is eventually curable.’

‘Why don’t you call it by its proper name?’

‘The International Congress decided five years ago to change the name.’

‘The world hasn’t changed the name, Herr Professor. If you send me to that hospital, everyone will know that I am a leper.’

‘I have no choice. But I assure you you will find it very comfortable. There is television, I believe, in every room, and a golf-course.’

The Herr Professor showed no impatience at all, unless the fact that he did not ask the patient to sit and stood himself, stiff and straight-backed behind Prometheus and the eagle, was a sign of it.

‘Herr Professor, I implore you. I will not breathe a word to a soul. You can treat me just as well as the hospital can. You’ve said yourself that the risk of contagion is very small, Herr Professor. I have my savings – they are not very great, but I will give them all . . .’

‘My dear sir, you must not try to bribe me. It is not only insulting, it is a gross error of taste. I am sorry. I must ask you to go now. My time is very much occupied.’

‘Herr Professor, you have no idea what it means to me. I lead a very simple life, but if a man is alone in the world he grows to love his habits. I go to a café by the lake every day at seven o’clock and stay there till eight. They all know me in the café. Sometimes I play a game of checkers. On Sunday I take the lake steamer to—’

‘Your habits will have to be interrupted for a year or two,’ the Herr Professor said sharply.

‘Interrupted? You say interrupted? But I can never go back. Never. Leprosy is a word – it isn’t a disease. They’ll never believe leprosy can be cured. You can’t cure a word.’

‘You will be getting a certificate signed by the hospital authorities,’ the Herr Professor said.

‘A certificate! I might just as well carry a bell.’

He moved to the door, the hall, his umbrella and the goloshes; the Herr Professor, with a sigh of relief which was almost inaudible beyond the room, seated himself at his desk. But again the patient had turned back. ‘Is it that you don’t trust me to keep quiet, Herr Professor?’

‘I have every belief, I can assure you, that you would keep quiet. For your own sake. But you cannot expect a doctor of my standing to break the law. A sensible and necessary law. If it had not been infringed somewhere by someone you would not be standing here today. Good-bye, Herr—’, but the patient had already closed the outer door and had begun to walk back amongst the rocks and firs towards the road, the bus-stop and the capital. The Herr Professor went to the window to make sure that he was truly gone and saw him among the snow-flakes which drifted lightly between the trees; he paused once and gesticulated with his hands as though a new argument had occurred to him which he was practising on a rock. Then he padded on and disappeared from sight.

The Herr Professor opened the sliding doors of the dining-room

Dream of a Strange Land

and made his accurate way to the sideboard, which was heavy like his desk. Instead of the Prometheus there stood on it a large silver flagon inscribed with the Herr Professor’s name and a date more than forty years past – an award for fencing – and beside it lay a large silver epergne, also inscribed, a present from the staff of the hospital on his retirement. The Herr Professor took a hard green apple and walked back to his study. He sat down at his desk again and his teeth went crunch, crunch, crunch.

Later that morning the Herr Professor received another caller, but this one arrived before the house in a MercedesBenz car and the Herr Professor went himself to the door to show him in.

‘Herr Colonel,’ he said as he pulled forward the only chair of any comfort to be found in his study, ‘this I hope is only a friendly call and not a professional one.’

‘I am never ill,’ the Colonel said with a look of irritated amusement at the very idea. ‘My blood-pressure is normal, my weight is what it should be, and my heart’s sound. I function like a machine. Indeed I find it difficult to believe that this machine need ever wear out. I have no worries, my nervous system is perfectly adjusted . . .’

‘Then I’m relieved to know, Herr Colonel, that this is a social call.’

‘The army,’ the Colonel went on, crossing his long slim legs encased in English tweed, ‘is the most healthy profession possible – naturally I mean in a neutral country like ours. The annual manoeuvres do one a world of good, brace the system, clean the blood . . .’

‘I wish I could recommend them to my patients.’

‘Oh, we can’t have sick men in the army.’ The Colonel added with a dry laugh, ‘We leave that to the warring nations. They can never have our efficiency.’

The Herr Professor offered the Colonel a cigar. The Colonel took a cutter from a little leather case and prepared the cigar. ‘You have met the Herr General?’ he asked.

‘On one or two occasions.’

‘He is celebrating his seventieth birthday tonight.’

‘Really? A very well preserved man.’

‘Naturally. Now his friends – of whom I count myself the chief – have been arranging a very special occasion for him. You know, of course, his favourite hobby?’

‘I can’t say . . .’

‘The tables. For the last fifty years he has spent most of his leaves at Monte Carlo.’

‘He too must have a good nervous system.’

‘Of course. Now it occurred to his friends, since he cannot spend his birthday at Monte Carlo for reasons of a quite temporary indisposition, to bring, as it were, the tables to him.’

‘How can that be possible?’

‘Everything was satisfactorily arranged. A croupier from Cannes and two assistants. All the necessary equipment. One of my friends was to have lent us his house in the country. You understand that everything has to be very discreet because of our absurd laws. You would think the police on such an occasion would turn a blind eye, but among the higher officials there is a great jealousy of the army. I once heard the Commissioner remark – at a party to which I was surprised to see that he had been invited – that the only wars in which our country had ever been engaged were fought by his men.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Oh, he was referring to crime. An absurd comparison. What has crime to do with war?’

The Herr Professor said, ‘You were telling me that everything had been satisfactorily arranged . . . ?’

‘With the Herr General Director of the National Bank. But suddenly today he telephoned to say that a child – a girl as one might expect – had developed scarlatina. The household therefore is in quarantine.’

‘The Herr General will be disappointed.’

‘The Herr General knows nothing of all this. He understands that a party is being given in his honour in the country – that is all.’

‘And you come to me,’ the Herr Professor said, trying to hide mystification which he regarded as a professional weakness, ‘in case I can suggest . . . ?’

‘I come to you, Herr Professor, quite simply to borrow your house for this evening. The problem can be reduced to very simple terms. The house has to be in the country – I have explained to you why. It must have a salon of a certain size – to receive the tables; we can hardly have less than three, since the guests will number about a hundred. And the owner of the house must naturally be acceptable to the Herr General. There are houses a great deal larger than yours that the General could not be expected to enter as a guest. We can hardly, in this case, requisition.’

‘I am honoured, of course, Herr Colonel, but . . .’

‘These doors slide back, I suppose, and can form a room sufficiently large . . . ?’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Pardon me. You were saying?’

‘I had the impression that the party was for tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t see how there could be time . . .’

‘A matter of logistics, Herr Professor. Leave logistics to the army.’ He took a notebook from his pocket and wrote down

‘lights’. He explained to the Herr Professor, ‘We shall have to hang chandeliers. A casino is unthinkable without chandeliers. May I see the other room, please?’

He paced it with his long tweed-clad legs. ‘It will make a fine salle privée with the doors folded back and the chandeliers substituted for these – forgive me for saying so – rather commonplace centre lights. Your furniture we can store upstairs? Of course we will bring our own chairs. This sideboard, however, can serve as a bar. I see you were a fencer in your time, Herr Professor?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Herr General used to be very keen on fencing. Now tell me, where do you think we could put the orchestra?’

‘Orchestra?’

‘My regiment will supply the musicians. If the worst came to the worst I suppose they could play on the stairs.’ He stood at the window of the salon, looking out at the wintry garden bounded by the dark wood of fir-trees. ‘Is that a summerhouse?’

‘Yes.’

‘The oriental touch is very suitable. If they played there, and if we left a window a little open, the music will surely carry faintly . . .’

‘The cold . . .’

‘You have a fine stove and the curtains are heavy.’

‘The summerhouse is altogether unheated.’

‘The men can wear their military overcoats. And then for a fiddler, you know, the exercise . . .’

‘And all this for tonight?’

‘For tonight.’

The Herr Professor said, ‘I have never before violated the law,’ and then smiled a quick false smile to cover his failure of nerve.

‘You could hardly do so in a better cause,’ the Herr Colonel replied.

Long before dark the furniture-vans began to arrive. The chandeliers came first, with the wine-glasses, and remained crated in the hall until the electricians drove up, and then the waiters arrived simultaneously with the van that contained seventy-four small gilt chairs. The mover’s men had beer in the kitchen with the Herr Professor’s housekeeper, waiting for a lorry to turn up with the three roulette-tables. The roulette-wheels, the cloths and the boxes of plastic tokens, of varying colours and shapes according to value, were brought later in a smart private car with the three croupiers, serious men in black suits. The Herr Professor had never seen so many cars parked before his house. He felt a stranger, a guest, and lingered at his bedroom-window, afraid to go out on the stairs and meet the workmen. The long passage outside his room became littered with the furniture from below.

As the red winter sun sank in early afternoon below the black firs the cars began to multiply upon the drive. First a fleet of taxis arrived one behind the other, all bright yellow in colour like an amber chain, and out of these scrambled many burly men in military overcoats carrying musical instruments, which too often stuck in the doors and had to be extricated with care and difficulty: it was hard indeed to understand how the ’cello had ever fitted in – the neck came out first like a dressmaker’s dummy and then the shoulders proved too wide. The men in overcoats stood around holding violin-bows like rifles at the ready, and a small man with a triangle shouted advice. Presently they had all disappeared from the front of the house and discordant sounds of tuning came across the snow from the summerhouse built in oriental taste. Something broke in the passage outside, and the Herr Professor, looking out, saw that it was one of the central lamps criticized by the Herr Colonel, which had fallen off the occasional table

on which it had been propped. The passage was nearly blocked by the heavy desk from the study, the glass-fronted bookcase and his three filing cabinets. The Herr Professor salvaged Prometheus and carried the bronze into his bedroom for safety, though it was the least fragile thing in all the house. There was a sound of hammers below and the Herr Colonel’s voice could be heard giving orders. The Herr Professor went back into his bedroom. He sat on the bed and read a little Schopenhauer to soothe himself.

It was some three-quarters of an hour later that the Herr Colonel found him there. He came briskly in, wearing regimental evening-dress, which made his legs thinner and longer than ever. ‘Zero hour approaches,’ he said, ‘and we are all but ready. You would not recognize your house, Herr Professor. It is quite transformed. The Herr General will feel himself in a sunnier and more liberal clime. The musicians will play a pot-pourri of Strauss and Offenbach with a little of Lehar, which the Herr General finds more easy to recognize. I’ve seen to it that suitable paintings hang on the walls. You will realize when you come down and see the salle privée that this has been no ordinary military exercise. A care for detail marks a good soldier. Tonight, Herr Professor, your house has become a casino, by the Mediterranean. I had thought of masking the trees in some way, but there was no way of getting rid of the snow which continues to fall.’

‘Astonishing,’ the Herr Professor said. ‘Quite astonishing.’ From the distant summerhouse he could hear a melody from La Belle Hélène, and on the drive outside cars continually braked. He felt far from home as though he were living in a strange country.

‘If you will excuse me,’ he said, ‘I will leave everything tonight in your hands. I hardly know the Herr General. I will have a sandwich quietly in my room.’

‘Quite impossible,’ the Herr Colonel said. ‘You are the host. By this time the Herr General knows your name, although of course he hardly expects the sight which will greet . . . Ah, the

Dream of a Strange Land

guests are now beginning to arrive. I asked them to come early so that by the time the Herr General puts in his appearance everything will be in full swing, the wheels turning, the stakes laid, the croupiers calling . . . the field of battle stretched before him, rouge et noir. Come, Herr Professor, a little flutter at the tables – it is time for the two of us to open the ball.’ 4

The road was treacherous under the thin and new-fallen snow; the bus from the capital proceeded at a pace no smarter than a practice-runner who is unwilling to strain a muscle before the great race. The patient’s feet felt chilled even through his goloshes, or perhaps it was the cold of his errand, a fool’s errand. There was a lot of traffic on the road that night: yellow taxis frequently passed the bus, and small sports-cars full of young men in uniform or evening-dress, laughing or singing, and once at a particularly imperious siren – which might have been that of a police-car or an ambulance – the bus slithered awkwardly to a stop beside the blue heaps of snow on the margin, and a large Mercedes went by; in it the patient saw an old man sitting stiffly upright with a long grey moustache which might have dated from the neutrality of 1914, wearing an old-fashioned uniform with a fur hat on his head, pulled down over his ears.

The patient alighted at a halt beside the road; the moon was nearly full, but he still required the pocket-torch which he carried with him to show the way through the woods: no headlights of cars helped him now on the private drive to the Herr Professor’s house. As he walked through the loose snow at the edge of the road he tried to practise his final appeal. If that failed there was nothing for him but the hospital, unless he could summon enough courage to enter the icy water of the

lake and never to return. He felt very little hope, and, for some reason that he could not understand, when he tried to visualize the Herr Professor at his desk – angry and impatient at this so late and unforeseen a visit – he could see only the half-spread wings of the bronze eagle and the jutting beak fastened in the intestines of the prisoner.

He pleaded in an undertone beneath the trees, ‘There would be no danger to anyone at all, Herr Professor. I have always been a lonely man. I have no parents. My only sister died last year. I see no one, speak to no one except the clients in the bank. An occasional game of checkers in the café perhaps – that is all. I would cut myself off even further, Herr Professor, if you thought it wiser. As for the bank, I have always been in the habit of wearing gloves when I handle the notes – so many are filthy. I will take any precaution you suggest if you will go on treating me in private, Herr Professor. I am a law-abiding man, but surely the spirit is more important than the letter. I will abide by the spirit.’

The eagle gripped Prometheus with its unrelenting beak, and the patient said sadly as though to prevent the repetition of a phrase he could not bear to hear again, ‘I don’t like television, Herr Professor – it makes my eyes water, and I have never played golf.’

He halted under the trees, and a lump of snow from a burdened branch fell with a plomp upon his umbrella. It seemed very unlikely, but he thought that he heard strains of distant music borne on a gust of wind and borne away again. He even thought he recognized the melody, something from La Vie Parisienne, a waltz sounding for a moment from where the darkness and the snow lay all around. He had seen this place before only in daylight; the snow touched his face, and the stars crackled overhead between the firs; he felt as though he must have missed his path and entered a strange estate where perhaps a dance was in progress . . .

But when he reached the circular drive before the house he recognized the portico, the shape of the windows, the steep slope of the roof from which at intervals the snow slid with a crunch like the sound of a man eating apples. It was all that he could recognize, for he had never seen the house like this, ablaze with light and noisy with voices. Perhaps two neighbouring estates had been built by the same architect, and somehow in the wood he had taken the wrong turning. To make sure, he approached the windows, the hard snow breaking like biscuits under his goloshes.

Two young officers, who were obviously the worse for drink, staggered out from the open doorway. ‘I have been betrayed by nineteen,’ one of them said, ‘that confounded nineteen.’

‘And I by zero. I have been faithful to zero for an hour but not once . . .’

The first young man took a revolver from the holster at his side and waved it in the moonlight. ‘All that is required now,’ he said, ‘is a suicide. The atmosphere is imperfect without one.’

‘Be careful. It might be loaded.’

‘It is loaded. Who is that man?’

‘I don’t know. The gardener probably. Don’t fool about with that thing.’

‘More bubbly is required,’ the first man said. He tried to put his revolver back into the holster, but it slid down into the snow and he carefully secured the empty holster. ‘More bubbly,’ he repeated, ‘before the dream fades.’ They moved erratically back into the house. The dark object made a pocket in the snow.

The patient went up to the window, which should, if he had taken the right path, have been the window of the Herr Professor’s study, but now he realized for certain that in the darkness he had come to the wrong house. Instead of a small square room with heavy desk and heavy bookcase and steel filing-cabinets was a long room brilliantly lit with cut-glass chandeliers, the

walls hung with pictures of dubious taste – young women in diaphanous nightgowns leaning over waterfalls or paddling among water-lilies in a stooping position. A crowd of men wearing uniform and evening-dress swarmed around three roulette tables, and the croupiers’ cries came thinly out into the night, ‘Faites vos jeux, messieurs, faites vos jeux,’ while somewhere in the black garden an orchestra was playing ‘The Blue Danube’. The patient stood motionless in the snow, with his face pressed to the glass, and he thought, The wrong house? But this is not the wrong house; it is the wrong country. He felt that he could never find his way home from here – it was too far away.

At one of the tables, on the right of the croupier, sat the old man whom he had seen pass in the Mercedes. One hand was playing with his moustache, the other with a pile of tokens before him, counting and rearranging them while the ball span and jumped and span, and one foot beat in time to the tune from The Merry Widow. A champagne cork from the bar shot diagonally up and struck the chandelier while the croupiers cried again, ‘Faites vos jeux, messieurs,’ and the stem of a glass went crack in somebody’s fingers.

Then the patient saw the Herr Professor standing with his back to the window at the other end of the great room, beyond the second chandelier, and they regarded each other, with the laughter and cries and glitter of light between them.

The Herr Professor could not properly see the patient – only the outline of a face pressed to the exterior of the pane, but the patient could see the Herr Professor very clearly between the tables, in the light of the chandelier. He could even see his expression, the lost look on his face like that of someone who has come to the wrong party. The patient raised his hand, as though to indicate to the other that he was lost too, but of course the Herr Professor could not see the gesture in the dark. The patient realized quite clearly that, though they had once

Dream of a Strange Land

been well known to each other, it was quite impossible for them to meet, in this house to which they had both strayed by some strange accident. There was no consulting-room here, no file on his case, no desk, no Prometheus, no doctor even to whom he could appeal. ‘Faites vos jeux, messieurs,’ the croupiers cried, ‘faites vos jeux.’

The Herr Colonel said, ‘My dear Herr Professor, after all, you are the host. You should at least lay one stake upon the table.’ He took the Herr Professor by his sleeve and led him to the board where the Herr General sat, beating tip, tap, tip to the music of Lehar.

‘The Herr Professor wishes to follow your fortune, Herr General.’

‘I have little luck tonight, but let him . . .’ and the General’s fingers wove a design over the cloth. ‘At the same time guard yourself with the zero.’

The ball span and jumped and span and came to rest. ‘Zero,’ the croupier announced and began to rake the other stakes in.

‘At least you have not lost, Herr Professor,’ the Herr General said. Somewhere far away behind the voices there was a faint explosion.

‘The corks are popping,’ the Herr Colonel said. ‘Another glass of champagne, Herr General?’

‘I had hoped it was a shot,’ the Herr General said with a rather freezing smile. ‘Ah, the old days . . . I remember once in Monte Carlo . . .’

The Herr Professor looked at the window, where he had thought a moment ago that someone looked in as lost as himself, but no one was there.

The News in English

Tonight Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen was off the air.

All over England the new voice was noticed; precise and rather lifeless, it was the voice of a typical English don.

In his first broadcast he referred to himself as a man young enough to sympathize with what he called ‘the resurgence of youth all over the new Germany’, and that was the reason – combined with the pedantic tone – he was at once nicknamed Dr Funkhole.

It is the tragedy of such men that they are never alone in the world.

Old Mrs Bishop was knitting by the fire at her house in Crowborough when young Mrs Bishop tuned in to Zeesen. The sock was khaki: it was as if she had picked up at the point where she had dropped a stitch in 1918. The grim comfortable house stood in one of the long avenues, all spruce and laurel and a coating of snow, which are used to nothing but the footsteps of old retired people. Young Mrs Bishop never forgot that moment; the wind beating up across Ashdown Forest against the blackedout window, and her mother-in-law happily knitting, and the sense of everything waiting for this moment. Then the voice came into the room from Zeesen in the middle of a sentence, and old Mrs Bishop said firmly, ‘That’s David.’

Young Mary Bishop made a hopeless protest – ‘It can’t be,’ but she knew.

‘I know my son if you don’t know your husband.’

It seemed incredible that the man speaking couldn’t hear them, that he should just go on, reiterating for the hundredth

time the old lies, as if there were nobody anywhere in the world who knew him – a wife or a mother.

Old Mrs Bishop had stopped knitting. She said, ‘Is that the man they’ve been writing about – Doctor Funkhole?’

‘It must be.’

‘It’s David.’

The voice was extraordinarily convincing: he was going into exact engineering details – David Bishop had been a mathematics don at Oxford. Mary Bishop twisted the wireless off and sat down beside her mother-in-law.

‘They’ll want to know who it is,’ Mrs Bishop said.

‘We mustn’t tell them,’ said Mary.

The old fingers had begun on the khaki sock. She said, ‘It’s our duty.’ Duty, it seemed to Mary Bishop, was a disease you caught with age: you ceased to feel the tug-tug of personal ties; you gave yourself up to the great tides of patriotism and hate. She said, ‘They must have made him do it. We don’t know what threats—’

‘That’s neither here nor there.’

She gave weakly in to hopeless wishes. ‘If only he’d got away in time. I never wanted him to give that lecture course.’

‘He always was stubborn,’ said old Mrs Bishop.

‘He said there wouldn’t be a war.’

‘Give me the telephone.’

‘But you see what it means,’ said Mary Bishop. ‘He may be tried for treason if we win.’

‘When we win,’ old Mrs Bishop said.

The nickname was not altered, even after the interviews with the two Mrs Bishops, even after the sub-acid derogatory little article about David Bishop’s previous career. It was suggested now that he had known all along that war was coming, that he had gone to Germany to evade military service, leaving his wife and his mother to be bombed. Mary Bishop fought, almost in

vain, with the reporters for some recognition that he might have been forced – by threats or even physical violence. The most one paper would admit was that if threats had been used Bishop had taken a very unheroic way out. We praise heroes as though they are rare, and yet we are always ready to blame another man for lack of heroism. The name Dr Funkhole stuck.

But the worst of it to Mary Bishop was old Mrs Bishop’s attitude. She turned a knife in the wound every evening at 9.15. The radio set must be tuned in to Zeesen, and there she sat listening to her son’s voice and knitting socks for some unknown soldier on the Maginot Line. To young Mrs Bishop none of it made sense – least of all that flat, pedantic voice with its smooth, well-thought-out, elaborate lies. She was afraid to go out now into Crowborough: the whispers in the post office, the old faces watching her covertly in the library. Sometimes she thought almost with hatred, why has David done this to me? Why?

Then suddenly she got her answer.

The voice for once broke new ground. It said, ‘Somewhere back in England my wife may be listening to me. I am a stranger to the rest of you, but she knows that I am not in the habit of lying.’

A personal appeal was too much. Mary Bishop had faced her mother-in-law and the reporters – she couldn’t face her husband. She began to cry, sitting close beside the radio set like a child beside its doll’s house when something has been broken in it which nobody can repair. She heard the voice of her husband speaking as if he were at her elbow from a country which was now as distant and as inaccessible as another planet.

‘The fact of the matter is—’

The words came slowly out as if he were emphasizing a point in a lecture, and then he went on – to what would concern a wife. The low price of food, the quantity of meat in the shops. He went into great detail, giving figures, picking out odd, irrelevant

things – like Mandarin oranges and toy zebras – perhaps to give an effect of richness and variety.

Suddenly Mary Bishop sat up with a jerk as if she had been asleep. She said, ‘Oh, God, where’s that pencil?’ and upset one of the too many ornaments looking for one. Then she began to write, but in no time at all the voice was saying, ‘Thank you for having listened to me so attentively,’ and Zeesen had died out on the air. She said, ‘Too late.’

‘What’s too late?’ said old Mrs Bishop sharply. ‘Why did you want a pencil?’

‘Just an idea,’ Mary Bishop said.

She was led next day up and down the cold, unheated corridors of a War Office in which half the rooms were empty, evacuated. Oddly enough, her relationship to David Bishop was of use to her now, if only because it evoked some curiosity and a little pity. But she no longer wanted the pity, and at last she reached the right man.

He listened to her with great politeness. He was not in uniform. His rather good tweeds made him look as if he had just come up from the country for a day or two, to attend to the war. When she had finished he said, ‘It’s rather a tall story, you know, Mrs Bishop. Of course it’s been a great shock to you – this – well – action of your husband’s.’

‘I’m proud of it.’

‘Just because in the old days you had this – scheme, you really believe—?’

‘If he was away from me and he telephoned “The fact of the matter is,” it always meant, “This is all lies, but take the initial letters which follow.” . . . Oh, Colonel, if you only knew the number of unhappy weekends I’ve saved him from – because, you see, he could always telephone to me, even in front of his host.’ She said with tears in her voice, ‘Then I’d send him a telegram . . .’

‘Yes. But still – you didn’t get anything this time, did you?’

‘I was too late. I hadn’t a pencil. I only got this – I know it doesn’t seem to make sense.’ She pushed the paper across. ‘SOSPIC . I know it might easily be coincidence – that it does seem to make a kind of word.’

‘An odd word.’

‘Mightn’t it be a man’s name?’

The officer in tweeds was looking at it, she suddenly realized, with real interest – as if it was a rare kind of pheasant. He said, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ and left her. She could hear him telephoning to somebody from another room: the little ting of the bell, silence, and then a low voice she couldn’t overhear. Then he returned, and she could tell at once from his face that all was well.

He sat down and fiddled with a fountain-pen – he was obviously embarrassed. He started a sentence and stopped it. Then he brought out in an embarrassed gulp, ‘We’ll have to apologize to your husband.’

‘It meant something?’

He was obviously making his mind up about something difficult and out of the way – he was not in the habit of confiding in members of the public. But she had ceased to be a member of the public.

‘My dear Mrs Bishop,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to ask a great deal from you.’

‘Of course. Anything.’

He seemed to reach a decision and stopped fiddling. ‘A neutral ship called the Pic was sunk this morning at 4.00 a.m., with a loss of two hundred lives. SOS Pic. If we’d had your husband’s warning, we could have got destroyers to her in time. I’ve been speaking to the Admiralty.’

Mary Bishop said in a tone of fury, ‘The things they are writing about David. Is there one of them who’d have the courage—?’

‘That’s the worst part of it, Mrs Bishop. They must go on writing. Nobody must know, except my department and yourself.’

‘His mother?’

‘You mustn’t even tell her.’

‘But can’t you make them just leave him alone?’

‘This afternoon I shall ask them to intensify their campaign – in order to discourage others. An article on the legal aspect of treason.’

‘And if I refuse to keep quiet?’

‘Your husband’s life won’t be worth much, will it?’

‘So he’s just got to go on?’

‘Yes. Just go on.’

He went on for four weeks. Every night now she tuned in to Zeesen with a new horror – that he would be off the air. The code was a child’s code. How could they fail to detect it? But they did fail. Men with complicated minds can be deceived by simplicity. And every night, too, she had to listen to her mother-in-law’s indictment; every episode which she thought discreditable out of a child’s past was brought out – the tiniest incident. Women in the last war had found a kind of pride in ‘giving’ their sons: this, too, was a gift on the altar of a warped patriotism. But now young Mrs Bishop didn’t cry: she just held on – it was relief enough to hear his voice.

It wasn’t often that he had information to give – the phrase ‘the fact of the matter is’ was a rare one in his talks. Sometimes there were the numbers of the regiments passing through Berlin, or of men on leave – very small details, which might be of value to military intelligence, but to her seemed hardly worth the risk of a life. If this was all he could do, why, why hadn’t he allowed them simply to intern him?

At last she could bear it no longer. She visited the War Office

again. The man in tweeds was still there, but this time for some reason he was wearing a black tail coat and a black stock as if he had been to a funeral. He must have been to a funeral, and she thought with more fear than ever of her husband.

‘He’s a brave man, Mrs Bishop,’ he said.

‘You needn’t tell me that,’ she cried bitterly.

‘We shall see that he gets the highest possible decoration . . .’ ‘Decorations!’

‘What do you want, Mrs Bishop? He’s doing his duty.’

‘So are other men. But they come home on leave. Sometime. He can’t go on for ever. Soon they are bound to find out.’

‘What can we do?’

‘You can get him out of there. Hasn’t he done enough for you?’

He said gently, ‘It’s beyond our power. How can we communicate with him?’

‘Surely you have agents.’

‘Two lives would be lost. Can’t you imagine how they watch him?’

Yes. She could imagine all that clearly. She had spent too many holidays in Germany – as the Press had not failed to discover – not to know how men were watched, telephone lines tapped, table companions scrutinized.

He said, ‘If there was some way we could get a message to him, it might be managed. We do owe him that.’

Young Mrs Bishop said quickly before he could change his mind, ‘Well, the code works both ways. The fact of the matter is—! We have news broadcast in German. He might one day listen in.’

‘Yes. There’s a chance.’

She became privy to the plan because again they needed her help. They wanted to attract his notice first by some phrase peculiar to her. For years they had spoken German together on their annual holiday. That phrase was to be varied in every

broadcast, and elaborately they worked out a series of messages which would convey to him the same instructions – to go to a certain station on the Cologne–Wesel line and contact there a railway worker who had already helped five men and two women to escape from Germany.

Mary Bishop felt she knew the place well – the small country station which probably served only a few dozen houses and a big hotel where people went in the old days for cures. The opportunity was offered him, if he could only take it, by an elaborate account of a railway accident at that point – so many people killed – sabotage – arrests. It was plugged in the news as relentlessly as the Germans repeated the news of false sinkings, and they answered indignantly back that there had been no accident.

It seemed more horrible than ever to Mary Bishop – those nightly broadcasts from Zeesen. The voice was in the room with her, and yet he couldn’t know whether any message for which he risked his life reached home, and she couldn’t know whether their message to him just petered out unheard or unrecognized.

Old Mrs Bishop said, ‘Well, we can do without David tonight, I should hope.’ It was a new turn in her bitterness – now she would simply wipe him off the air. Mary Bishop protested. She said she must hear – then at least she would know that he was well.

‘It serves him right if he’s not well.’

‘I’m going to listen,’ Mary Bishop persisted.

‘Then I’ll go out of the room. I’m tired of his lies.’

‘You’re his mother, aren’t you?’

‘That’s not my fault. I didn’t choose – like you did. I tell you I won’t listen to it.’

Mary Bishop turned the knob. ‘Then stop your ears,’ she cried in a sudden fury, and heard David’s voice coming over.

‘The lies,’ he was saying, ‘put over by the British capitalist Press. There has not even been a railway accident – leave alone